ADHD Meds Are Unscientific and Bad for Young People

Surprise, surprise—there’s another thing about which the medical and pharmaceutical fields lied to us. As an increasing number of young children and even adults are diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), more and more children are being put on medication. It’s perfectly safe and effective, right? I mean, the medical and pharma professionals say so, but then again they said the same about the Covid-19 vaccine, which has since killed 13 million people.

The medical and pharmaceutical industries have long been increasingly uninterested in saving people’s lives, and more and more interested in making money (for instance, Goldman Sachs seriously asked in 2018 if curing patients were a “sustainable” business model). Which means that they frequently try to create patients dependent for life on their medications and treatments. Again, remember that the overwhelming majority of major medical entities in America support baby murder (abortion) and the Covid vaccines, and that many medical organizations support mutilating—ahem, “transgender” surgeries for kids. In the case of the latter, the transgender surgery industry is expected to reach a value of $5 billion by 2030. As Rush Limbaugh used to say, follow the money.

Most doctors and pharma reps are more interested in making money than in making sure your child isn’t harmed, and even if it isn’t actively malicious many doctors simply trust what they are told without research, just as happened with the Covid vaccines. Enjuris reported that pharmaceutical companies had had to pay out over $10 billion just in the top 5 settlements between 2009 and 2013. Yes, pharmaceutical companies are frequently wrong—and the doctors who prescribe those meds are thus frequently wrong as well. I personally know two people who were prescribed meds by incompetent doctors and discovered by their own research that the drugs either had the side effects they had been prescribed to cure or that, in the combo prescribed, they could be fatal.

“[Brownstone Institute, Yaakov Ophir] Although stimulants, as suggested by their name, are frequently abused for stimulating (potentially addictive) sensations of high energy, euphoria, and potency, they are often compared to harmless medical aids, such as eyeglasses or walking crutches. Numerous studies, we are told, support their efficacy and safety, and evidence-based medicine dictates that these substances will be administered to children with ADHD as the first-line treatment…

In 2020, thousands of real-life medical records from Israel suggested that over 20 percent of all children and young adults (5-20 years) received a formal diagnosis of ADHD. This means that hundreds of millions of children around the world are eligible for this diagnosis and that most of them (about 80 percent), including very young, preschool children, will be prescribed with its treatment-of-choice, as if regular use of stimulants is indeed comparable to eyeglasses [America is another hot spot for ADHD diagnoses]…Like all psychoactive drugs, which affect the central nervous system, stimulant medications are designed to penetrate the blood-brain barrier – the specialized tissue and blood vessels that normally prevent harmful substances from reaching the brain. In this way, stimulant medications are essentially impacting the biochemical processes of our brain – that miraculous organ that makes us who we are.

In my new book ADHD is Not an Illness and Ritalin is Not a Cure: A Comprehensive Rebuttal of the (alleged) Scientific Consensus, I do my best to answer these disturbing questions. The first part of the book offers a step-by-step refutation of the notion that ADHD meets the required criteria for a neuropsychiatric condition. In fact, a close reading of the available science suggests that the vast majority of the diagnoses simply reflects common and pretty normative childhood behaviors that underwent unjustified medicalization. The second part of the book uncovers the massive evidence that exists against the efficacy and safety of the treatment-of-choice for ADHD.

Hundreds of studies, published in well-recognized, mainstream academic journals tell a totally different story than the one told by the American Academy of Pediatrics [AAP has also slammed bills restricting transgender ‘therapies’ and surgeries for kids and bills preventing biological males from playing on female sports teams, so AAP is definitely unreliable]. Stimulant medications are nothing like eyeglasses. Of course, it is impossible to summarize an entire book here, but I do wish to outline three principal failures in the common comparison between stimulant medications and eyeglasses – or any other daily used, harmless medical aids for that matter, such as walking crutches.”

I don’t know a single person who was helped by ADHD medication. I do know multiple young people whose brains and personalities were permanently damaged by the drugs; I also know more than one person whose parents refused the meds, and they grew up as normal, functional people. Medication is rarely the answer, particularly for a “lifelong condition.” If the condition is lifelong and non-debilitating, don’t let the medical and pharmaceutical industry turn you into their own personal ATM, dispensing money from now till eternity for medication that will never fix anything. It’s a fraud.

This mentality also discourages personal responsibility and encourages the idea of victimhood or eternal dependence. I know all too many young people who choose to behave badly and irresponsibly on a regular basis, and then claim they can’t help it because they’ve been diagnosed with ADHD or any other number of the alphabet psychological labels doctors and therapists love to slap on people. I have news for you—free will is still free will. For most of these young people, they are still perfectly capable of making the right choices. That is even reinforced by the fact that many of these young people I know continue to be lazy and bad decision makers after they have taken the medication that supposedly helps them to focus. The ADHD meds don’t force them to shut off the TV or finish the project. In the end, they did not need medication. They needed self-discipline. And since they do not have any self-discipline, and they have essentially been told they are incapable of self-discipline, they continue to exhibit a severe lack of focus or work ethic as much while on the medication as off it. Their ADHD is an excuse, not a condition.

It might be a little harder for these people to focus, but since when did we develop the concept that something worth doing was going to be anything but difficult? Thank God our Founding Fathers or the Greatest Generation during World War II didn’t have all this ADHD nonsense. Thank God they believed in overcoming their weaknesses. If they had spent their lives being told by doctors that they were hopelessly incurable and needed to be completely dependent upon drugs, America wouldn’t exist and the Third Reich would have survived.

“[Brownstone, emphasis added] [One,] Even without considering the specific criticism about the validity of ADHD, the very comparison between organic/bodily conditions, which are typically measured through objective tools, to amorphic psychiatric labels that rely exclusively on subjective assessments of behaviors, is inappropriate and misleading… [Two, the] primary impairment in ADHD is manifested in school settings…When schools are closed, its daily medical management is often no longer needed [kids are more restless and unfocused in school than when playing. Who could have guessed?]…[Three,] If stimulant drugs are as safe as experts say, like ‘Tylenol and aspirin,’ why do we insist that they will be medically prescribed by licensed physicians?…

ADHD medications are not fundamentally different from other psychoactive drugs that cross the blood-brain barrier. At first usage, they may trigger intense sensations of potency or euphoria, but when used for prolonged periods, their desired effects subside, and their unwanted negative effects start to emerge. The brain recognizes these psychoactive substances as neurotoxins and activates a compensatory mechanism in an attempt to fight the harmful invaders. It is this activation of the compensatory mechanism, not the ADHD, that might cause the biochemical imbalance in the brain.”

I remember how impacted I was by the movie 15:17 to Paris, about the real-life American heroes who, while on vacation in Europe, stopped an active terrorist shooter. The main hero, who was badly injured while stopping the shooter, was Spencer Stone, an Air Force serviceman. The movie started when the three friends featured in the movie were still children, and showed how Spencer’s school told his mother he had ADHD and needed to be put on meds. Spencer’s mother, a devout Christian, refused, calling the diagnosis out for what it was—an attempt to drug her child with potentially life-altering medication just to make the teacher’s job slightly easier. Spencer’s mother exclaimed, “My God is bigger than your statistics!” If only some parents I know had had that same attitude! Their children, like Spencer, might have grown up to be heroes instead of brain-damaged dependents.