The War Against Children
by Peter R. Breggin, M.D.
and Ginger Ross Breggin

THE WAR AGAINST CHILDREN:
How the drugs, programs, and theories of the psychiatric establishment are threatening America's children with a medical 'cure' for violence.
Co-authored with Ginger Ross Breggin
cloth published 1994 by St. Martin's Press

"Terrifying data conveyed in the calm and sober voice of an experienced and respected physician and researcher. A brilliantly controversial and, for me, uncomfortably persuasive work-and a major addition to our understanding of racism as it infiltrates our science and our culture."
-Jonathan Kozol, author of Amazing Grace and Savage Inequalities

In 1992, Dr. Peter Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin inspired a national campaign against the proposed federal "Violence Initiative," that aimed at identifying inner-city children with alleged defects that would make them violent when they reached adulthood. Many of the research plans, which are still in operation, involve searching for a "violence gene," finding "biochemical imbalances," and intervening in the lives of schoolchildren with psychiatric drugs.

In The War Against Children, the Breggins describe this broad network of private and public programs--funded by the pharmaceutical industry as well as with tax dollars. It includes ongoing studies requiring young subjects to undergo frightening and dangerous spinal taps in the single minded quest for a genetic or biological answer to the rising national crime rate.

With millions of children on Ritalin, and more on other psychiatric drugs, diagnoses and treatments are replacing adult responsibility and social reform. This book describes in detail why the use of biological psychiatric interventions to control the behavior of children is politically expedient and profitable to the pharmeucutical companies, but too often backfires, hurting the child, the family, our society and our future.