That amounted to interference in the child’s freedom and personal rights, because pharmacological agents induced behavioral changes but failed to educate the child on how to achieve these behavioral changes independently. The child was thus deprived of an essential learning experience to act autonomously and emphatically which “considerably curtails children’s freedom and impairs their personality development”, the NEK criticized.

The alarmed critics of the Ritalin disaster are now getting support from an entirely different side. The German weekly Der Spiegel quoted in its cover story on 2 February 2012 the US American psychiatrist Leon Eisenberg, born in 1922 as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, who was the “scientific father of ADHD” and who said at the age of 87, seven months before his death in his last interview: “ADHD is a prime example of a fictitious disease”

Since 1968, however, some 40 years, Leon Eisenberg’s “disease” haunted the diagnostic and statistical manuals, first as “hyperkinetic reaction of childhood”, now called “ADHD”. The use of ADHD medications in Germany rose in only eighteen years from 34 kg (in 1993) to a record of no less than 1760 kg (in 2011) – which is a 51-fold increase in sales! In the United States every tenth boy among ten year-olds already swallows an ADHD medication on a daily basis. With an increasing tendency.

When it comes to the proven repertoire of Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda, to sell the First World War to his people with the help of his uncle’s psychoanalysis and to distort science and the faith in science to increase profits of the industry – what about investigating on whose behalf the “scientific father of ADHD” conducted science? His career was remarkably steep, and his “fictitious disease” led to the best sales increases. And after all, he served in the “Committee for DSM V and ICD XII, American Psychiatric Association” from 2006 to 2009. After all, Leon Eisenberg received “the Ruane Prize for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Research. He has been a leader in child psychiatry for more than 40 years through his work in pharmacological trials, research, teaching, and social policy and for his theories of autism and social medicine”.

And after all, Eisenberg was a member of the “Organizing Committee for Women and Medicine Conference, Bahamas, November 29 – December 3, 2006, Josiah Macy Foundation (2006)”. The Josiah Macy Foundation organized conferences with intelligence agents of the OSS, later CIA, such as Gregory Bateson and Heinz von Foerster during and long after World War II. Have such groups marketed the diagnosis of ADHD in the service of the pharmaceutical market and tailor-made for him with a lot of propaganda and public relations? It is this issue that the American psychologist Lisa Cosgrove and others investigated in their study Financial Ties between DSM-IV Panel Members and the Pharmaceutical Industry7. They found that “Of the 170 DSM panel members 95 (56%) had one or more financial associations with companies in the pharmaceutical industry. One hundred percent of the members of the panels on ‘Mood Disorders’ and ‘Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders’ had financial ties to drug companies. The connections are especially strong in those diagnostic areas where drugs are the first line of treatment for mental disorders.” In the next edition of the manual, the situation is unchanged. “Of the 137 DSM-V panel members who have posted disclosure statements, 56% have reported industry ties – no improvement over the percent of DSM-IV members.” “The very vocabulary of psychiatry is now defined at all levels by the pharmaceutical industry,” said Dr Irwin Savodnik, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles.

This is well paid. Just one example: The Assistant Director of the Pediatric Psychopharmacology Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School received “$1 million in earnings from drug companies between 2000 and 2007”. In any case, no one can easily get around the testimony of the father of ADHD: “ADHD is a prime example of a fictitious disease.”

The task of psychologists, educators and doctors is not to put children on the “chemical lead” because the entire society cannot handle the products of its misguided theories of man and raising children, and instead hands over our children to the free pharmaceutical market. Let us return to the basic matter of personal psychology and education: The child is to acquire personal responsibility and emphatic behavior under expert guidance – and that takes the family and the school: In these fields, the child should be able to lead off mentally. This constitutes the core of the human person.

One of the earliest uses of methamphetamine was during World War II, when it was used by Axis and Allied forces.[100] The company Temmler produced methamphetamine under the trademark Pervitin and so did the German and Finnish militaries. It was also dubbed "Pilot's chocolate" or "Pilot's salt".[101] It was widely distributed across rank and division, from elite forces to tank crews and aircraft personnel, with many millions of tablets being distributed throughout the war.[102] Its use by German Panzer crews also led to it being known as "Panzerschokolade" ("Panzer chocolate" or "tankers' chocolate").[103][104] More than 35 million three-milligram doses of Pervitin were manufactured for the German army and air force between April and July 1940.[105] From 1942 until his death in 1945, Adolf Hitler was given intravenous injections of methamphetamine by his personal physician Theodor Morell. It is possible that it was used to treat Hitler's speculated Parkinson's disease, or that his Parkinson-like symptoms that developed from 1940 onwards resulted from using methamphetamine.[106] In Japan, methamphetamine was sold under the registered trademark of Philopon (ヒロポン[107] hiropon[108]) by Dainippon Pharmaceuticals (present-day Dainippon Sumitomo Pharma [DSP]) for civilian and military use. As with the rest of the world at the time, the side effects of methamphetamine were not well studied, and regulation was not seen as necessary. In the 1940s and 1950s the drug was widely administered to Japanese industrial workers to increase their productivity.[109]

Methamphetamine and amphetamine were given to Allied bomber pilots during World War II to sustain them by fighting off fatigue and enhancing focus during long flights. The experiment failed because soldiers became agitated, could not channel their aggression and showed impaired judgment.[98] Rather, dextroamphetamine (Dexedrine) became the drug of choice for American bomber pilots, being used on a voluntary basis by roughly half of the U.S. Air Force pilots during the Persian Gulf War, a practice which came under some media scrutiny in 2003 after a mistaken attack on Canadian troops.[110]

Following the use of amphetamine (such as Benzedrine, introduced 1932) in the 1930s for asthma, narcolepsy, and symptoms of the common cold,[98] in 1943, Abbott Laboratories requested U.S. FDA approval of methamphetamine for treatment of narcolepsy, mild depression, postencephalitic parkinsonism, chronic alcoholism, cerebral arteriosclerosis, and hay fever, which was granted in December 1944.[citation needed]

Sale of the massive postwar surplus of methamphetamine in Europe, North America, and Japan stimulated civilian demand.[101] After World War II, a large Japanese military stockpile of methamphetamine, known by its trademark Philopon, flooded the market.[111] Post-war Japan experienced the first methamphetamine epidemic, which later spread to Guam, the U. S. Marshall Islands, and to the U. S. West Coast.[98]

In 1948, the Philopon trademark came under a well-publicized lawsuit by Philips Corporation.[111] Philips, under its Koninklijke division, filed suit against Dainippon Pharmaceuticals to cease using Philipon as the commercial name for methamphetamine. Philips claimed the exclusive right to use the trademark as a portmanteau of Philips and Nippon, the Japanese name of the country. DSP's attorneys challenged Philips' standing to sue as a foreign (Dutch) corporation. The matter was ultimately settled out of court in 1952, with Dainippon Pharmaceuticals agreeing to pay Philips a 5% royalty on worldwide sales of methamphetamines sold by DSP under the Philopon label. The Japanese Ministry of Health banned production less than a year later.[112]

In the 1950s, there was a rise in the legal prescription of methamphetamine to the American public. In the 1954 edition of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, conditions treatable by methamphetamine included "narcolepsy, postencephalitic parkinsonism, alcoholism, certain depressive states, and in the treatment of obesity."[113] Methamphetamine constituted half of the amphetamine salts for the original formulation for the diet drug Obetrol, which later became the ADHD drug Adderall. Methamphetamine was also marketed for sinus inflammation or for non-medicinal purposes as "pep pills" or "bennies".[98]