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The War Against Children is the name of a book I read some years ago by a class mate of mine, Dr Peter Bregman. In it he detailed an unbelievable tale of the assault by the medical profession on the brains of children all over America for the sake of profit. They do this by inventing diseases for which they can then give a drug. This assault on the brain through the use of drugs is unprecedented in the history of the world. They actually convince parents and teachers that there is something wrong with the brains of children that can only be treated with toxic mind-numbing drugs. It is diabolical in intent and could spell the doom of society and national life as we have conceived of it in the past. Zombie drugged children become zombie drugged adults. The following is an interview with Dr Fred Baughman, a factual account, that brings this story up to date.
Live with Dr. Fred Baughman: ADHD fraud and the chemical
holocaust against a generation of children
Mike: Hello everyone, this is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, and I’m talking about the mythical
disease known as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and the overmedication of the population,
with Dr. Fred Baughman. I want to give you a little background about why I’m so interested in
interviewing you. Our readers will really appreciate your information, because we cover this subject
quite extensively. We have similar views on it and there is a lot of increasing interest out there.
People are realizing that they have been fooled all these years, so that’s why I wanted to get in touch
with you.
Dr. Fred Baughman: In the area of child psychiatric drugs, the main focus has been the recently
commenced FDA hearings, which pertain to reports of death, strokes and heart attacks in children
and adults. The first report concerning Adderall came out about a year ago. Adderall is the number
one ADHD drug, and that report dealt with 12 or so individuals that were said to have had strokes,
if you can imagine a stroke occurring in a young child. Some were sudden deaths and others were
heart complications, and a total of 20 to 30 such reports lead Health Canada to take Adderall off
the market.
Mike: Now these records are through the voluntary MedWatch system, correct?
Dr. Baughman: Exactly, which the FDA explains in a booklet about the mechanics of MedWatch
and other similar voluntary reporting schemes. They confessed that such schemes ordinarily identify
no more than 1 percent of actual occurrences. So at any rate, we had that occurrence about a year ago
with Health Canada taking Adderall off the market and our FDA not taking Adderall off the market.
Subsequently, we learned our FDA lobbied Health Canada behind-the-scenes not to take it off the
market.
Mike: That is unbelievable. The FDA applied pressure to foreign nations to protect dangerous drugs
in our own market?
Dr. Baughman: Yes, it’s just that. Then about three or four months ago, Health Canada put Adderall
back on the market. It wasn’t because they had any good evidence of its safety or effectiveness. Adderall
is a mixture of the two salts of amphetamine, so it’s a pure amphetamine.
Mike: I want to talk to you more about what’s actually in these drugs later.
Dr. Baughman: The fascinating thing about Adderall is that it was a weight reduction drug for adults
called Obetrol. It’s was so extremely addictive that Obetrol was taken off the market for that reason.
Now we have the FDA bringing this extraordinarily addictive drug to market for little children.
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Live with Dr. Fred Baughman
Mike: So it was too dangerous for adults but not unsafe for children?
Dr. Baughman: In fact, they are bringing it to market for entirely normal little children said to have
the illusory, bogus disease called ADHD.
Mike: For those reading, you’re a pediatric neurologist, correct?
Dr. Baughman: Yes, and I practiced both adult and child neurology; board-certified in both. I have
been a long-standing fellow of the American Academy of Neurology.
Mike: Okay, so you come from the world of what I might call conventional medicine. You are an M.D.,
and yet, over the years, and I’m sure you’ll explain how this happened, you found some mass distortions
happening with ADHD so you launched a web site called www.ADHDfraud.org. My first question:
At what point as a pediatric neurologist did you begin to see something was wrong with this picture?
Baughman: I began to publish actual research works when I was in training, first at Sinai Hospital
in New York and after that, at the Boston Veteran Hospital. After the first 10 years in my practice,
which was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I published a considerable body of original research mainly
having to do with genetically determined brain decisions or neurological diseases and chromosome
abnormalities. Much of that work was published with Dr. Joseph Mann, also of Grand Rapids. I have
discovered and described actual diseases, and that’s the background that I bring to my newfound
duty of evaluating and critiquing modern-day psychiatry, especially where it pertains to their wholly
fraudulent claims that their diagnoses, such as ADHD, bipolar OCD and depression are actual brain
diseases when they are not.
Now I was in private practice from 1964 to 1993 when I retired, and it was during the ‘70s that I
began to notice, first in Grand Rapids and then here in San Diego where I relocated, the increasing
frequency of the burst of diagnoses of hyperactivity and brain damage. Then in 1980, the American
Psychiatric Association invented ADD, or attention deficit disorder, and with that the epidemic seemed
to worsen. It appeared to me that the frequency of such diagnoses and their treatment with Ritalin, an
amphetamine-like drug every bit as addictive as cocaine, were increasing in my community. At first I
took note and later became alarmed at the frequency with which children were being referred to me by
schools through their physician with these diagnostic labels put in place, basically by schoolteachers.
Mike: This was a “disease” that almost appeared to be spreading like a virus.
Dr. Baughman: It was a notion of a disease, an illusory disease; with child psychiatry repeating the lie
often enough that it was becoming a reality, especially for the educational establishment and teachers
nationwide, and increasingly, the media or the public at large. Then in 1997 with the epidemic standing
somewhere around 500,000 to 700,000 nationwide, they simply rewrote the diagnostic criteria by
adding hyperactivity to the attention deficit.
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Live with Dr. Fred Baughman
Mike: Do you mean to say that there is a group of psychiatrists who meet in a room somewhere
and they just write down and invent whatever behavioral observations they want to assign to this
disease definition?
Dr. Baughman: That is exactly the way it works. In medicine, including my specialty, neurology, if a
curious, observant physician discovers a new abnormality in a patient in his practice or in his clinic
at medical schools, that previously unobserved abnormality is the new disease. So there has to be
an objective abnormality. In diabetes, there is elevated blood sugar in the blood throughout all the
tissues. With cancer, a pathologist has to see cells that have abnormal nuclei and chromosomes under
the microscope in order to contend that that patient has that disease or a disease. But in psychiatry,
the committee of the diagnostic and statistical manual meets in a room and by a show of hands, they
consider one another’s favorite galaxies or mixture of behaviors and vote those into existence and give it
a code number or an entry into the DSM, and they are all psychiatric disorders. By the word “disorder,”
they mean disease.
