Dr. Michael Savage Interviews Dr. Peter R. Breggin

The Ritalin Racketeers and Their Chemical Lobotomies – Part I

Michael Savage
March 29, 2000

http://www.newsmax.com/articles/?a=2000/3/29/65250

[Dr. Savage has a Ph.D. in Epidemiology and Human Nutrition from U.C., Berkeley.]

Savage: If you’ve heard Hillary Clinton’s recent remarks on Ritalin and other drug use on children, you’ll find the usual nauseating demagoguery. She appears to be urging Ritalin caution; but, if you listen carefully, she’s calling it a miracle drug: "A Godsend for emotional and behavioral problems, for both children and their parents." She insists her efforts are not an attack on the medical treatment of children’s emotional well-being because the drugs are very, very "useful."

As with everything else the Clintons do, you’ve got to read between the lines. So right now we’re going to read between the lines with an expert who has a magnifying glass on the subject of Ritalin use. He wrote an earlier book called Talking Back to Ritalin; What Doctors Aren’t Telling You about Stimulants for Children. He’s been on this program before. His name is Dr. Peter R. Breggin. He has a new book out, and it’s called Reclaiming Our Children. You can get it at the bookstore or at www.Breggin.com.

Dr. Breggin, welcome to the Savage Nation.

Breggin: What a pleasure to hear your backtalk to Hillary. You know, there is such hypocrisy with her. I didn’t start out as a Clinton basher; I started out hopeful years ago. What she’s doing here is merely damage control because her drugs have come under criticism.

Savage: What do you mean by "her drugs"?

Breggin: In June of last year, following the school shootings, Hillary and Tipper Gore, as well as their husbands, got together for the first White House conference on mental health. Because of her interest in mental health and her own problem with anti-depressants, Tipper had been made the expert, the psychiatric consultant to the president, duly designated. She then created this conference. At the conference Hillary showcased a psychiatrist named Kopowits of New York University...

Savage: Oh, he’s a son-of-a-gun! He’s a drug peddler, in my opinion. He had the nerve to say from his early studies on Ritalin that he found it very useful on children down to the age of two. He goes a step further and says we should even use more of it.

Breggin: Yes, he does. You’re on top of this subject, Michael.

Savage: There’s nothing worse than poisoning our children’s minds.

Breggin: You know, the man Hillary introduced at the meeting goes so far as to say that no amount of trauma to children -- or poor parenting or anything in their lives -- causes them mental disorders. He says it’s all biological and genetic and should be treated by drugs.

This is a guy who actually wrote in one of his books that sex abuse doesn’t cause mental disorder unless the child has a biological problem to start with in the brain.

Savage: So what is he? Some kind of a front for the drug companies?

Breggin: He’s the head of child and adolescent psychology at N.Y.U.

Savage: Let’s be clear on this guy. Is he a NaMBLA mentality, a member of the North American Man Boy Love Association?

Breggin: No, I don’t think so. But it does come close to enabling child abuse when he says that. Now the whole conference was this way. Hillary even said that, whether or not teenagers want treatment, they have to get it. So it’s involuntary treatment.

Savage: Dr. Breggin, please, let’s pause for a moment. I listened to Hillary, and I heard the double talk. She’s so good at it, and I’m not making this up, that the Communist Chinese have sent their cadres to study her speeches. They say she’s the finest propagandist they’ve ever heard.

She claims she’s urging caution because of the outcry against the doping up of our kids. But if you listen to the text of her statements, she’s really saying they’re miracle drugs.

Breggin: Well, she’s also doing something that is, to me, an abomination. She’s giving money to N.I.M.H. [National Institute for Mental Health] ultimately to conduct more experiments on two- to four-year-olds. What they’re going to do is conduct a lot of clinical studies which actually drug two- to four-year-olds.

Savage: You know, I’m so frightened of these two people, Bill and Hillary, that I’m making an all-out effort to make the truth known about these horrific practices.

In the last conversation we had about your earlier book, Talking Back to Ritalin, we showed that A.D.D. (1.) may not be a real diagnosis in many cases, (2.) takes away the spontaneity in a child, and (3.) if a boy shows symptoms of the "disease" called masculinity, he’s immediately declared ill and put on a drug. This is very terrifying, isn’t it?

Breggin: I think it’s absolutely horrifying. Since I was on your show the last time, I was asked by the National Institute of Health to be their scientific discussant on the effects of these drug at a big conference they held. Beforehand, I reviewed all of the important literature on the issue. Even with experiments on animals. When they’re given these drugs they stop playing; they stop being curious; they stop socializing; they stop trying to escape. We make good caged animals with these drugs. And we make good caged kids by knocking their spontaneity out of them. And, Michael, the other thing is that these drugs enforce obsessive behavior.

Savage Amazing, they actually enforce obsessive behavior, which they are supposed to cure. We’re beginning to find out that many of the school shootings are side reactions to Prozac-like medications. That’s a very big hidden factor.

Breggin: Prozac and stimulants.

Savage: That’s right. We’re talking about the chemical lobotomy. We’re talking about the chemical straightjacketing of our children. We are talking about one of the greatest threats of all. But people can stand up to the school nurse; you can stand up to the teacher; you can stand up to the principal; you can stand up to them with the facts and the right books.

Dr. Breggin’s book can show you how to take your child back from the authoritarian state that wants to dope your child up because he may be misbehaving.

Dr. Breggin, when you say "reclaiming our children" you’re implying that they’ve been taken away from us, aren’t you?

