When 7-year-old Sherrice Iverson was raped and murdered three years ago in a casino restroom in Primm, Nevada her convicted killer, 18-year-old Jeremy Strohmeyer, was on a prescription for the amphetamine stimulant Dexedrine, having recently been diagnosed with "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder" (ADHD). Shortly before his arrest, Strohmeyer took 37 more of the pills, attempting suicide.

After 18-year-old mass-murderer Eric Harris perpetrated the Columbine massacres in Littleton, Colorado, and killed himself, an autopsy was performed on his body. It revealed that at the time of the school shootings he had been under the influence of the antide-pressant Luvox, a cousin of Prozac.

Kip Kinkel, the 14-year-old Springfield, Oregon, student who killed his parents, two students and wounded another 22 in a cafeteria shooting spree, had been prescribed both Ritalin and Prozac.

The lists of these cases goes on and on. Americans increasingly see a link between the torrent of seemingly senseless acts of violence by school-age children and prescription psychotropic drugs - many of which have been known for years to cause serious adverse effects when given to minors.

The manufacturer of Ritalin, for example, admits that, "psychotic episodes can occur." The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the psychiatric industry noted in 1987 that ". . . suicide is the major complication" of with-drawal. Perhaps not coincidentally, since Ritalin was approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration in 1955, teen suicides have more than tripled.

Today at least 6 million kids are now on mind-altering drugs such as Ritalin, Luvox and Prozac. In some classrooms, 20 percent of the students are on Ritalin. Yet no research has shown that such psychoactive drugs are safe for minors nor that they remedy any brain-chemistry imbalance.

Yet the official drug-pushing continues. By the year 2000, says the federal government's National Institute of Mental Health a longtime promoter of chemical solutions to human behavioral problems 10 million schoolchildren will be taking psychiatric drugs.

IN A NATION THAT HAS CONDUCTED A 40-YEAR WAR ON DRUGS, WHY THE EAGERNESS TO DOPE UP OUR KIDS?

Proponents of the chemical solution point to the rising numbers of children diagnosed with behavioral disorders. And indeed, the American Psychiatric Association, or APA, now has a manual that spares no behavior: Conduct Disorder (CD), Serious Reading Disorder (SRD), Serious Emotional Disorder (SED), Learning Disorder (LD), Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), also known as Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).

And these "disorders" are a real growth business. Take ADD/ADHD for example.

In 1987 it was voted into existence by the APA, and within one year 500,000 children in the United States were carrying the label. Six years after that, according to the International Narcotics Control Board funded by the United Nations "10-12 percent of all boys between the ages of 6 and 14 in the United States have been diagnosed as having ADD and are being treated with methylphenidate." Methylphenidate is the generic name for Ritalin 90 percent of the world's supply of which the United States now buys and uses.

The boom in "disorder" diagnoses is paralleled by, and, in view of some critics, motivated by massive cash transfers to the psychiatric industry from American taxpayers. Beginning in 1991, the U.S. government began providing annual federal grants to schools with ADHD children of $400 per child. And last year American schools paid members of the mental health industry $1 billion to diagnose students with the "disorders." That, however, just scratches the surface. Funding for special education the category into which many of these kids are placed was more than $30 billion a year in 1994.

Here in Nevada, according to a state report, total official spending budgeted for special education in fiscal year 2000 is $189.2 million. Of that, local communities pay $132 million, while the state pays $56.3 million. The federal government, which mandates much of the special education effort, will contribute only $106,000.

Despite the big bucks involved and state and federal support, the whole pharmacological response to youth behavioral problems is highly suspect. Why? Because no evidence exists that brain chemistry abnormalities produce the acting-out or the inattention that bother parents and teachers.

Reluctantly, even the chief proponents of the psychiatric approach acknowledge this. Speaking at the March 7, 1998, meeting of the American Society of Adolescent Psychiatry, researcher James M. Swanson lamented: "I would like to have an objective diagnosis for the disorder (ADHD). Right now psychiatric diagnosis is completely subjective. We would like to have biological tests a dream of psychiatry for many years."

Nevertheless, in the words of syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher, teachers are "the chief pushers of Ritalin." Their reason is that children "become more focused and compliant while taking the stimulant drug."

Within two years after the APA came up with its "learning Disorder" (LD) diagnosis, the number of children so-labeled had reached more than 782,000. By 1996, it had reached 2.6 million.

"The many millions of schoolchildren around the world who are being drugged have no disease," says neurologist Fred A. Baughman Jr., M.D. "Had a vast majority of these children learned to read properly utilizing phonics, they would never have been labeled as having ADHD or any other `learning disorder'."

The alleged existence of the "disorders" do provide unproductive schools and educators with an excuse that seems scientific until the facts are known.

But the new reliance on psychiatry in the schools is actually part of an attack on the basic principles of learning itself. As former U.S. Senator and San Francisco State College President S.I. Hayakawa once said, it "rejects the idea of education as the acquiring of knowledge and skills . . . and regards the fundamental task in education as therapy."

IS IT ANY WONDER AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS SO OFTEN FAIL?

Deborah Carson is an associate research fellow in education with the Nevada Policy Research Institute, a free-market research and education foundation.