Mike: Can you give us an example of the type of behaviors that are listed in the DSM as being diseases
or disorders?
Dr. Baughman: In the case of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, here are the 14 symptoms that
appeared in the 1987 DSM. Remember, a child found to have eight of them was deemed to have
ADHD. Number one is often fidgets or squirms; two is trouble staying in one’s seat; three is easily
distracted; four is can’t wait one’s turn; five is blurts out answers; six is trouble following instructions;
seven is can’t sustain attention; eight is shifts from one activity to another; nine doesn’t play quietly; 10
talks excessively; 11 interrupts; 12 can’t listen; 13 loses things; 14 does dangerous things, thrill seeking
and so on.
Mike: Wow, I think you just described probably half the population.
Dr. Baughman: Right, exactly, so much for their motivation. It’s just absolutely brilliant, the marketing
scheme, as long as you get away with it.
Mike: And they are getting away with it.
Dr. Baughman: The Center for Disease Control estimated in 2004 that there were 4 million cases
nationwide in children 17 and under.
Mike: Now isn’t it one out of every 10 children in public schools?
Dr. Baughman: As of 2003 I believe it was. Professor William Cary of the University of Pennsylvania
testified to Congress that 17 percent of all school children as of 2003 are on some type of psychiatric
drug, not all ADHD drugs and not all with an ADHD diagnosis. I think that the number today is
probably one in five, or 20 percent. It was 17 percent according to Dr. Cary in 2003. It’s probably 20
percent today.
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Live with Dr. Fred Baughman
Mike: It’s astounding. Even if this disease were legitimate, this was something that doesn’t exist in
other countries and it didn’t exist anywhere two generations ago. How do the psychiatrics explain the
abrupt emergence of this apparent disease?
Dr. Baughman: They don’t much explain it. People who try to ask legitimate questions of them are
generally ignored because they don’t have any scientific answers. They know it is a big lie, and as long as
they are getting away with it and as long as they have full access to the U.S. Department of Education
and the lobbyists to members of Congress, they enact the diagnosis and treatment of this into law.
Consequently, there are laws on the books that mandate a certain level of diagnosis in the schools and
that even pay extra to school districts for every child that is diagnosed with one of their bogus and
contrived diseases and treated as special-education subjects. Taxpayers end up paying two or three
times as much for children thus labeled as they do for normal kids.
Mike: Let me clarify that. So a school district that gets more of its children are diagnosed with ADHD,
it gets rewarded with more funds?
Dr. Baughman: They get more funds. There are even laws on the books that pay parents a stipend
for every child they have who is diagnosed and thus considered disabled. So I think they get Social
Security disability. I think the stipend, at least a few years ago, was $400 a month.
Mike: Isn’t this a situation where everybody is on the take, so they can turn the bodies of our children
into profit machines?
Dr. Baughman: That’s exactly what is happening. These entirely bogus, junk science, pseudoscientific
labels are a barcode on the forehead of a child, and once the label gets in their record, it sticks. They
can’t get rid of it. If a child or an adult gets one of these labels, this stigmatizes that individual. They are
going to have more trouble getting health care insurance and trouble finding employment. The armed
services will not take children who have been on these drugs. I must confess that as the Armed Forces
have failed to meet their quota for the Iraq war, they have dropped their standards and they are recently
accepting persons who have such labels and have been on such drugs.
Mike: Well, let’s get back to the parents if we could for a minute. People in positions of authority,
people who apparently have an education in neurology or psychiatry, are telling parents that their
children have a chemical brain disorder. It’s a very convincing argument to the parents.
Dr. Baughman: Yes it is, and I must point out that virtually every physician-patient encounter in the
country, regardless of specialty, has wholeheartedly embraced this scheme. That includes the American
Academy of Pediatrics, the Child Neurology Society, of which I am a member, the American Academy
of Family Practice, and by various psychological groups. The American Academy of Pediatrics in fact,
republished in the DSM for diagnostic criteria for ADHD in the journal Pediatrics, I think it was
in 1999, and subsequently published a guideline for the psychostimulant treatment of ADHD the
following year, I believe in 2000. In so doing, the American Academy of Pediatrics, along with the
other groups I just mentioned, served notice that they intended to enter the business of diagnosing and
drugging entirely normal children for profit. That’s one of the things that has spurred the epidemic.
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Live with Dr. Fred Baughman
Mike: Now, do you have any colleagues who are also standing up and openly questioning this practice,
or are you pretty much finding yourself isolated?
Dr. Baughman: I’ve been isolated, but there are a small cadre of honest scientific physicians who feel
as I do, and a smaller number yet, that are speaking out. I’ve really been surprised to behold the impact
that my web site has had. Now I’ve got a book that is going to be published soon.
Mike: Can you give us the title of that book please?
Dr. Baughman: Yes, it’s called “The ADHD Fraud: How Psychiatry Makes Patients of Normal
Children.” It will be available through www.Trafford.com—Trafford publishing company—and it
should be available within the week.
Mike: Have you been pressured to censor your views in any way or have you taken any heat?
Dr. Baughman: Back in 1994-95, I made a formal written proposal to the American Academy of
Neurology to write practice parameter for ADHD that would essentially determine the best advisable
practices for the disease. The Academy wrote an encouraging response and gave me the go ahead in
writing. I presented them with a statement saying that my review of the world scientific literature
found no evidence that ADHD was a disease. The next thing that happened was that I heard from
members of the Quality Assurance Committee that my efforts wouldn’t really be needed any longer.
So I was essentially deep-sixed; I was put on the shelf.
Mike: Do you know which of these groups accept money from pharmaceutical companies?
Dr. Baughman: Every one of them. Every one of them accepts lots of money and there is no such
thing as a psychiatric expert in any psychiatric disorder that is not wholly owned or operated by the
pharmaceutical industry.
