Senator Nancy Schafer Makes An Appearance On Prisonplanet TV
http://prisonplanet.tv
http://infowars.com
http://harrythomas.info

ZbAqB4j5BrE

St. Petersburg Times
The 'atypical' dilemma
Skyrocketing numbers of kids are prescribed powerful antipsychotic drugs. Is it safe? Nobody knows.
By ROBERT FARLEY, Times Staff Writer
July 29, 2007

More and more, parents at wit's end are begging doctors to help them calm their aggressive children or control their kids with ADHD. More and more, doctors are prescribing powerful antipsychotic drugs.

In the past seven years, the number of Florida children prescribed such drugs has increased some 250 percent. Last year, more than 18,000 state kids on Medicaid were given prescriptions for antipsychotic drugs.

Even children as young as 3 years old. Last year, 1,100 Medicaid children under 6 were prescribed antipsychotics, a practice so risky that state regulators say it should be used only in extreme cases.

These numbers are just for children on fee-for-service Medicaid, generally the poor and disabled. Thousands more kids on private insurance are also on antipsychotics.

Almost entirely driving this spiraling trend is the rise of a class of antipsychotic drugs called atypicals.

These drugs emerged in the 1990s and replaced the older, "typical" antipsychotics like Haldol or Thorazine, which are often associated with Parkinson-like shakes.

The atypicals were developed to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in adults. But once on the market, doctors are free to prescribe them to children, and for uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

There is almost no research on the long-term effects of such powerful medications on the developing brains of children. The more that researchers learn, the less comfortable many are becoming with atypicals.

Initially billed as wonder drugs with few significant side effects, evidence is mounting that they can cause rapid weight gain, diabetes, even death.

They're also expensive. On average last year, it cost Medicaid nearly $1,800 for each child on atypical antipsychotics. In the last seven years, the cost to taxpayers for atypical antipsychotics prescribed to children in Florida jumped nearly 500 percent, from $4.7-million to $27.5-million.

Medicaid and insurance companies have fed the problem, encouraging the use of psychiatric drugs as they reimburse less and less for labor-intensive psychotherapy and occupational therapy.

Another factor: Doctors have been influenced by pharmaceutical companies, which have aggressively marketed atypicals.

Whatever the reasons for the soaring use of psychiatric drugs in children, things have gotten out of whack, according to Dr. Ronald Brown. Last year he headed an American Psychological Association committee that looked into the issue.

"The bottom line is that the use of psychiatric medications far exceeds the evidence of safety and effectiveness," Brown said.

"What people need to do is what's in the best interest of children instead of what's in the best interest of people's pocketbooks. But children don't vote."

KMIhMRI4ETM

A St. Petersburg Times special report
Drug research: To test or to tout?
By Robert Farley, Times Staff Writer
April 13, 2008

In the mental institution in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Nurse Ratched is obsessed with keeping order on the ward. She dispenses pills that sedate the residents into near zombies.

The novel was published in the 1960s, when Haldol and Thorazine were the drugs of choice to fight schizophrenia. They calm patients but also can cause uncontrollable shakes.

In the 1990s, drug companies trumpeted a new class of drugs, atypical antipsychotics, that they billed as a dream solution: better treatment, fewer shakes.

They wanted the Food and Drug Administration to let them say their drugs were safer and more effective than Haldol. But the FDA said no, because the drug companies had submitted biased studies, according to documents obtained by the St. Petersburg Times.

It happened when Eli Lilly and Co. asked for approval of Zyprexa, and again when Janssen asked for approval for Risperdal.

The FDA said Risperdal could come to market. But there was a caveat: "We would consider any advertisement or promotion labeling for Risperdal false, misleading or lacking fair balance ... if there is a presentation of data that conveys the impression that (Risperdal) is superior to haloperidol (generic for Haldol) or any other marketed antipsychotic drug product with regard to safety or effectiveness."

Believing they had invented better drugs, not to mention the opportunity for outsized profits, the drug companies were undaunted by the FDA's red light.

Prohibited from touting their drugs as better? No problem. They paid academics and doctors who said it for them.

The companies funded study after study that found — little surprise — the new drugs were better and safer. State by state, the companies funded committees that set treatment guidelines that decreed atypicals should be the drugs of choice.

Despite the FDA ostensibly reining them in, the drug companies remade the marketplace.

Atypicals have become the overwhelming drug of choice, and not just for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, the crippling illnesses they were approved for. Doctors commonly prescribe them to treat anxiety, depression and ADHD in children. They're even given as sleep aids.

The new drugs can cost 20 times as much as the old, so taxpayers pay a small fortune in Medicaid expenses. In Florida alone in the past five years, taxpayers spent more than $1.1-billion on the new antipsychotic drugs.

The drug companies, meantime, enjoy billions in profits.

X9vnejQcdr4