ADD Deja Vu
by John Merrow
On Sunday, February 3, the front page of the The New York Times featured some brilliant reporting by Alan Schwarz about the misuse and abuse of the prescription drug Adderall, commonly prescribed for Attention Deficit Disorder. Schwartz tells the gripping and tragic story of one young man, Richard Fee, who, as the headline puts it, “drowned in a stream of prescriptions.”
If you haven’t read it, I urge you to online and do so as soon as you can. It’s a salutary tale of medical indifference and–to my eyes anyway–malpractice. And it’s a reminder of our culture’s dependence on pills and quick fixes.
It’s not until the last paragraph that the organization known as CHADD is mentioned, but the very mention of that organization brought back a wave of unpleasant memories. You see, we investigated