Mike: That’s a big statement.
Dr. Baughman: That is a big statement and a big and tragic truth.
Mike: So these experts are really just paid promoters of the drugs.
Dr. Baughman: They’ve got M.D. degrees and so they masquerade as scientific physicians but they
have sold their souls and they have sold whatever scientific credentials they ever had.
Mike: What kind of money can they make writing these prescriptions for children?
Dr. Baughman: They are making an immense amount of money; millions of dollars.
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Live with Dr. Fred Baughman
Mike: This is all very difficult for the average American parent or consumer to swallow. They simply
cannot believe that individuals would be so evil as to sell their souls to pharmaceutical companies.
Dr. Baughman: I think this has a great deal to do with the magnitude of the psychiatric epidemic in
general and the ADHD epidemic. Parents, ordinary layman, going with their children at the behest
of school officials in the first place, could not believe that someone would tell a total lie to them. They
cannot imagine that. At the moment, I’m working with individuals to put together a consumer fraud
suit here in the state of California, based on fraudulent diagnosis of ADHD and subsequent drugging.
If you’ve been lied to and told you have a disease when you don’t and then drugged, that’s battery.
Mike: Will you keep me posted on this action?
Dr. Baughman: Yes, people keep asking about it. I tell them to keep an eye on my web site because if
we get this thing going, I certainly will be posting notes as to our progress or lack of it.
Mike: If you set a precedent in California, this thing could really sweep the nation.
Dr. Baughman: That is what we hope. They’ve had such obscene amounts of drug company money
to defend themselves, that no one has really succeeded against them as is necessary to put an end to
this fraud. It’s so much more than a fraud when they actually poison normal children, which is what
they’re doing.
Mike: I’ve heard it described somewhere else on the internet as a chemical holocaust or crimes
against humanity.
Dr. Baughman: There has been a perversion of the language. They have taken entirely normal children
and made patients out of them by diagnosing them with fictional chemical imbalances of the brain.
It’s a total fraud. I have observed two national news programs recently, talking about a new kind of
disability that our soldiers in the Iraqi conflict are developing. I listened to hear what the new disease
was. Lo and behold, it was PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.
I grant you, there are a lot of troubling visions and experiences that all men in a war are exposed to,
and these cause troubling flashbacks and troubled sleep. But it’s not an organic disease of the brain as
psychiatry would have us believe, nor are these symptoms inevitable. They would have all the soldiers
over there believe that PTSD is a disease with a grave prognosis. They tell them they are never going
to get rid of these terrible flashbacks without the help of a new drug that they’re trying to develop to
obliterate those painful memories.
Mike: Well, that’s the way to make a permanent customer, isn’t it?
Dr. Baughman: Yes, and the media has bought into this psychiatric disease mongering, and that’s why
it is rampant. That’s why the drugging of our children is rampant.
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Live with Dr. Fred Baughman
Mike: Isn’t the next great marketing frontier for these companies adult ADHD now?
Dr. Baughman: Well yes, it’s not the future; it’s the present. There has been a tremendous year-to-year
growth in the billions of prescriptions for Adderall, Ritalin, Concerta, and all the other amphetamines.
My alma mater, New York University School of Medicine, is at the very forefront of this fraud. There
was a story in the magazine section of the New York Times roughly a year ago, describing the launch
of an adult ADHD clinic at the university. They had a hall or a big space at the Helmsley Hotel. I guess
they had signs out on the curb saying this was underway on the top floor. If you want to be checked
for ADHD, go on up.
Mike: They had a recruiting service there.
Dr. Baughman: People went up and they took this behavioral checklist test and 85 percent of those
taking the test had the disease. They got labeled and were on their way the very next day to their
doctors with a new label.
Mike: Is it true that I could make an appointment with a psychiatrist walk in and say I have
trouble focusing, I’m easily distracted and I fidget a lot, and right then I could be diagnosed and
put on these drugs?
Dr. Baughman: Let me tell you something. In a 2002 survey done by the American Academy Of
Child and Adult Psychiatry, they looked at the surveying practices of child psychiatrists and found
that 91 percent of children seeing child psychiatrists came out of their initial visit with a prescription
for a drug.
Mike: Ninety-one percent?
Dr. Baughman: Ninety-one percent. I would say that a third to a half of all the patients I saw as a
neurologist had no organic disease. Now contrast that with this 2002 study survey of child psychiatry,
where 91 percent are coming away with a prescription. Were the 90 percent commonsense parents?
Most likely.
Mike: If you look at the big picture of what’s happening here, what does this say about scientific
integrity in Western civilization, if these well-educated people in this so-called scientific organization
can invent such a widespread hoax? Does this have you questioning some of scientific truth today, or
what’s your view on it?
Dr. Baughman: I pointed out earlier that it’s not just psychiatry, but its pediatrics, neurologists, family
practitioners, psychologists, and school teachers across the country that have become pawns and are not
seeing the evil of their ways by becoming pushers for the drugging establishment. This is the standard
of practice across the board. The entire profession has been bought out. On average, every physician in
the country gets $13,000 per year from the drug companies.
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Live with Dr. Fred Baughman
Mike: In what form?
Dr. Baughman: They get free dinners, golf, free trips, but that money isn’t spread around equally. It
is spread strategically so that your top policy makers in medicine—your top psychiatrists and your
heads of departments—get more money than anyone else. Some get about $500,000 a year, and it
has been so successful that no one within academic medicine can speak out as I speak out. I knew a
long time ago I would not prove compatible with the sort of control from above that is the rule in
academic medicine.
Mike: So you are saying that anybody in academic medicine has to go along to get along.
Dr. Baughman: If they were to stand up and say things that I say, they would be out the next day. NYU
has become a hive for disease-inventing psychiatry. I got the sad news that the department received
more funds to train more poisoners of normal children.
Mike: Well, I think it’s obvious that you have experienced the idea that when you operate with
integrity in this world, it can be a pretty lonely path. Now let’s talk about poisoning and the long-term
implications. What happens to Americans when one out of five children grow up on speed or some
other kind of psychiatric drug?
