n February of 1996 expressing concern over the discovery that 10 to 12 percent of all male school children in the United States currently take the drug, a rate far surpassing that in any other country in the world. Indeed, citizens of the U.S., most of them well below the legal drinking or smoking age, now consume over 90 percent of the 8.5 tons of Methylphenidate produced world wide each year (3). The question is: "Are these Ritalin prescriptions legitimate and useful or are most of them used as an escape route for parents and teachers?"
             Ritalin is over-prescribed and therefore, has become ineffective in most cases because it is most often prescribed to children who do not even really have ADHD. When it actually is prescribed to children with the disorder, it can be a dangerous drug with harmful side effects that many do not even know about because the drug companies keep the information hidden. Therefore, Ritalin is useless because there are many other methods to calm and control ADHD children.
             You may find this surprising, but the majority of children in second through fifth grade have been given prescriptions of the powerful drug Ritalin, even though many of them probably do not even have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Dr. LeFever, an assistant professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at the Centre for Pediatric Research, claimed that it is hard to believe this many children have the specific brain-related problem called ADHD (Resset 106). By these statistics, it seems that because ADHD is becoming more well-known, therefore making it an "easy answer", it is almost becoming a way-out, or an escape route for teachers and parents who are not willing to deal with the normal tendencies of young children. Many tea
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