Pennsylvania State Representative Leanna Washington was presented the CCHR award by Isaac Hayes for her work to end harmful drugging of schoolchildren. A Catastrophe In Education
Another public official who discovered the catastrophic effect on our society of drugging children is Pennsylvania State Representative Leanna Washington. In July 1999, Rep. Washington held a legislative hearing into “Psychiatric Drugs and Their Effects on Children,” which was telecast live and statewide on Pennsylvania cable television. Public supporting the hearings inundated the station with calls, and the hearings were subsequently rebroadcast six times. Spurred by the reaction, Rep. Washington began to garner public support from other quarters. Addressing the Philadelphia branch of the NAACP, she gained their unanimous vote in favor of her quest to stop the distribution of Ritalin to public school children. She also arranged to distribute information to fellow legislators across the country. Next followed a series of roundtable discussions, first at the annual congress of the National Foundation of Women Legislators, then to the Youth Committee of the National Caucus of Black State Legislators. Due to Rep. Washington’s spirit and determination, on December 1, 1999, the National Caucus of Black State Legislators, representing 600 legislators across the country, unanimously passed a resolution which declared that Ritalin—classified by the DEA as a Schedule II narcotic, along with cocaine and other highly addictive drugs—should never be changed to a lesser class of narcotic. It also stated that because of the “recent incidents of school violence and other occasions of violence [being] the result of children being unnecessarily medicated by such drugs,” the Caucus has called for a national investigation into the use of all psychiatric drugs and their effects on children. Presented the CCHR Human Rights Award by soul music legend and actor Isaac Hayes, Rep. Washington told the audience, “It does not make me proud to know that the United States is the Ritalin capital of the world, that Americans consume five times as much of this drug as the rest of the world. “We have opted to use drugs to correct what was once just normal childhood behavior, and we have chosen to use those same drugs to treat a so-called ‘disorder’ without looking at other physical causes of behavior such as diet and nutrition,” she said. “As a society, we must re-examine our practice of and our reliance on prescribing mind-altering drugs to children.”
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