From: snow <snow@smoke.suba.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 17:30:37 +0800
To: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Subject: Re: [RANT] Giving Mind Control Drugs to Children
In-Reply-To: <199607090604.CAA11704@jekyll.piermont.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.93.960710234518.329C-100000@smoke.suba.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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On Tue, 9 Jul 1996, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> likelyhood that something is a disease doesn't really wash very
> well. By your lights, then, heart disease couldn't be a "real" illness
> given that a lot more than 10% of the population suffers from it to
> one extent or another. Of course, we could simply redefine dying of a
> heart attack as "normal" and then we could be done.

     A heart attack is (or used to be) a normal way of dying.

     Dying is natural. It is even (in some cases, and from certain 
perspectives) desirable. 

     So are dreamers, so are doers. Poets, Priests and Garbage collectors.
The problem is that in this society parents don't want (largely, painting 
with a BIG BIG brush and painting over some people) dreamers or garbage 
collectors, poets or artists. They want CPA's and Programmers, attentive
little students, of course the kids nature has nothing to do with it.

     Remember a year or so an add for Joop Jeans? A "Yuppie" looking woman
with a baby on a leash (like a dog collar and leash) with the words
"A child, the ultimate pet". That seems to be the position that many parents 
seem to be taking these days. They don't have kids, they have prize 
pedegree Children. These children are expected to behave without training, to
follow rules without being disiplined (funny how that word keeps popping up
in these posts) and to perform in the 90th percentile in everything. 
 
      On the other end we have growing pool of warm bodies whose parents are 
just barely warm bodies. They aren't taking prozac and ritilan to get thru
school, with them it is coke, crack, pot, horse and alcohol. Their parents 
are barely even aware of their existance. 

     IMO both of these are from the same mentality, the attitude of a child 
as a cute little pet. 

> How about giving people with hypertension blood pressure medication? I
> mean, they are just "out of the norm", right? I mean, there is a
> continuum of blood presures, yes? Why should we give the people at the
> top of the spectrum medications, just because high blood pressures are
> associated with vascular accidents?

     What causes this hypertension? Maybe rather than medicating you  
should eliminate the CAUSE of the problem.

     Of course that is more work than just taking a pill. 

> I suppose you don't understand what it might be like for someone to be
> unable to do their work no matter how heavy the threat against them if
> they don't, and no matter how easy it is. There are people out there
> who can't get themselves to pay a phone bill or throw out the
> newspapers for months on end -- they just can't get themselves to

     Actually, I would. 

> You miss the point. You spoke of involuntarily medicated kids. Most of
> the kids aren't involuntarily medicated.

     I would worry more about a kid who _wants_ speed than one who doesn't. 

     Correct me if I am wrong, but aren't children more sensative to 
chemicals than adults?

> > The price of giving the patient (or the patient's parents)
> > everything they want is [...] classrooms full of obedient
> > citizen-units in Soma-induced trances.
> Ritalin does not induce a zombie-like trance, as the numerous people
> on this mailing list who take it can tell you.

     No, the responces indicated that it turned you into a person happy 
to focus on and perform repitive tasks hour after hour. Machine-like 
trance instead of Zombie. Great. 

Petro, Christopher C.
petro@suba.com <prefered for any non-list stuff>
snow@crash.suba.com