LOS ANGELES — Multi-Grammy Award winning recording artist Isaac Hayes and celebrity activist Eduardo Palomo, star of the NBC drama Kingpin, have come out in strong support of a new federal bill, the Child Medication Safety Act of 2003, introduced on March 11 by Rep. Max Burns (GA-12). The bill requires states to establish policies and procedures that prohibit school personnel from requiring a child take psychotropic drugs as a condition of attending school. In introducing the bill, Rep. Burns stated, “Some school officials around the country are forcing parents to place their child on psychotropic drugs, such as Ritalin or Adderall, in order to keep the school from refusing to provide educational services to the child. This is unconscionable.”
Hayes, a Commissioner (advisor) of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) International, a mental health watchdog, says, “I urge all members of the minority community to fully support this bill for the sake of our youth. Many of our children, antagonized by poverty and substandard inner-city education, are being subjected to dangerous psychiatric drugs that do nothing to address their emotional or educational needs. Under no circumstance should a parent be forced to drug their child.”
Palomo, an active supporter of CCHR, concurs: “Having personally met parents who have been coerced through schools into drugging their child, and as a parent, I am horrified that their rights can be so easily violated. As a Latino, I am particularly concerned with the number of minority children who have been labeled as mentally disordered and then drugged.”
Palomo and Hayes' concerns are well founded. In March last year, the U.S. Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, divulged the “disproportionate enrollment of minority children” in Special Education. According to Paige, “Our system fails to teach many children fundamental skills like reading and then inappropriately identifies some of them as having disabilities.”
Today, African-American children are three times more likely than whites to be labeled with mental or “learning disabilities” through the public education system, and the number of Hispanic children placed in special education increased 53 percent over a 10-year period according to the 1998 annual report of the Federal Office of Special Education.
A year-long investigation of the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education also found an astounding 2.8 million children had been placed in Special Education simply because they had not been taught to read, costing state and federal governments an estimated $30 billion.
The targeting of minority children with mental disorders, prompted Pennsylvania State Representative LeAnna Washington to become an outspoken critic of the escalating number of children being legally prescribed mind-altering drugs. Between eight and nine million children in the U.S. are prescribed psychotropic drugs. In December 1999, Representative Washington was instrumental in the National Caucus of Black State Legislators' unanimous vote passing a resolution that called for a national investigation into “the use of all psychiatric drugs and their effects on children in this nation.”
CCHR says that underlying the coerced drugging of children is the definition of “disability” under Special Education law. The primary purpose of the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), which covers Special Education, was to provide a free and appropriate education for children with hearing, sight, speech and other physical handicaps. However, the term “handicapped” was changed to “learning disabled,” and children who fidget in class, interrupt their teachers, or simply fall behind academically were classified as “disabled.”
Bruce Wiseman, the U.S. President of CCHR stated, “The Child Medication Safety Act is a major step in the right direction of curbing the epidemic levels of child drugging in our schools. However, a key issue is the identification process, as children are being screened and identified as 'mentally ill' in our classrooms, and then coerced and pressured to take powerful cocaine-like stimulants. Children are labeled with so-called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), which has never been medically or scientifically proven.”
Hayes stated, “Children are our future leaders, and black children are the hope of the black race. The same must be said of Hispanics, Native Americans or any race. We must nurture and protect them, ensure they receive a proper education, proper medical, not psychiatric care and give them every opportunity to succeed in life. We must support this legislation for the sake of all of our children.”
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights is an international psychiatric watchdog group co-founded in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights. Contact CCHR's Media Department at 800-869-2247 or humanrights@cchr.org.
