ADHD Drug Danger: Personal Injuries and Wrongful Deaths

Matthew Hohmann died for the crime of being an energetic teenager. Matthew was a gymnast and a great 14-year old kid who had never done anything wrong or had any health problems. Then, because his young mind sometimes wandered, he received the diagnosis of ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder)

With his ADHD diagnosis came the death sentence of a prescription for Adderall XR, a drug that Canadian regulators pulled off the market in 2005 after linking it to 20 deaths and 12 strokes. Six months later, however, Canadian officials allowed Adderall back on the market, and Canadians still face the same threat from this drug as Americans do.On an October morning in 2004, Matthew obediently took his pill as he was getting ready for school. A few minutes later, his father found him dead on the bathroom floor. The autopsy revealed that Matthew had died of sudden heart failure. He had been taking Adderall for only 6 weeks, and prior physicals had found no problems with his heart.

Adderall is one of the many drugs prescribed for kids and adults with the collection of symptoms called ADHD. All of these drugs are powerful, and they all carry the FDA’s Black Box warning, which means that they have a high probability of causing serious personal injury, wrongful deaths, and frighteningly bizarre behaviors.

Of all the ADHD drugs, Ritalin is the best known. It produces unpleasant effects such as nervousness, headaches, loss of appetite, and abnormal heartbeats, and it’s extremely popular with doctors and parents even though studies have found that it’s essentially useless in helping children.

The pharmaceutical companies make it easy and convenient to take medication for ADHD. Parents can choose from tablets, capsules, transdermal systems, oral solutions, and chewable tablets. The brand names, the active ingredients, and the delivery methods of these deadly drugs are:

Adderall Tablets (mixed salts of a single entity amphetamine product)

Adderall XR (mixed salts of a single entity amphetamine product) Extended-Release Capsules

Concerta (methylphenidate hydrochloride) Extended-Release Tablets

Daytrana (methylphenidate) Transdermal System

Dextroamphetamine ER, (Dextroamphetamine Sulfate)

Extended-Release Capsules

Desoxyn (methamphetamine hydrochloride) Tablets

Dexedrine (dextroamphetamine sulfate) Spansule Capsules and Tablets

Focalin (dexmethylphenidate hydrochloride) Tablets

Focalin XR (dexmethylphenidate hydrochloride) Extended-Release Capsules

Metadate CD (methylphenidate hydrochloride) Extended-Release Capsules

Methylin (methylphenidate hydrochloride) Oral Solution

Methylin (methylphenidate hydrochloride) Chewable Tablets

Ritalin (methylphenidate hydrochloride) Tablets

Ritalin SR (methylphenidate hydrochloride) Sustained-Release Tablets

Ritalin LA (methylphenidate hydrochloride) Extended-Release Capsules

Strattera (atomoxetine hydrochloride) Capsules

Vyvanse
(lisdexamfetamine dimesylate) Capsules

Some ADHD drugs are also available in generic forms.

Desoxyn is a form of methamphetamine, and an illustration of great government hypocrisy. In its illegal form, meth is a highly addictive drug that can destroy a healthy adult’s life in a very short time. “Meth” and “Dex” are both known on the street as speed.

Government agencies and private organizations fight a constant and losing battle against meth use in adults and teens, but it’s readily available in prescription form for children who display the behaviors that supposedly indicate ADHD.

Recent estimates put the number of children taking stimulant drugs for ADHD at 2.5 million, and a report released on June 15 has strongly linked these drugs to sudden and unexplained deaths in young people.

The report found that the odds of sudden death were 7.4 times higher for children taking stimulant medications than for other children, and the report brought attention to a truth that has always been clear: Putting children on drugs to alter their behavior is a horrible and completely ineffective method of behavior modification.

ADHD is a unique disease because it has no official diagnosis. The massive and growing ADHD industry has compiled a long list of behaviors that describe about 99% of the children on the planet. At the top of the list is “Does not give close attention to detail or makes careless mistakes in schoolwork, work, or other activities.”

Finding a child who hasn’t met that description would be a real challenge, but if a child displays enough of the normal childhood behaviors on the list, the diagnosis is ADHD and the solution is a prescription for a powerful psychotropic drug.

A study published in the magazine Pediatrics found that the drugs prescribed for children who have this mythical disease caused many of them to hallucinate that snakes and bugs were crawling on them and to believe that they had run into a wall when no wall was nearby.

In the 1960s, hallucinating was popular among the Hippies of that era, and they used LSD because they wanted to “trip”. The most famous form being “Orange Sunshine” produced by the Grateful Dead and freely disbributed in Kool Aid at concerts such as Woodstock. Overdoses led to bad trips and some died, and many government and private agencies worked hard to eliminate demand for that drug, while today’s much stronger marijuana is reportedly California’s leading cash crop. Against that history, today young children take drugs that alter their minds and consciousness with the blessings of parents, doctors, and the school nurse.

The number of children diagnosed with the phantom disease called ADHD has been growing steadily because it’s a source of profits for the ADHD industry. Doctors, pharmaceutical companies, psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, pediatricians, and school counselors hasve been able to plant the fear of ADHD in millions of parents, but the industry hasn’t been able to fool everyone in to their program of drugging kids for profit.

Some have been calling ADHD the fraud that it is. People who genuinely care about children understand that ADHD is a hoax designed to bring in profits for the pharmaceutical industry. The people against ADHD and its medications know that drugging kids is a sure way to ruin their lives.

Perhaps this latest report will alert parents and public officials to the dangers of ADHD medications and to the millions of young lives being diminished by these drugs. The ADHD industry has been hurting millions of children, and legal action against those doctors, drug companies, and school counselors is probably the only way to stop them.

If your child or someone you know has been injured by a drug prescribed for ADHD, first save all the prescription botttle and please contact me to determine what can be done and what should be done. When reporesenting children we first make sure that no harm will come to the child by reason of a lawsuit and we have not yet met a judge who has not agreed.

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Onward,

Richard Alexander

Posted on: June 26, 2009   Posted in: Product Liability / Defective Products, Unsafe Drugs   No Comments