Dr. Baughman: Well, we are at that number clearly. We are drugging well over 10 million. There is
no sign that it’s getting better. I pointed out that ADHD in adults is a rapidly growing market sector,
so I think when you are told you’ve got a disease and you are in fact normal, you are damaged just by
the label. When you are given a drug to normalize an abnormality in your body or brain that doesn’t
exist, that’s poisoning and you are going to be damaged by that drug every single time. So the side
effect rate for Ritalin or for Adderall is 100 percent. There is no kid that gets put on these drugs that
isn’t altered by them. Their perceptions, behaviors, feelings and emotions are always changed and not
always noticeably. They are always altered and there are horrible long-term consequences that we can’t
begin to know.
Mike: What long-term side effects have you heard of?
Dr. Baughman: I mentioned before that Health Canada found that there were roughly 20 to 30 cases
of strokes in young children, roughly 10 or 12 sudden deaths, heart abnormalities. Just before the
Feb. 9 FDA hearing, there were 51 reported cases of complications, deaths, strokes and heart attacks
reported to the FDA MedWatch program. I have written testimony on the record for the Feb. 9 FDA
conference.
In fact, back in the 1990s, I testified in a Kansas City case for Mr. Gary Bell on behalf of his daughter
Stephanie. She underwent heart surgery for what I think was a complication of her long-term Ritalin
use. At any rate, Gary Bell and I did a freedom of information request for all the deaths and injuries
related to Ritalin or methylphenidate, and for 1990-1997 there were 160 deaths from methylphenidate
Ritalin. There were another 26 deaths for 1998 to 2000, 186 deaths for the decade.
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Live with Dr. Fred Baughman
Mike: Again, these are only voluntary reports.
Dr. Baughman: These are voluntary reporting schemes to MedWatch, 1 percent of actual incidents the
FDA says. That means there may have been 18,600 for that decade. I have personally been consulted
in about a dozen death cases, including Matthew Smith of Royal Oak, Michigan, which is just outside
of Detroit. He and his parents had been coerced to keep him on Ritalin from first grade to age 13.
He suddenly fell over while playing with friends and died. At autopsy, his heart muscle was diffusely
enlarged, scarred and infiltrated with fat. The medical examiner, Dr. Drakovic, a highly experienced
pathologist, said there was no doubt in his mind that Matthew Smith died of long-term chronic
amphetamine methylphenidate Ritalin poisoning.
Mike: So we have a population that is potentially setting themselves up for long-term death and harm
just like drug addicts?
Dr. Baughman: Yes. Reports that young athletes, college and high school athletes suddenly drop dead
are not uncommon. There was a pro ballplayer, I think a pitcher on the Baltimore Orioles, who had
been on supplements that contained ephedrine, which is very similar to the amphetamines. My feeling
is that steroid use and amphetamine use is very, very common in athletes at the high school level
and up. I think every one of those deaths is conceivably related to psychiatric drugs, most of which
have startling coronary cardiac heart consequences. Not just amphetamines, but all of these so-called
antipsychotics, which are horrible poisons the pharmaceutical industry is hoisting upon the population.
Almost all those drugs have cardiac side effects as well.
Mike: Before I wrap this up. I have to ask about the front groups for psychiatric medicine, like Teen
Screen and CHAD. Give us a rundown on these groups and what they do.
Dr. Baughman: Teen Screen is coming to us out of Columbia University, once an esteemed medical
school uptown from NYU, which was also once a proud scientific institute. David Schaefer, the
psychiatrist who has authored Teen Screen, along with the pharmaceutical sponsors, is not content
with the rate of growth of psychiatric poisoning in this country, so they want to make it mandatory
that all kids in our captive population, our schools to take diagnostic tests.
Mike: So they think four out of every 10 kids…
Dr. Baughman: That is probably a low yield for Teen Screen. I would think that more of these screens
would have a 60, 70 or even 80 percent positive diagnostic rate like the adult ADHD screen run by
New York University at one of the Helmsley Hotels. As long as they’ve got enough friends in Congress
and in the White House to write these things into law, they’re going to carry on. Teen Screen is very
much a product of the White House. The President’s new Freedom Commission on Mental Health
launched the notion of Teen Screen.
Mike: Which is mandatory mental health screening, right?
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Live with Dr. Fred Baughman
Dr. Baughman: Yes. I think Illinois already passed it and made it law. They are not asking parents
whether or not they want their kids screened. This is Big Brother to the max. This is worse than
anything Stalin could have imagined. This population had better wake up; the implications go far
beyond the drugging of our normal school children.
Mike: That leads me to my final question: How does all of this ever end? How does this return to
normal? When is the fraud exposed? How long will it take? If the pharmaceutical companies are so
powerful and control so many big players, how does this ever get exposed?
Dr. Baughman: Exactly. Right now there is a pharmaceutical company lobbyist for every member of
Congress and probably three or four for every senator. Who knows how many for the president? It
is really a horror story unfolding. When I started medicine in 1964, I thought we were a wonderful
profession. We didn’t have to compromise ourselves by inventing things to do. That has changed 100
percent. The medical profession is a disgrace today.
Mike: Again for those reading, you are hearing from Dr. Fred Baughman, pediatric neurologist and
M.D. Your web site is www.ADHDfraud.org. What is the title of your upcoming book?
Dr. Baughman: “The ADHD Fraud: How Psychiatry Makes Patients of Normal Children.”
Mike: Okay, that’s a title that we will be looking forward to. Any last thoughts, Dr. Baughman?
Dr. Baughman: Yes, you might also consider getting a DVD production by Gary Null Associates in
New York City, called “Drugging Our Children.” I was interviewed for it in a powerful hard-hitting
video view of what we’ve talked about here. I also have a video that I produced with footage from
the 1998 ADHD consensus conference. My video is called “ADHD Total 100% Fraud.” It can be
purchased through my web site.
Mike: If you have any new items, books, videos or press releases, send them my way. I will be happy to
get that out to the readers.
Dr. Baughman: I sure will.
