After years of growing concern, the California state auditor has produced a damning report describing how the state’s 79,000 foster children are being drugged with psychotropic medications at abnormally high rates.
The report found that nearly 12 percent of kids in California’s child welfare system were prescribed psychotropic medications – including antipsychotics, antidepressants and mood stabilizers – during 2014-2015. This compares to a rate of 4 to 10 percent for non-foster kids.
Some of these vulnerable children were drugged “in amounts and dosages that exceeded state guidelines,” with no follow-up by the county to ensure these prescriptions were appropriate. Some counties also violated the law by failing to obtain court or parental approval for psychotropic medications.
California spent $226 million on psychotropic medications for foster kids over the last decade, which amounts to almost 72 percent of total drug spending for foster youth.
The report slams the state and counties for a failure of oversight that has allowed child welfare centers to resort to drugging to control behavior, which can have devastating effects on brain development and health condition.
According to a 2014 investigation by the Los Angeles Daily News:
…there is substantial evidence of many of the drugs’ dramatic side effects: rapid-onset obesity, diabetes and a lethargy so profound that foster kids describe dozing through school and much of their young lives. Long-term effects, particularly on children, have received little study, but for some psychotropics there is evidence of persistent tics, increased risk of suicide, even brain shrinkage.
Over the last decade, nearly 15 percent of California’s foster kids were prescribed psychotropic medications, and almost 1 in 4 adolescents were being drugged in this way – part of a growing trend across the country.
“To be prescribing these medications so extensively and so, I think, thoughtlessly, with so little evidence supporting their use, it’s just malpractice,” said George Stewart, a Berkeley child psychiatrist who has treated the neediest foster children in the Bay Area for the past four decades. “It really is drugging them.”
The investigation goes on to highlight several disturbing practices that have become the norm in the state’s child welfare system. Nearly 60 percent of foster kids receiving medications were put on the riskiest antipsychotics – a figure that stunned experts and officials overseeing the system.
More than 12 percent of foster kids on meds in 2013 were put on two, three, four or more psychotropic drugs, which falls in “uncharted medical territory.” Foster children, age five and younger, were put on psychotropics, even though federal health officials say this is not safe.
While foster kids, who have often been the victims of abuse and neglect, can certainly have more trouble coping with life and may act out dangerously to themselves or others, the increasing reliance on mind-altering drugs to sedate and control them is disturbing.
Several former foster kids who were interviewed described being in a dazed state all day long, rapidly becoming obese and diabetic, and constantly being in a state of dizziness and nausea. Rochelle Trochtenberg, now 31, still suffers from tremors after being subjected to “a shifting mix of lithium, Depakote, Zyprexa, Haldol and Prozac, among others.”
Another investigation by the Los Angeles Daily News detailed how irresponsible doctors are contributing to the problem highlighted by the auditor’s report.
One psychiatrist who manages treatment at a group home for troubled children is a self-proclaimed “spokesperson for pharmaceutical companies.”
A mere 10 percent of the state’s highest prescribers were responsible about 50 percent of the time when a foster child received an antipsychotic, the riskiest class of psychiatric drugs with some of the most harmful side effects…
These same doctors often relied on risky, unproven combinations of the drugs, a practice widely rejected by medical associations and other states.
In San Bernardino County, one psychiatrist prescribed antipsychotics to 328 foster children — 85 percent of the patients to whom he gave a psychiatric drug in the five years the investigation examined. And when one antipsychotic didn’t work — or wasn’t enough — Dr. Warris Walayat routinely prescribed another.
And last but certainly not least, let’s not forget the role of pharmaceutical companies themselves. Drug manufacturers paid $4.6 billion in settlements to federal prosecutors after they misrepresented scientific evidence to illegally market their expensive antipsychotic drugs.
Eli Lilly advised its sales task force: “The competition wins if we are distracted into talking about diabetes.”
And, unsurprisingly, when California tried to rein in those prescribing psychotropic medications to children, doctor and psychiatrist lobbying groups enacted heavy pressure to delay or block pieces of the legislation.
There’s just too much money to be made in drugging the most vulnerable kids in the state’s foster care system.
Justin Gardner writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com, where this article first appeared.
It’s the end of mankind if people don’t raise up now. What else has to happen?
