A new NIH-funded study says that as many as 25% of students in middle and high school are abusing Adderall. Combining that information with what we already know our kids are putting in their bodies (deliberately or accidentally) leaves me wondering whether all these substances are affecting our children’s relationship to their own bodies, leading to the “transgender” explosion.

Regarding ADHD, I believe the real diagnosis for most of these kids isn’t ADHD. Instead, it’s a product of 30 hours a week of forced inactivity while having incredibly boring lessons forced upon them. Still, whatever the cause for children’s restlessness and inattention, once they get the ADHD diagnosis, they usually get started on Adderall, a drug containing amphetamines and dextroamphetamine.

Image: Adderall by Patrick Mallahan III, CC BY-SA 3.0.

A newly released NIH-funded study says roughly one out of four American teenagers is using a drug like Adderall:

One in four US teens at some schools are abusing prescription stimulants such as Adderall, a Government-funded study suggests.

The research found what experts described as a ‘contagion effect’ - where the risk of illegal use was higher in places where lots of students had legal prescriptions. Children more likely to abuse the drugs were in the northeastern region of the US, are white and have highly educated parents.

[snip]

‘In some schools there was little to no misuse of stimulants, while in other schools more than 25% of students had used stimulants in nonmedical ways,’ Dr Sean McCabe, the study’s lead author from the University of Michigan, told CNN.

The latest numbers also show that around 10% of American children are on some form of antidepressant. Both ADHD treatments and antidepressants have effects on people’s sexual function and mental condition.

Those are just the licit drugs children take.

Children are also doubling down on marijuana (which is more potent than in the 1960s and can have other, dangerous chemicals in it). According to a CDC handout, in 2019, 37% of high school students reported trying marijuana. In addition, marijuana vaping was rising in popularity, with 8% of 8th graders and 22% of 12th graders vaping pot. Ironically, one of the side effects of pot use is “difficulty maintaining attention,” which is the kind of thing that gets an ADHD diagnosis. It’s easy to imagine kids on both Adderall and pot.

Another thing we’re putting into children’s bodies in unprecedented amounts is vaccinations. In my day, we got measles, mumps, rubella, smallpox, diphtheria, polio, tetanus, and a few other classic diseases. Nowadays, children get vaccinations for Hepatitis A and B, rotavirus, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, Hib (Influenza b), pneumococcal disease, polio, COVID, the flu, measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox—all before the age of 7. Once they hit 7, they may get iterations of the same vaccines, as well as getting HPV vaccinations and two different vaccinations for meningococcal diseases.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe in vaccines. Before modern germ theory and vaccinations, up to 50% of all children born in the Western world died before they were five. My parents and their friends had lifelong consequences from things such as polio, scarlet fever, measles, chickenpox, mumps, hepatitis, etc. Tetanus, which was untreatable, was a miserable way to die. Having said that, the number of jabs kids get today is concerning, and there may be invisible fallout paired with the benefits from those vaccinations.

Finally, there’s an environmental factor, one that environmentalists have been complaining about for a very long time: Endocrine disruptors, which include estrogen (footnotes omitted):

The effect of estrogenic compounds in the water supply from industry, agriculture, and other sources raises concerns about human health and deserves scrutiny. Estrogenic compounds are part of a larger category of chemicals known as endocrine-disruptors (EDCs), chemicals that can alter the hormonal and homeostatic systems enabling an organism—like a human being or other animal—to communicate with and respond to its environment. Given the demonstrated effects of EDCs on human reproductive health, it is important to examine the role played by EE2 in contributing to the presence of estrogenic compounds in our water.

Endocrine disruptors are everywhere in the modern world:

Endocrine disruptors are found in many everyday products, including some plastic bottles and containers, liners of metal food cans, detergents, flame retardants, food, toys, cosmetics, and pesticides.

One activist, Seth Siegel, estimates that 10 million doses of synthetic estrogen get flushed daily into America’s waters thanks to the millions of American women on the Pill. While most of that is filtered out in water treatment plants, that estrogen still remains in our drinking water. Add to that the estrogen farm animals excrete that makes its way into our water supply, as well as endocrine disruptors from other sources (industrial and farm run-off, etc.), and the amount isn’t inconsequential.

(Before you panic, one 2010 study found that the estrogen in children’s water is less than what they get from milk, so it may not be a problem. I note it simply because it’s there.)

I’m an ignoramus about medicine and science. Still, it seems worthwhile to examine whether the increasing number of children claiming to be “transgender” or suffering from other forms of body dysphoria isn’t solely due to social pressure and indoctrination (although I believe those are the primary drivers). Part of the problem may be because our children ingest an unprecedented number of chemical substances, some with very serious side effects.