About the Author
The Health Ranger (Mike Adams) is a holistic nutritionist with more than 5,000 hours
of study on nutrition, wellness, food toxicology and the true causes of disease and
health. He is the author of The 7 Laws of Nutrition, Grocery Warning, Spam Filters
for Your Brain, and many other books available at www.TruthPub
Live with Dr. Fred Baughman: ADHD fraud and the chemical
holocaust against a generation of children
Mike: Hello everyone, this is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, and I’m talking about the mythical
disease known as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and the overmedication of the population,
with Dr. Fred Baughman. I want to give you a little background about why I’m so interested in
interviewing you. Our readers will really appreciate your information, because we cover this subject
quite extensively. We have similar views on it and there is a lot of increasing interest out there.
People are realizing that they have been fooled all these years, so that’s why I wanted to get in touch
with you.
Dr. Fred Baughman: In the area of child psychiatric drugs, the main focus has been the recently
commenced FDA hearings, which pertain to reports of death, strokes and heart attacks in children
and adults. The first report concerning Adderall came out about a year ago. Adderall is the number
one ADHD drug, and that report dealt with 12 or so individuals that were said to have had strokes,
if you can imagine a stroke occurring in a young child. Some were sudden deaths and others were
heart complications, and a total of 20 to 30 such reports lead Health Canada to take Adderall off
the market.
Mike: Now these records are through the voluntary MedWatch system, correct?
Dr. Baughman: Exactly, which the FDA explains in a booklet about the mechanics of MedWatch
and other similar voluntary reporting schemes. They confessed that such schemes ordinarily identify
no more than 1 percent of actual occurrences. So at any rate, we had that occurrence about a year ago
with Health Canada taking Adderall off the market and our FDA not taking Adderall off the market.
Subsequently, we learned our FDA lobbied Health Canada behind-the-scenes not to take it off the
market.
Mike: That is unbelievable. The FDA applied pressure to foreign nations to protect dangerous drugs
in our own market?
Dr. Baughman: Yes, it’s just that. Then about three or four months ago, Health Canada put Adderall
back on the market. It wasn’t because they had any good evidence of its safety or effectiveness. Adderall
is a mixture of the two salts of amphetamine, so it’s a pure amphetamine.
Mike: I want to talk to you more about what’s actually in these drugs later.
Dr. Baughman: The fascinating thing about Adderall is that it was a weight reduction drug for adults
called Obetrol. It’s was so extremely addictive that Obetrol was taken off the market for that reason.
Now we have the FDA bringing this extraordinarily addictive drug to market for little children.
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Live with Dr. Fred Baughman
Mike: So it was too dangerous for adults but not unsafe for children?
Dr. Baughman: In fact, they are bringing it to market for entirely normal little children said to have
the illusory, bogus disease called ADHD.
Mike: For those reading, you’re a pediatric neurologist, correct?
Dr. Baughman: Yes, and I practiced both adult and child neurology; board-certified in both. I have
been a long-standing fellow of the American Academy of Neurology.
Mike: Okay, so you come from the world of what I might call conventional medicine. You are an M.D.,
and yet, over the years, and I’m sure you’ll explain how this happened, you found some mass distortions
happening with ADHD so you launched a web site called www.ADHDfraud.org. My first question:
At what point as a pediatric neurologist did you begin to see something was wrong with this picture?
Baughman: I began to publish actual research works when I was in training, first at Sinai Hospital
in New York and after that, at the Boston Veteran Hospital. After the first 10 years in my practice,
which was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I published a considerable body of original research mainly
having to do with genetically determined brain decisions or neurological diseases and chromosome
abnormalities. Much of that work was published with Dr. Joseph Mann, also of Grand Rapids. I have
discovered and described actual diseases, and that’s the background that I bring to my newfound
duty of evaluating and critiquing modern-day psychiatry, especially where it pertains to their wholly
fraudulent claims that their diagnoses, such as ADHD, bipolar OCD and depression are actual brain
diseases when they are not.
Now I was in private practice from 1964 to 1993 when I retired, and it was during the ‘70s that I
began to notice, first in Grand Rapids and then here in San Diego where I relocated, the increasing
frequency of the burst of diagnoses of hyperactivity and brain damage. Then in 1980, the American
Psychiatric Association invented ADD, or attention deficit disorder, and with that the epidemic seemed
to worsen. It appeared to me that the frequency of such diagnoses and their treatment with Ritalin, an
amphetamine-like drug every bit as addictive as cocaine, were increasing in my community. At first I
took note and later became alarmed at the frequency with which children were being referred to me by
schools through their physician with these diagnostic labels put in place, basically by schoolteachers.
Mike: This was a “disease” that almost appeared to be spreading like a virus.
Dr. Baughman: It was a notion of a disease, an illusory disease; with child psychiatry repeating the lie
often enough that it was becoming a reality, especially for the educational establishment and teachers
nationwide, and increasingly, the media or the public at large. Then in 1997 with the epidemic standing
somewhere around 500,000 to 700,000 nationwide, they simply rewrote the diagnostic criteria by
adding hyperactivity to the attention deficit.
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Live with Dr. Fred Baughman
Mike: Do you mean to say that there is a group of psychiatrists who meet in a room somewhere
and they just write down and invent whatever behavioral observations they want to assign to this
disease definition?
Dr. Baughman: That is exactly the way it works. In medicine, including my specialty, neurology, if a
curious, observant physician discovers a new abnormality in a patient in his practice or in his clinic
at medical schools, that previously unobserved abnormality is the new disease. So there has to be
an objective abnormality. In diabetes, there is elevated blood sugar in the blood throughout all the
tissues. With cancer, a pathologist has to see cells that have abnormal nuclei and chromosomes under
the microscope in order to contend that that patient has that disease or a disease. But in psychiatry,
the committee of the diagnostic and statistical manual meets in a room and by a show of hands, they
consider one another’s favorite galaxies or mixture of behaviors and vote those into existence and give it
a code number or an entry into the DSM, and they are all psychiatric disorders. By the word “disorder,”
they mean disease.