Frustrating isn’t it? Thing is without large numbers they will always aim to crush any ‘movement’.
I had friends who worked in Child Services in NYC and they told me that under Mayor Giuliani who received millions from Big Pharma, they were expected to look the other way while doctors also on the take began to perscribe drugs to the kids. One high ranking supervisor who did all she could before getting fired for failing to be bought complained about the permanent damage that the drugs created. She was told, “who cares about black & hispanic kids their expandable anyway? Think about your pockets.” This is capitalism. Where profits come before people.
Thank you for this article exposing Satanic Big Pharma & their Satanic ORGANIZED CRIME CRONIES in the medical profession. These are people who have sold their souls to Satan for wealth and power. They have absolutely no morals whatsoever. The only rule they seem to have is: don’t get caught and don’t squeal on your Satanic cronies. Their goal is a one world totalitarian, military, police- state tyrannical oligarchy under the rule of the secret servants of Satan. The more people that they can destroy and get control over through mind- control drugs, the more money they rake in, the more power they get and the more damage they do to society . Pray that all the evils & destructive creations of the Satanists be driven back into themselves for their own destruction. Speed up the Law of the Harvest (the as you sow, you reap law) to return the evil karma of the Satanists back upon themselves as their judgment.
What’s the obsession over a fictional character?
Too many psychotropics?
I’m absolutely appalled when I consider what is being done to kids using these drugs. What they do is put a stop to the most crucial developmental time in their life towards becoming
healthy adults. able to problem solve and to be creative human beings able to interact with their environments in mutually healthy ways. There is absolutely nothing more important for developmental growth than a healthy use of imagination – it exercises the mind to develop into an aware person able navigate their surrounding environment – in
relationship; to be able to answer questions for themselves instead of seeking
the expert advice of others.
There was a reason why for hundreds of years children
were allowed to believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny.
I’m not referring to the specifics as related to the tradition in each of these
examples but rather a recognition of the need to allow young minds develop to
their full potential with the parents in the roles of protective nurturers encouraging them to develop into independent human beings who willingly live interdependently within their community.
Psychotropic drugs were initially and still are used for a limited number of uses. Nurturing
healthy development into self sufficient, confident human beings is not one of them.
I was a mental health therapist for many years. I learned in grad school that anti-psychotics leave lasting harmful effects in adults – they should never be given to kids. I also spent time in foster care when I was 6 y.o. and fully realize this could have happened to me. This is beyond cruel and inhumane, these doctors and psychiatrists are basically murdering these kids; they may not die early but they won’t have a life or any chance at anything good. And who will adopt them? No one.
I can’t begin to tell you the level of outrage I feel when I read articles like this. WE ARE DESTROYING OUR CHILDREN IN SO MANY WAYS! Any kid in foster care may have behavioral difficulties, mostly because they were abused, not loved, unwanted and some were simply taken away so CPS could make money off them, they were in loving families. I’ve known many people in CA who are excellent parents yet their kids were taken away for being in the front yard or some other stupid reason. CPS makes $ off every kid they grab from a family. Many of them are simply never heard from again – where do they go? On the black market for adoptive kids which rich white folks will pay so they can have a child.It’s beyond disgusting, it’s criminal and inhumane.
No children, no future. Now it’s not so hard to understand why they do it, huh?
Headline writers: when you place a comma before “even toddlers” (and one is required there), you MUST place a comma AFTER the same clause also. It must be set off at both ends. Otherwise it just looks awful, and is incorrect to boot!
YOU STEPPED IN WHAT?
So many people don’t understand that – even supposedly “educated” people – that I tend to hyphenate, just to mark the distinction.
I understand because I often do it also.
At the very least the biological parents and the court should be regarded as stakeholders in medical issues making it possible for social workers and attorneys to protect the child from big pharma.
ssri’s causing zombies everywhere. Another big pharma payoff as the children must continue to buy their crap on a monthly basis.
This is especially disturbing. Children are captive victims of Washington’s attack on the Constitution.
I totally understand friend. I lose a lot of sleep working myself up over the way things are too. I have little daughter and Im flat out trying to protect her. The vax agenda is out of this world here in Australia. And, so much more. They are working over-time with their agenda now too…