What role do the insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies play in the world of ADHD?
. . . There’s a suit going on right now in three states. It alleges that the major pharmaceutical company that makes Ritalin, the Novartis Company, along with the American Psychiatric Association, the main representatives of organized medicine in the ADHD movement, and the self-help group CHADD have conspired to dupe the American public into believing that there’s such a thing as ADHD, and then thrust upon innocent children a potentially dangerous drug. The suit alleges that there’s a conspiracy. Now, there may be some legal definition that meets the conspiracy angle. But I don’t believe that there’s any conspiracy at all. We have what I call the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith at work. Adam Smith, as you know, wrote the fundamental textbook on capitalism. And we have market forces at major play here, getting people to think a certain way about medications, and then operating on the doctors and the patients to get them to take them first–often at the expense of other interventions that