Mike: Can you give us an example of the type of behaviors that are listed in the DSM as being diseases
or disorders?
Dr. Baughman: In the case of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, here are the 14 symptoms that
appeared in the 1987 DSM. Remember, a child found to have eight of them was deemed to have
ADHD. Number one is often fidgets or squirms; two is trouble staying in one’s seat; three is easily
distracted; four is can’t wait one’s turn; five is blurts out answers; six is trouble following instructions;
seven is can’t sustain attention; eight is shifts from one activity to another; nine doesn’t play quietly; 10
talks excessively; 11 interrupts; 12 can’t listen; 13 loses things; 14 does dangerous things, thrill seeking
and so on.
Mike: Wow, I think you just described probably half the population.
Dr. Baughman: Right, exactly, so much for their motivation. It’s just absolutely brilliant, the marketing
scheme, as long as you get away with it.
Mike: And they are getting away with it.
Dr. Baughman: The Center for Disease Control estimated in 2004 that there were 4 million cases
nationwide in children 17 and under.
Mike: Now isn’t it one out of every 10 children in public schools?
Dr. Baughman: As of 2003 I believe it was. Professor William Cary of the University of Pennsylvania
testified to Congress that 17 percent of all school children as of 2003 are on some type of psychiatric
drug, not all ADHD drugs and not all with an ADHD diagnosis. I think that the number today is
probably one in five, or 20 percent. It was 17 percent according to Dr. Cary in 2003. It’s probably 20
percent today.
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Live with Dr. Fred Baughman
Mike: It’s astounding. Even if this disease were legitimate, this was something that doesn’t exist in
other countries and it didn’t exist anywhere two generations ago. How do the psychiatrics explain the
abrupt emergence of this apparent disease?
Dr. Baughman: They don’t much explain it. People who try to ask legitimate questions of them are
generally ignored because they don’t have any scientific answers. They know it is a big lie, and as long as
they are getting away with it and as long as they have full access to the U.S. Department of Education
and the lobbyists to members of Congress, they enact the diagnosis and treatment of this into law.
Consequently, there are laws on the books that mandate a certain level of diagnosis in the schools and
that even pay extra to school districts for every child that is diagnosed with one of their bogus and
contrived diseases and treated as special-education subjects. Taxpayers end up paying two or three
times as much for children thus labeled as they do for normal kids.
Mike: Let me clarify that. So a school district that gets more of its children are diagnosed with ADHD,
it gets rewarded with more funds?
Dr. Baughman: They get more funds. There are even laws on the books that pay parents a stipend
for every child they have who is diagnosed and thus considered disabled. So I think they get Social
Security disability. I think the stipend, at least a few years ago, was $400 a month.
Mike: Isn’t this a situation where everybody is on the take, so they can turn the bodies of our children
into profit machines?
Dr. Baughman: That’s exactly what is happening. These entirely bogus, junk science, pseudoscientific
labels are a barcode on the forehead of a child, and once the label gets in their record, it sticks. They
can’t get rid of it. If a child or an adult gets one of these labels, this stigmatizes that individual. They are
going to have more trouble getting health care insurance and trouble finding employment. The armed
services will not take children who have been on these drugs. I must confess that as the Armed Forces
have failed to meet their quota for the Iraq war, they have dropped their standards and they are recently
accepting persons who have such labels and have been on such drugs.
Mike: Well, let’s get back to the parents if we could for a minute. People in positions of authority,
people who apparently have an education in neurology or psychiatry, are telling parents that their
children have a chemical brain disorder. It’s a very convincing argument to the parents.
Dr. Baughman: Yes it is, and I must point out that virtually every physician-patient encounter in the
country, regardless of specialty, has wholeheartedly embraced this scheme. That includes the American
Academy of Pediatrics, the Child Neurology Society, of which I am a member, the American Academy
of Family Practice, and by various psychological groups. The American Academy of Pediatrics in fact,
republished in the DSM for diagnostic criteria for ADHD in the journal Pediatrics, I think it was
in 1999, and subsequently published a guideline for the psychostimulant treatment of ADHD the
following year, I believe in 2000. In so doing, the American Academy of Pediatrics, along with the
other groups I just mentioned, served notice that they intended to enter the business of diagnosing and
drugging entirely normal children for profit. That’s one of the things that has spurred the epidemic.
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Live with Dr. Fred Baughman
Mike: Now, do you have any colleagues who are also standing up and openly questioning this practice,
or are you pretty much finding yourself isolated?
Dr. Baughman: I’ve been isolated, but there are a small cadre of honest scientific physicians who feel
as I do, and a smaller number yet, that are speaking out. I’ve really been surprised to behold the impact
that my web site has had. Now I’ve got a book that is going to be published soon.
Mike: Can you give us the title of that book please?
Dr. Baughman: Yes, it’s called “The ADHD Fraud: How Psychiatry Makes Patients of Normal
Children.” It will be available through www.Trafford.com—Trafford publishing company—and it
should be available within the week.
Mike: Have you been pressured to censor your views in any way or have you taken any heat?
Dr. Baughman: Back in 1994-95, I made a formal written proposal to the American Academy of
Neurology to write practice parameter for ADHD that would essentially determine the best advisable
practices for the disease. The Academy wrote an encouraging response and gave me the go ahead in
writing. I presented them with a statement saying that my review of the world scientific literature
found no evidence that ADHD was a disease. The next thing that happened was that I heard from
members of the Quality Assurance Committee that my efforts wouldn’t really be needed any longer.
So I was essentially deep-sixed; I was put on the shelf.
Mike: Do you know which of these groups accept money from pharmaceutical companies?
Dr. Baughman: Every one of them. Every one of them accepts lots of money and there is no such
thing as a psychiatric expert in any psychiatric disorder that is not wholly owned or operated by the
pharmaceutical industry.
Mike: That’s a big statement.
Dr. Baughman: That is a big statement and a big and tragic truth.
Mike: So these experts are really just paid promoters of the drugs.
Dr. Baughman: They’ve got M.D. degrees and so they masquerade as scientific physicians but they
have sold their souls and they have sold whatever scientific credentials they ever had.
