Drugging and Killing of Children

[Guest guest]

Remember Aliah Gleason (Medicating Aliah)? And the Rhoades family in IN who

are suing because their daughter was given a mental health screen and

diagnosis w/o permission or the knowledge of her parents?

 

The screening survey is called TeenScreen that was given to the Rhoades

daughter. Columbia University is all about TeenScreen. Note their

involvement with the children in the NY article posted below.

 

www.teenscreen.org/

 

The Columbia University TeenScreen Program is an adolescent mental health

and suicide-screening initiative active in 43 states. By helping communities

establish programs in schools, doctors' offices, juvenile justice facilities

and other youth organizations, and collaborating with legislators,

administrators, and advocates to promote mental health screening throughout

the country, we hope to offer all parents the opportunity for their teenager

to receive a voluntary mental health check-up.

 

http://www.psychsearch.net/teenscreen.html

 

TeenScreen: <A Front Group for the Psycho-Pharmaceutical Industrial

Complex>

 

This is a stomach churning article. It should be read in its

entirety, but I snipped as well as I could.

 

Medicaid and DCFS children are already being screened for mental health in

Illinois.

 

http://tinyurl.com/7wbhv

 

Over 700 babies in the Medicaid system were drugged in Ohio.

 

http://tinyurl.com/8r2hq

 

Why? Because few will speak up for them. And when they try, then the

government will make sure there is adherence and compliance.

 

For anyone or any group who says this is only a public school issue, I will

continue to say this is not. The TeenScreen Survey was noted specifically in

an IL House Resolution:

 

http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/93/hr/09300hr0654.htm

 

WHEREAS, A program known as the " Columbia TeenScreen developed at the

Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry of Columbia University, has been

proven successful ..RESOLVED, That we recommend that every young person

should be screened once during childhood or adolescence to identify mental

illness and prevent suicide;

 

http://tinyurl.com/7a6jq

 

http://www.nypress.com/18/30/news & columns/liamscheff.cfm

 

New York Press

WWW.NYPRESS.COM

JULY 27, 2005

 

LIAM SCHEFF

NEWS & COLUMNS

 

Mimi Pascual gave the children drugs every day and every night, on

schedule, as the doctors ordered. She shook the children awake and popped

the pills into their mouths, or squirted a syringe full of ground pill and

water to the back of their throats.

 

She and the other child-care workers made the rounds: midnight, 3 a.m., 5

a.m. Some kids took the pills by mouth, some through nasal tubes, and some

through tubes jutting out of their stomachs. The children didn't like the

drugs. They'd wake up vomiting or with bad diarrhea. But Mimi and the

workers at Incarnation Children's Center had to follow the regimen, or

they'd be fired. " The drugs had side effects, everybody knew that, " said

Mimi. But the workers were told the drugs were saving the children's lives.

After a young girl who had just gone on the drugs had a stroke and then

quickly died, and another young boy who was put on thalidomide wasted away

on a respirator, Mimi stopped believing that the drugs were just saving

lives. She believed they were killing the children too.

 

Minerva Pascual worked at Incarnation Children's Center for eight years

over a nearly 10-year period, taking care of the abandoned HIV- positive

children of drug-addicted mothers in New York City's Washington Heights

neighborhood. She started at ICC in 1995, when she was just 17. Mimi was one

of two dozen neighborhood women from Washington Heights, Harlem and Inwood

Heights who were hired by the Catholic nuns who ran the orphanage for

abandoned babies.

 

Like Mimi, the vast majority were originally from the Dominican Republic,

and had no medical background. Some spoke only negligible English. But they

were all mothers, aunts, big sisters and grandmothers themselves, used to

taking care of large families on a shoestring, to keeping life together

under great stress, and, as Mimi tells me, used to " cleaning ass, " a skill

that was useful at ICC.

 

Hired as a child-care worker, she soon found herself a surrogate mother to

the children, changing them, feeding them, holding and hugging them-and

drugging them. " At first they were little babies, " Mimi told me. " We changed

their diapers and cleaned them up, and played with them. We were told they

were 'special'-because of the HIV.

 

> snip <

 

" In the beginning we were taking care of little abandoned crack babies who

had no one, but then it changed. More and more of the kids were there for

compliance. They didn't want to take drugs, or their parents didn't want to

give them, so they got put in ICC. " None of us ever blamed the kids for

refusing. We all saw them throw up like clockwork after taking the pills,

and then the diarrhea that followed.

