Review of Medicine in Special Education Another Look at Drugs and Behavior
I reviewed the effects of drugs on behavior and learning in children, and came to some skeptical conclusions about poor methodology and inflated claims of success (Freeman, 1966). A number of trends since then seem to warrant up-dating the information in that survey. “Learning disability” has become an even more popular, though perhaps no less vague, category. Public attention and demands for special programs have clearly increased, while the funds available for training the needed professionals have recently dwindled. Abuse of drugs, including those used for children with learning problems, is known to be on the increase, and has become a major world concern. All of this has come to a head in the past several months in the United States, where we hear that arrests for drug abuse have, for the first time, exceeded those for alcoholic indulgence, and accusations have been leveled at medical schools and physicians in Omaha for allegedly providing stimulant drugs to children with behavior problems, in an effort to make them conform. It is not easy to find one’s way between the extremes of a rather indiscriminate, overenthusiastic use of drugs on the one hand, and pharmacologic nihilism due to fear of political repercussions on the other. Considerable advances have been made in the past four or five years in developing a more adequate methodology in the field of drug therapy. Unfortunately for the educator, recent studies have done more to confirm some earlier suspicions and clinical hunches than to provide new methods which can predictably change behavior in desired directions. Walden Two has not arrived through psychoREVIEW OF MEDICINE IN SPECIAL EDUCATION Another Look at Drugs and Behavior ROGER D. FREEMAN, M.D. University of British Columbia