Mike: What kind of money can they make writing these prescriptions for children?
Dr. Baughman: They are making an immense amount of money; millions of dollars.
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Live with Dr. Fred Baughman
Mike: This is all very difficult for the average American parent or consumer to swallow. They simply
cannot believe that individuals would be so evil as to sell their souls to pharmaceutical companies.
Dr. Baughman: I think this has a great deal to do with the magnitude of the psychiatric epidemic in
general and the ADHD epidemic. Parents, ordinary layman, going with their children at the behest
of school officials in the first place, could not believe that someone would tell a total lie to them. They
cannot imagine that. At the moment, I’m working with individuals to put together a consumer fraud
suit here in the state of California, based on fraudulent diagnosis of ADHD and subsequent drugging.
If you’ve been lied to and told you have a disease when you don’t and then drugged, that’s battery.
Mike: Will you keep me posted on this action?
Dr. Baughman: Yes, people keep asking about it. I tell them to keep an eye on my web site because if
we get this thing going, I certainly will be posting notes as to our progress or lack of it.
Mike: If you set a precedent in California, this thing could really sweep the nation.
Dr. Baughman: That is what we hope. They’ve had such obscene amounts of drug company money
to defend themselves, that no one has really succeeded against them as is necessary to put an end to
this fraud. It’s so much more than a fraud when they actually poison normal children, which is what
they’re doing.
Mike: I’ve heard it described somewhere else on the internet as a chemical holocaust or crimes
against humanity.
Dr. Baughman: There has been a perversion of the language. They have taken entirely normal children
and made patients out of them by diagnosing them with fictional chemical imbalances of the brain.
It’s a total fraud. I have observed two national news programs recently, talking about a new kind of
disability that our soldiers in the Iraqi conflict are developing. I listened to hear what the new disease
was. Lo and behold, it was PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.
I grant you, there are a lot of troubling visions and experiences that all men in a war are exposed to,
and these cause troubling flashbacks and troubled sleep. But it’s not an organic disease of the brain as
psychiatry would have us believe, nor are these symptoms inevitable. They would have all the soldiers
over there believe that PTSD is a disease with a grave prognosis. They tell them they are never going
to get rid of these terrible flashbacks without the help of a new drug that they’re trying to develop to
obliterate those painful memories.
Mike: Well, that’s the way to make a permanent customer, isn’t it?
Dr. Baughman: Yes, and the media has bought into this psychiatric disease mongering, and that’s why
it is rampant. That’s why the drugging of our children is rampant.
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Live with Dr. Fred Baughman
Mike: Isn’t the next great marketing frontier for these companies adult ADHD now?
Dr. Baughman: Well yes, it’s not the future; it’s the present. There has been a tremendous year-to-year
growth in the billions of prescriptions for Adderall, Ritalin, Concerta, and all the other amphetamines.
My alma mater, New York University School of Medicine, is at the very forefront of this fraud. There
was a story in the magazine section of the New York Times roughly a year ago, describing the launch
of an adult ADHD clinic at the university. They had a hall or a big space at the Helmsley Hotel. I guess
they had signs out on the curb saying this was underway on the top floor. If you want to be checked
for ADHD, go on up.
Mike: They had a recruiting service there.
Dr. Baughman: People went up and they took this behavioral checklist test and 85 percent of those
taking the test had the disease. They got labeled and were on their way the very next day to their
doctors with a new label.
Mike: Is it true that I could make an appointment with a psychiatrist walk in and say I have
trouble focusing, I’m easily distracted and I fidget a lot, and right then I could be diagnosed and
put on these drugs?
Dr. Baughman: Let me tell you something. In a 2002 survey done by the American Academy Of
Child and Adult Psychiatry, they looked at the surveying practices of child psychiatrists and found
that 91 percent of children seeing child psychiatrists came out of their initial visit with a prescription
for a drug.
Mike: Ninety-one percent?
Dr. Baughman: Ninety-one percent. I would say that a third to a half of all the patients I saw as a
neurologist had no organic disease. Now contrast that with this 2002 study survey of child psychiatry,
where 91 percent are coming away with a prescription. Were the 90 percent commonsense parents?
Most likely.
Mike: If you look at the big picture of what’s happening here, what does this say about scientific
integrity in Western civilization, if these well-educated people in this so-called scientific organization
can invent such a widespread hoax? Does this have you questioning some of scientific truth today, or
what’s your view on it?
Dr. Baughman: I pointed out earlier that it’s not just psychiatry, but its pediatrics, neurologists, family
practitioners, psychologists, and school teachers across the country that have become pawns and are not
seeing the evil of their ways by becoming pushers for the drugging establishment. This is the standard
of practice across the board. The entire profession has been bought out. On average, every physician in
the country gets $13,000 per year from the drug companies.
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Live with Dr. Fred Baughman
Mike: In what form?
Dr. Baughman: They get free dinners, golf, free trips, but that money isn’t spread around equally. It
is spread strategically so that your top policy makers in medicine—your top psychiatrists and your
heads of departments—get more money than anyone else. Some get about $500,000 a year, and it
has been so successful that no one within academic medicine can speak out as I speak out. I knew a
long time ago I would not prove compatible with the sort of control from above that is the rule in
academic medicine.
Mike: So you are saying that anybody in academic medicine has to go along to get along.
Dr. Baughman: If they were to stand up and say things that I say, they would be out the next day. NYU
has become a hive for disease-inventing psychiatry. I got the sad news that the department received
more funds to train more poisoners of normal children.
Mike: Well, I think it’s obvious that you have experienced the idea that when you operate with
integrity in this world, it can be a pretty lonely path. Now let’s talk about poisoning and the long-term
implications. What happens to Americans when one out of five children grow up on speed or some
other kind of psychiatric drug?
