PRESS RELEASE:

Many experts say that coerced psychiatric drugging of children in children has reached epidemic levels. Often African American parents are helpless to protect their children in the face of psychiatric or psychological coercion. On April 7, 2000, a 16-year-old Cecil Reed suffered a massive, fatal heart attack while swimming in a pool at the state-run Bronx Children's Psychiatric Center in New York. A cocktail of four prescribed psychiatric drugs triggered the attack. Psychiatrists claimed Cecil suffered a "schizoaffective disorder" and "post-traumatic stress disorder," but his father maintains his son was just a strong willed boy who would lash out after being separated from family and friends. Cecil's father had repeatedly tried to get his son off the drugs, recalling his son's pleas: "Daddy, I don't want to take medicine anymore. They are just using me as a guinea pig."

Hayes stated, "Children are our future leaders, and black children are the hope of the black race. We must nurture and protect them, ensure they receive a proper education, proper medical, not psychiatric care and give them every opportunity to succeed in life. We must support this legislation for their sake, and for the sake of all of our children."

In March last year, the U.S. Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, spoke out against the "disproportionate enrollment of minority children" in Special Education. According to Paige, "Our system fails to teach many children fundamental skills like reading and then inappropriately identifies some of them as having disabilities." In 1930, 80 percent of African American children over the age of 14 could read. By 1990, after more than 25 years of "Special Education," only 56 percent of African Americans over the age of 14 could read.

A year-long investigation of the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education also found an astounding 2.8 million children had been placed in Special Education simply because they had not been taught to read, costing state and federal governments an estimated 30 billion dollars.

CCHR says that underlying the coerced drugging of children is the definition of "disability" under Special Education law. Bruce Wiseman, the US President of CCHR stated, "The Child Medication and Safety Act goes to the heart of addressing the enforced drugging issue so prevalent in Special Education. The real issue is the identification process, as children are first being screened and identified as 'mentally ill' in our classrooms, and then coerced and pressured to take powerful cocaine-like stimulants. Children are labeled with mental disorders such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), which has never been medically or scientifically proven to exist."

This abuse of children has prompted Pennsylvania State Representative LeAnna Washington to become an outspoken critic of the rapidly escalating level of children being legally prescribed mind-altering drugs. In December 1999, Representative Washington was instrumental in the National Caucus of Black State Legislator's unanimous vote passing a resolution that called for a national investigation into "the use of all psychiatric drugs and their effects on children in this nation."

For more information on the psychiatric labeling and drugging of children, contact CCHR at 800-869-2247, or visit www.fightforkids.org. CCHR was established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology to investigate and expose psychiatric violations of human rights.