When it came to drugs, "just say no" used to be a parent's favourite slogan. But not any more, says psychiatrist Peter R. Breggin in The Boston SundayGlobe. Today, America is raising a nation of legal drug addicts.

"In my psychiatric practice, I see children six to ten years old who have been put on four or five psychiatric medications at once," says Dr. Breggin. This year, six million children across the USA -- over one tenth of the schoolage population -- will be prescribed anti-depressants and stimulants. "From Ritalin and Dexedrine to Prozac and Paxil, the drug epidemic among our children comes increasingly from our prescription counters," he declares.

The situation is now so out of control that the International Narcotics Control Board of the World Health Organisation has issued a warning against the massive over-prescription of stimulants to American children, a country that consumes 90 percent of the world's Ritalin -- a 'remedy' for so-called Attention Deficit Disorder.

What type of children are drugged? Children who are sad, anxious, angry, aggressive or just plain disobedient... even shy, dreamy children are being drugged. In short, childhood itself has come to he seen as a disease.

But in a country that is supposed to value differences, such wholesale drugging of children "reflects an extreme of enforced conformity. The child is compelled to display a drug-induced, superficial social veneer."

By turning to pharmaceutical drugs as a quick-fix solution to their children's more disappointing characteristics, many believe that parents are bringing up a generation of people who have little sense of personal responsibility. Instead of learning how to improve themselves and the world they live in, children are being taught that they are somehow defective and should rely on drugs to make them 'right'.