ABC News Investigation: Diane Sawyer and Sharyn Alfonsi to Report on the Overmedication of Children in the U.S. Foster Care System - ABC News:
Reports to Air Beginning Wednesday, November 30 on “World News with Diane Sawyer” and Concluding with In Depth Reporting on “20/20″ Friday, December 2
“ABC World News” anchor Diane Sawyer continues her reporting on the United States foster care system with a new series of reports – “Generation Meds.” Following a year-long investigation, Sawyer and Sharyn Alfonsi uncover a startling reality: many foster children, even as young as one-year olds, are being prescribed powerful mind-altering drugs at alarming rates — up to 13 times higher than that of other children. As part of its investigation ABC News was given a first look at a groundbreaking two-year study by the General Accounting Office (GAO) which finds that the federal government has not done enough to protect America’s foster children from being over medicated with these powerful drugs. Reports will air on “World News with Diane Sawyer” beginning on Wednesday, November 30 and will conclude with a special report on “20/20″ Friday, December 2 at 10:00 PM on the ABC Television Network.
Regarding the Diane Sawyer
ReplyDeleteABC News investigative series of reports on the drugging of foster children:
The FDA feels that adequate blackbox warnings have been issued on antidepressants and antipsychotics prescribed to hundreds of thousands of small children and infants and refuses to issue or even acknowledge the necessity of issuing any further warnings.
One problem seems to be that the FDA in their rulings and policy, apparently legally allow doctors, psychiatrists, social workers and health care professional workers to pretty much totally ignore these valid and very necessary warnings.
This above group is hardly ever jailed, fined or suspended from practicing medicine because of harmful overprescription of these drugs that can result in accidental (but always seems like it could have been avoided) wrongful death.
Doctors' legally allowable overprescription practices exponentially wrongfully increase harmful drug sales since there is no exisiting law or prohibition in place to legally brake or slow down or stop such rabid overprescription nor does anyone in the FDA feel there is any need for such laws.
Plus legal overprescription actually promotes more easily available illegal recreational use of such harmful drugs.
Jailing parents for allowing and/or not allowing their children to be drugged does nothing to keep the children from being harmed.
The doctor is the necessary third element to get the child put on the drugs so why shouldn't the doctor go to jail with the parents?
In the case of the death of 4 year old Rebecca Riley, both her parents are in jail for the overprescribing of the psychotropic drugs that killed her.
The psychiatrist who wrote all the many many many prescriptions for the three drugs that apparently resulted in Rebecca Riley's "accidental" death never faced jail time and probably never will.
That does nothing to help protect other children from such apparent arrogant professional negligence.
Apparently, Dr. Joseph Biederman, an eminent authoritarian Harvard psychiatrist whose large body of pharmaceutical industry funded scientific research attempts to justify and incite wholesale drugging of children and infants by doctors has never been held responsible for the practically religious secular fervor of his research.
If we are all responsible for this damage as the FDA official smugly told Diane Sawyer in her interview, then shouldn't the doctors and research psychiatrists closest to having placed our kids and infants in harm's way be the first to be held legally responsible?