Big pharma covers up side effects.

A prescribed threat

Among the harshest critics of the child wonder-drug regimen? Think rock icons.

By Mary Eberstadt
MARY EBERSTADT is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of "Home-Alone America," newly released in paperback by Penguin/Sentinel.

September 25, 2005

WHEN TOM CRUISE and his fellow Scientologists took a hammering earlier this year for their public opposition to psychiatric drugs, neither they nor their critics could have anticipated the releases in July and August of two weighty reports offering evidence that at least some psychiatric prescription-writing has run amok.

If these two reports by Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, or CASA, have it right, more kids than ever have their fingers — and sometimes their noses — in somebody else's psychiatric prescription pill bottle.