 

When the kids were all younger-babies-they couldn't tell us the drugs made

them sick. But when they got older they started to tell us, 'I don't want to

take this 'cause I can't go to school, I feel worse when I take it.' "

 

" We all had doubts about what we were doing, " Mimi said. " But honestly, we

did what we were told. "

 

One of the things Mimi and the other childcare workers noticed was the

constantly shifting medicine regime. " Some children got AZT, some didn't.

Then it would switch. Then it was a new drug, then it was a drug that we

never heard of. " We figured it out, " she said. " These were experimental

treatments. " Marta, another child-care worker, put it more bluntly, " This is

the guinea-pig business, " she said. ICC is administered by Columbia

Presbyterian Hospital and the Catholic Home Bureau. It was under ICC's first

medical director, Dr. Stephen Nicholas, that the orphanage began to receive

funds from the National Institutes of Health to use its wards in

pharmaceutical clinical trials.

 

ICC claims to have stopped the trials in 2002, but children from ICC are

still seen at major New York hospitals, including Columbia Presbyterian,

which all continue to do trials with HIV-positive children.

 

In 2005, following a year of media coverage on ICC, the New York City

Council held a City Hall meeting to determine what exactly had happened

there. Mimi attended. " What a joke, " she said. " They were trying to find out

if ICC was doing trials. We were giving kids experimental drugs since the

beginning. It was no secret. If you asked the nurses about it, you were told

it was normal, and not to ask questions. If you asked the doctors why some

kids got AZT and some didn't, you didn't get an answer. " " But we knew drug

trials were going on, " said Mimi. " The child-care workers, the nurses, the

doctors, administration-everybody knew. " I asked how the children handled

the complex regimen. " The nurses said these children were lucky because they

were getting the new drugs, but at the same time, when the kids vomited, or

had diarrhea, or a bad rash, " Mimi said, " we knew it was the meds. Even the

nurses told us it was the meds. You couldn't hide it. It happened too

regularly, it was predictable.

 

<snip>

 

" But we had to give them. We were always told that without the meds they

would die, " said Mimi. " Is that what happened? " I asked. " No, " said Mimi.

" It wasn't that predictable. Some kids lived and some kids died. But the

ones who were drugged the most did worse. " She added, " The ones with the

tubes always did worse. " When Mimi started at ICC, the tubes were used

infrequently. " But when the kids got older, a lot of them started to refuse

the medication, " she recalled. " Then they started coming in with the tubes

more and more. " " Kids who refused too much, or threw up too much, they'd get

a tube. First it was through the nose. " But then it was more and more

through the stomach. You'd see a certain child refusing over and over, and

one day they'd come back from the hospital from surgery, and they had a tube

coming right out of their stomach. " If you asked why, the doctors said it

was for 'compliance'-the regimen. Got to keep up the regimen, " said Mimi.

" Those were the rules. "

 

<snip>

 

" Adherence " was the word of the day in late 2003, when I interviewed Dr.

Catherine Painter, ICC's current medical director, about the relentless drug

schedule. Painter explained, " What we're asking of our families and patients

in terms of adherence is something beyond 100 percent-all of their medicines

all the time, whether they have them on-hand or not, whether the medication

makes them sick or not,or whether they're sick with a concurrent illness. "

 

<snip>

 

" One girl, a six-year-old, Shyanne-she came in for adherence. She was the

most delicate little flower-beautiful, polite, full of life. Her family

never gave her meds. So Administration for Children's Services brought her

into ICC. " " So, she came in, and started the meds. And it was three months,

maybe three months. And she had a stroke. She couldn't see. She was this

normal girl, singing, jumping, playing. Then, poof, stroked out. Blind. We

were freaked out. Then, in a few months, she was gone-dead. "

 

<snip>

 

Mimi has encouraged him to get his complete medical records from the state,

but he is having little luck getting through the system. Andre's memories of

ICC are mixed. He tells me that he loved the child-care workers, like Mimi,

who looked after him. He just didn't like the drugs, so he didn't take them,

when he had a choice.