Breggin: Absolutely. They’ve been taken away from us by the psychiatric mental-health system. They’ve been taken away by the educational system, by the government, and by many different forces.

Savage: From Hillary Clinton, in her own double-talking words, and from others, we understand that our children have been stolen from us by the state and by the psychiatric establishment.

You don’t know this, Dr. Breggin, for almost twenty years now I’ve been trying to fight this battle. I’m not alone obviously, and you’ve been fighting this battle a very long time yourself.

Why do you think Hillary Clinton has such a demonic desire to dope our children? What is this all about?

Breggin: I think that one of the things that has happened is that psychiatry has become the religion of liberalism. I come from a liberal tradition. I’m Jewish. My dad was a liberal. What I’ve found is that people who see themselves as thoughtful, caring, educated and informed have swallowed psychiatry as the way.

I think that’s a major reason. Instead of turning in their own lives to philosophy, religion, love, family life, or nature, they think of psychiatry; and today that means the "pill" as an ultimate answer. Also, if you have a desire for social control, "benevolent" control and "benevolent" authority, then again biological psychiatry offers a tremendous opportunity.

In part I’m just mystified. Here’s a woman, Hillary, who wrote a book about it takes a "village" to raise children. It wasn’t about a book about "it takes a pill." There’s a "double think" that the modern person often has. Anything that’s called "science" is accepted as an absolute and sweeps reason away.

I would like to write my next book about what happened to critical intelligence in America and how it’s been undermined by these really shallow ideas about human life and nature.

Savage: Well, it’s these Utopian idealists like the Clintons who think they really do have the answers. They think they’re following the best minds of their generation, but they’re not the best minds. They don’t realize that they may be the worst minds of their generation.

But to get back to brass tacks, we’ve found out that the Ritalin epidemic is so bad that psychological damage is being done to children as young as two years of age. Infants are being put on speed. What’s amazing to me, we’ve got the D.E.A. locking people up for selling crank, and here we are giving crank to children. It’s an identical molecule, isn’t it?

Breggin: In some cases it is identical because methamphetamine is one of the F.D.A. drugs allowed for children. The three basic stimulants now are amphetamine, methamphetamine, and then Ritalin, which are all in the same class and Schedule Two drugs along with cocaine, the most addictive drug as recognized by all the world’s drug agencies.

Savage: Here’s what bothers me. The White House comes out and says it’s going to do a major study of the effects on preschool-age children using Ritalin, Prozac and other drugs. I know in advance what the study’s going to say. The results are in before they even start. They’re going to do a window-dressing control while praising the overall need for the drugs. In the end they’re going to try to peddle more drugs than before while making us think they’re clamping down; that’s my guess.

Breggin: I think that’s right. They just got through doing that with a big study they ballyhooed, called the M.T.A. study. The N.I.M.H. spent multi-millions of dollars on it, and they’re going to do the same thing now with little kids. And despite the millions spent, the N.I.M.H. study wasn’t even conducted according to accepted scientific procedures and is basically worthless.

Savage: Doctor, this reminds me of the sad state of experiments done on little children by Kinsey. Kinsey, as you well know, was a complete whacko. Most of his studies have been shown to be false.

Breggin: Yes, I know. He was sexually abusing those children and had sex abusers working for him to stimulate the babies.

Savage: He was a nut case who was using children as sex objects and then writing books about it to make it look legitimate. Yet his work is still quoted today as if it’s the gospel. The same mentality now prevails in the Clinton White House and among those folks who think they’re going to save our children by abusing them with drugs.

Tell us, Doctor, what can we do to protect active children. I guarantee it; if I were a child today, they’d put me in a chemical straightjacket. What could my mother do if they told her, " Your son has A.D.D. according to our test, and we’re going to prescribe medication for him"?

Breggin: I think the first thing parents need to start doing is absolutely refuse to cooperate with any psychological evaluation of children in school. Schools should not be mental hospitals. Parents should say that the only tests they want their children to have are those respecting their academic subjects and nothing else.

Savage: That’s interesting. You’ve basically implied that they’ve turned our schools into something other than schools. What do you think the government has in mind by turning our schools into little clinics?

Breggin: It’s going to get even worse if Hillary follows her plan that I describe in Reclaiming Our Children. But even now in many, many schools the nurses are giving out more drugs than were given out in children’s mental hospitals when I was in training. You can go into a school today and find that ten or twenty percent of the boys are on drugs given by the school nurse. I just recently visited a school where over half of the children were being given drugs.

The teachers are given something called the Connor’s Scale for the students. Connors for decades has been trying to find ways to control kids with drugs. He goes right back to the sixties.. His scale is basically a psychiatric rating which is used to diagnose A.D.D. and A.D.H.D. Teachers use this scale in the classroom. They give the results to the school psychologist, and then the parents are called in to face a team of five people telling them that their child has A.D.H.D.

As I said, parents must refuse to cooperate with any psychological evaluation of their children in school.

Savage: It’s a war to control our children. State control through drugs, just as practiced in the Soviet Union. With Hillary and Tipper leading the charge!

Michael Savage’s radio broadcasts can be heard from occupied San Francisco on KSFO 560 AM Monday through Friday, 4 PM to 7 PM PST (7-10 PM EST) and on www.TalkRadioNetwork.com (Channel 2) from 12 noon to 2 PM PST (3 PM to 5 PM EST).

Savage is the number one, drive-time host in this liberal-dominated market.