From the January 2000 Idaho Observer:

Drug-Free School Zone?

by The Idaho Observer

Schools all over the nation post "Drug-Free School Zone" signs all over their campuses.

Let us take a look.

In the November 30, 1998 edition of Time magazine a feature article entitled "The Age of Ritalin" reported that in 1995, just under "half a million prescriptions were written for controlled substances like Ritalin...for children between the ages of 3 and 6."

By 1997, the number had reportedly jumped to over 800,000 perscriptions being written for children taking mood-altering psychotropics such as Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil.

The Physician's Desk Reference, 1998, page 1897 under "Ritalin," states that, "Ritalin should be given cautiously to emotionally unstable patients, such as those with a history of drug dependence or alcoholism, because such patients may increase dosage on their own initiative."

A person with a drug dependence history knows a good drug when he does one. According to Time, Ritalin has also become a street drug. Students have been known to pestle the pills into a powder and snort it or sprinkle it over their weed and smoke it.

Kids who are being prescribed Ritalin are saving some back because they can sell them to kids who don't have a prescription for at least $5 a pill.

The same book, pages 859-863, contains everything you ought to know about Prozac before you allow somebody you love to be ingesting the fluoro toxin. The pages also give the same warnings about prescribing the substance to persons with a history of drug dependence or alcoholism.

Drug-Free School Zone? If 800,000 elementary school-aged kids are being prescribed a mood-altering drug such as Ritalin or Prozac, the chances that there is even one public school in the nation without at least one student on at least one of those drugs is pretty small.

It has been reported that there are schools with over 10 percent of their student bodies going to class under the influence of state-prescribed psychotropic drugs like Ritalin.

There can be no doubt that such drugs are in fact drugs and that nearly a million kids show up to school every day after taking their state-prescribed "happy pills."

Please tell me how a school full of kids stoned on Ritalin, Zoloft and Paxil is a drug-free zone? Please tell me how kids stoned on weed and kids stoned on state prescribed drugs are different, other than the fact that state prescribed drugs are the common thread among kids who go on homicidal rampages that kill and injure their fellow students and destroy public property.

Drug-Free School Zone? You tell me. It sounds like another example of Orwellian Doublespeak to me because a more accurate sign would be, "Drugged-at-School Zone."