 

Shawn, a 14-year-old boy who is still in state custody, has practically

grown up at ICC. When I asked him what he thinks about ICC, he said, " I like

ICC because my friends are there. " He paused then added in a quiet voice,

" But I don't like when people run away from shots or vaccinations, or have

to get held down so they can give you a shot. " Shawn is also in ICC because

he doesn't like to take the drugs, and Mona, his aunt and legal guardian,

doesn't like to give him drugs that she claims make him weak and sick. Shawn

acts out-he runs away whenever he can to get away from the constant,

monitored drugging. When he is returned to ICC, Shawn tells me, it's " needle

time " -time for Thorazine shots, then off to a local psych ward.

 

" They're destroying him, " his aunt Mona tells me. " He just wants to come

home, it's so obvious. That's why he runs away. "

 

" The regime has changed, " said Mimi, " and so has the place. It's AIDS drugs

plus-plus psych meds, anti-psychotics, antidepressants. We came to work here

with kids we were told were dying-crack babies-to try to care for them.

Today it's a psych ward. "

<snip>

Like ICC, these projects are funded and overseen by Columbia University in

conjunction with the local church and state authorities.

 

Mimi left ICC in December 2004. " I was fired, " she said. " I let it happen.

I couldn't stand it anymore-I watched them drugging this little boy to

death-there's no way it was anything but the drugs. " Mimi described a boy

named Seon, who died in spring of 2004. " He had all these soft, fatty lumps.

We even called him " lumpy. " She said. They sent him to get the lumps on his

neck removed in surgery, and they would just grow back. They told us it was

cancer, but he was on all those drugs. He had a tube, and they were always

pumping him. When we changed his diapers, it would come out like the drug

mixture-rough and sandy like the ground-up pills. "

 

<snip>

 

Thalidomide. That's what they gave him. " Thalidomide was originally

marketed as a safe, over-the-counter sedative and analgesic in the 1950s and

1960s throughout Europe. It caused a wave of severe deformities in children

of pregnant women who took the drug and was taken off the market. In 1998,

the drug company Celgene resurrected Thalidomide, with FDA approval,

officially as a leprosy drug, but with intended off-label use for AIDS and

cancer patients.

 

" They pumped Seon with it; he deteriorated fast, " Mimi said. " Once day we

came in and he was bleeding from every hole in his body-his rectum, his

nose, his mouth. He was in such pain. He would scream when he had to go to

the bathroom.

 

They put him on a respirator. They induced a coma with drugs so they could

put him on a respirator. They told us they did it so he could breathe

better. " Mimi said, her voice getting a little rough. " I sat with him; he

couldn't talk, but he was crying-tearing from his eyes. " He got all dry and

scaly; he shriveled up like a snail-and he died. "

 

<snip>

 

Michelle, the 17-year-old, is one of Mimi's post-ICC kids, who spent six

months at ICC in 2004. She is now out of ICC and back in high school.

Michelle admits that whenever she can, she weans herself off the drugs.

" When I was on the medication, it was hard. It doesn't make me feel good,

and I have to deal with feeling sick and then trying to make it through my

eight-hour day. " What happens when you quit? " The withdrawl period is hard, "

she said. " I'm tired and I want to sleep all the time. " Michelle has been

off the drugs for a few months, and says she feels better and stronger.

" It's easier, I don't feel like I used to-12 o'clock comes and I feel

hungry, but I don't get sick if I don't eat right away. " Michelle is out of

ICC, but she's not free of New York's Drug Adherence program. She is

required to attend weekly doctor appointments where her blood is drawn and

tested for med levels. What happens if the doctors decide you're not taking

the drugs? " They put you back in the hospital or in ICC-like that, " she

said, snapping her fingers. " They always say it's just going to be a short

period of time, but it's always a few months-and that's out of my school

time. " Michelle explained, " School is everything to me-I just want it out of

my way so I can keep moving through life. I want to go to college- and high

school is standing in my way " " So it's comply versus school. Don't comply,

and miss out on school. Then it's an extra year you have to do. So, smile

and nod and take the pills, and slowly stop, or it's back to square one.

" I'm 17, not 18, and until I'm 18-I can say the sky is blue-and they'll say

it's not-and I say 'Yes it is'-but it doesn't make a difference. Three more

months, " she said, her throat tightening. " I'm telling you, I can't wait.I

can't wait. "

 

Volume 18, Issue 30

http://www.nypress.com/18/30/news & columns/liamscheff.cfm