I hereby irrevocably and utterly surrender to the ‘ADHD’ lobby, a mighty alliance of bad teachers, bad parents, dodgy doctors and greedy drug companies.
‘My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun stands today, I shall fight no more forever,’ as the great Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce nation so beautifully expressed it in 1877, after a noble 1,300-mile fighting retreat in face of the US Army.
It was clear to him that no further purpose could be served by combat. You can only fight for so long against certain defeat.
That ADHD lobby is still my enemy, and yours. They are as hopelessly, dangerously and greedily wrong as they ever were.
God protect anyone, child or adult, from falling into their hands and suffering from their dubious chemical ministrations.
But I have been defeated by decades of lies and hype, and simply cannot be bothered to carry on arguing about it. Have it your way. I’ve done what I could. Let’s be a drugged nation and see where that gets us.
‘That ADHD lobby is still my enemy, and yours. They are as hopelessly, dangerously and greedily wrong as they ever were,’ writes Peter Hitchens
The earliest article I wrote about this menace which I can find dates back to November 2000: ‘Last week the NHS was given permission to hand out a mood-altering drug to young children, at the taxpayers’ expense.’
Since then I have gone as deep into this subject as it has been possible for me to do. I have argued out the issue with parents convinced their children have ‘ADHD’. I have been to California to interview the paediatric neurologist Fred Baughman, a real hard scientist, who became convinced the complaint was false after one of his own children was ‘diagnosed’ with it by his school.
I learned that a key scientific report had vanished which cast doubt on ADHD being due to a brain malfunction. So I reassembled it from archives, wire service reports and scientific journals of the time, and surviving records held by private individuals.
Mrs Hitchens spent several stimulating years at the wonderfully named Dog Kennel Hill primary school in south London. I could fill a small
book with her stories of sharing classes with the offspring of the Richardson Torture Gang, and of how her brilliant teachers made sure the first black children were not picked on. It also got her into a fine girls’ grammar school, now closed by egalitarian vandals. Imagine her fury (and mine) when she learned that the school is now to be given a dull new name for various pathetic modern reasons.
So I can tell you that the USA’s National Institutes of Health Consensus Conference on ‘ADHD’, held on November 18, 1998, concluded: ‘We do not have an independent, valid test for ADHD, and there are no data to indicate that ADHD is due to a brain malfunction.’
None of this turns out to matter in our increasingly drugged-up, post-science and anti-science world. ‘Diagnosis’ of ADHD continues to be made on subjective grounds all over the Western world, all the time.
This is (to my mind) most horrible in the case of children who trustingly take pills, often at very young ages, which are similar to amphetamines, otherwise an illegal drug – and illegal for good reasons. In the USA, many are given actual amphetamines.
But in the past ten years a fashion has exploded for ‘adult ADHD’, with grown men and women clamouring to be ‘diagnosed’ and prescribed. In many cases those involved also qualify for substantial tax-free state payments.
I have written and spoken about this on major platforms for a quarter of a century, and I might as well have saved my breath.
What was, 25 years ago, a minor but worrying menace has now become a pandemic of idiocy which will probably include almost everybody in the country in the end.
It is one of the many things which will only finish when the pound sterling shrivels into mounds of worthless paper and billions of meaningless computer digits, or when we are invaded by a serious enemy, or bombed to bits.
Ukraine war echoes the follies of 1914
It is now 111 years since the British Empire committed suicide by entering the crazy, pointless First World War. Hundreds of thousands of our best men from all classes died before they could have children.
From being rich and solvent, we sank into debt within 18 months, a disgrace which ended with us defaulting on our gigantic World War One debt to the USA in 1934, of which we have not since paid a penny (anyone who thinks this isn’t true, and there’s always one such wiseacre, is invited to bet me £100 that I am wrong. Oh, please do).
‘It is now 111 years since the British Empire committed suicide by entering the crazy, pointless First World War,’ writes Peter Hitchens. Pictured: The Kaiser during the First World War
Our naval supremacy and our world standing went down the drain. Most sensible people knew within months that the war was a costly disaster but they couldn’t stop it. This was because leaders on both sides, such as Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, had whipped up patriotic sentiment to such a pitch they could not compromise.
Something similar has happened in Ukraine. Facts and reason about this war are unpopular. Sentiment and propaganda rule instead. So my guess is that death and demolition will just go on, and the vast new cemeteries will continue to spread across the blasted land.
No wonder patience with police has run out
How long can our absent, politically correct apology for a police force survive? In Bournemouth last week, some residents – tired and angered by spreading disorder and lawlessness – supported a private patrol body, the ‘Safeguard Force’, to fill the obvious gap.
I know little about this outfit. But I have for some time been saying that Parliament should grasp that patience has run out with ‘police’ forces which are simultaneously pathetic when confronted with crime and chaos, and sinister when they pursue citizens for thinking incorrect thoughts.
Imagine if schools refused to teach, bus companies refused to run buses and fire brigades ignored fires. They’d be closed down and replaced with new ones that did what we pay them to do. A serious government would immediately begin to train proper new local police forces, based on the model which used to work so well here. When they were ready, it would disband the useless, bloated organisations which not only fail to protect us but obviously dislike us and what we think and say.
Let these so-called ‘police’ forces see if they can get anyone to crowdfund them for whatever it is they do.