Dr. Baughman: Well, we are at that number clearly. We are drugging well over 10 million. There is
no sign that it’s getting better. I pointed out that ADHD in adults is a rapidly growing market sector,
so I think when you are told you’ve got a disease and you are in fact normal, you are damaged just by
the label. When you are given a drug to normalize an abnormality in your body or brain that doesn’t
exist, that’s poisoning and you are going to be damaged by that drug every single time. So the side
effect rate for Ritalin or for Adderall is 100 percent. There is no kid that gets put on these drugs that
isn’t altered by them. Their perceptions, behaviors, feelings and emotions are always changed and not
always noticeably. They are always altered and there are horrible long-term consequences that we can’t
begin to know.
Mike: What long-term side effects have you heard of?
Dr. Baughman: I mentioned before that Health Canada found that there were roughly 20 to 30 cases
of strokes in young children, roughly 10 or 12 sudden deaths, heart abnormalities. Just before the
Feb. 9 FDA hearing, there were 51 reported cases of complications, deaths, strokes and heart attacks
reported to the FDA MedWatch program. I have written testimony on the record for the Feb. 9 FDA
conference.
In fact, back in the 1990s, I testified in a Kansas City case for Mr. Gary Bell on behalf of his daughter
Stephanie. She underwent heart surgery for what I think was a complication of her long-term Ritalin
use. At any rate, Gary Bell and I did a freedom of information request for all the deaths and injuries
related to Ritalin or methylphenidate, and for 1990-1997 there were 160 deaths from methylphenidate
Ritalin. There were another 26 deaths for 1998 to 2000, 186 deaths for the decade.
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Live with Dr. Fred Baughman
Mike: Again, these are only voluntary reports.
Dr. Baughman: These are voluntary reporting schemes to MedWatch, 1 percent of actual incidents the
FDA says. That means there may have been 18,600 for that decade. I have personally been consulted
in about a dozen death cases, including Matthew Smith of Royal Oak, Michigan, which is just outside
of Detroit. He and his parents had been coerced to keep him on Ritalin from first grade to age 13.
He suddenly fell over while playing with friends and died. At autopsy, his heart muscle was diffusely
enlarged, scarred and infiltrated with fat. The medical examiner, Dr. Drakovic, a highly experienced
pathologist, said there was no doubt in his mind that Matthew Smith died of long-term chronic
amphetamine methylphenidate Ritalin poisoning.
Mike: So we have a population that is potentially setting themselves up for long-term death and harm
just like drug addicts?
Dr. Baughman: Yes. Reports that young athletes, college and high school athletes suddenly drop dead
are not uncommon. There was a pro ballplayer, I think a pitcher on the Baltimore Orioles, who had
been on supplements that contained ephedrine, which is very similar to the amphetamines. My feeling
is that steroid use and amphetamine use is very, very common in athletes at the high school level
and up. I think every one of those deaths is conceivably related to psychiatric drugs, most of which
have startling coronary cardiac heart consequences. Not just amphetamines, but all of these so-called
antipsychotics, which are horrible poisons the pharmaceutical industry is hoisting upon the population.
Almost all those drugs have cardiac side effects as well.
Mike: Before I wrap this up. I have to ask about the front groups for psychiatric medicine, like Teen
Screen and CHAD. Give us a rundown on these groups and what they do.
Dr. Baughman: Teen Screen is coming to us out of Columbia University, once an esteemed medical
school uptown from NYU, which was also once a proud scientific institute. David Schaefer, the
psychiatrist who has authored Teen Screen, along with the pharmaceutical sponsors, is not content
with the rate of growth of psychiatric poisoning in this country, so they want to make it mandatory
that all kids in our captive population, our schools to take diagnostic tests.
Mike: So they think four out of every 10 kids…
Dr. Baughman: That is probably a low yield for Teen Screen. I would think that more of these screens
would have a 60, 70 or even 80 percent positive diagnostic rate like the adult ADHD screen run by
New York University at one of the Helmsley Hotels. As long as they’ve got enough friends in Congress
and in the White House to write these things into law, they’re going to carry on. Teen Screen is very
much a product of the White House. The President’s new Freedom Commission on Mental Health
launched the notion of Teen Screen.
Mike: Which is mandatory mental health screening, right?
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Live with Dr. Fred Baughman
Dr. Baughman: Yes. I think Illinois already passed it and made it law. They are not asking parents
whether or not they want their kids screened. This is Big Brother to the max. This is worse than
anything Stalin could have imagined. This population had better wake up; the implications go far
beyond the drugging of our normal school children.
Mike: That leads me to my final question: How does all of this ever end? How does this return to
normal? When is the fraud exposed? How long will it take? If the pharmaceutical companies are so
powerful and control so many big players, how does this ever get exposed?
Dr. Baughman: Exactly. Right now there is a pharmaceutical company lobbyist for every member of
Congress and probably three or four for every senator. Who knows how many for the president? It
is really a horror story unfolding. When I started medicine in 1964, I thought we were a wonderful
profession. We didn’t have to compromise ourselves by inventing things to do. That has changed 100
percent. The medical profession is a disgrace today.
Mike: Again for those reading, you are hearing from Dr. Fred Baughman, pediatric neurologist and
M.D. Your web site is www.ADHDfraud.org. What is the title of your upcoming book?
Dr. Baughman: “The ADHD Fraud: How Psychiatry Makes Patients of Normal Children.”
Mike: Okay, that’s a title that we will be looking forward to. Any last thoughts, Dr. Baughman?
Dr. Baughman: Yes, you might also consider getting a DVD production by Gary Null Associates in
New York City, called “Drugging Our Children.” I was interviewed for it in a powerful hard-hitting
video view of what we’ve talked about here. I also have a video that I produced with footage from
the 1998 ADHD consensus conference. My video is called “ADHD Total 100% Fraud.” It can be
purchased through my web site.
Mike: If you have any new items, books, videos or press releases, send them my way. I will be happy to
get that out to the readers.
Dr. Baughman: I sure will.
About the Author
The Health Ranger (Mike Adams) is a holistic nutritionist with more than 5,000 hours
of study on nutrition, wellness, food toxicology and the true causes of disease and
health. He is the author of The 7 Laws of Nutrition, Grocery Warning, Spam Filters
for Your Brain, and many other books available at www.TruthPub
