Johnny get your pills
BY ROB WATERS
(06/17/99)

A disturbing but interesting article. I am an attorney in a small town in Ohio and a lot of my practice involves domestic custody cases and juvenile court cases. In the juvenile court cases, at least a third of the kids I deal with are medicated, and I don't think I can remember even one kid who has been medicated that isn't taking a least two different medications. The worst I've seen is a kid who at one point was on incredibly high doses of eight meds. The kids usually see the prescribing doctor once every three or four months; they are usually poor, and their parents are always overwhelmed by the kids and their problems.

What is going on is a fear of these kids and, in most of the cases, a refusal to deal with their real problems with more expensive talk theories. We give them some dope and stick them away.

It's strange and quite scary: Kids who do the kinds of things I did when I was in school (in the '50s and '60s) are considered "disturbed" and in need of some very serious mind-altering medication; but if they drink beer or smoke dope, they are criminals.

-- Ronald C. Couch

Waters does readers a disservice by continually intermingling the use of stimulant medications such as Ritalin with antidepressants. Ritalin has been studied for more than 30 years, and has never shown any significant long-term problems. A recent study found it was most likely underprescribed rather than overprescribed. Attention deficit hyperactive disorder, while sometimes found with depression, is a completely different disorder and it makes little sense to try to focus on both at once.

-- Patricia Saperstein

The only thing the recent school shooters have in common -- aside from being male and young -- was the fact that they were all prescribed medication:

• Shawn Cooper, Ritalin, blasted shotgun inside school.
• Eric Harris, Luvox, Columbine H.S.
• T.J. Solomon, Ritalin, shot six of his schoolmates.
• Kip Kinkel, Ritalin and Prozac, blasted parents and killed two at his school -- and wounded 22.

Maybe psychiatrist Harold Koplewicz, director of New York University's Child Study Center (obviously an advocate for medicating children) should get into counseling himself.

-- Jeffrey Abelson
New York

I am 19, and I have been taking some sort of mood medication, on and off, since I was 8. I believe that taking Ritalin at an early age has partially caused my ongoing sleep disorders. Diagnosed with ADD (as it was then called), I "grew out of it" at about 10 and stopped taking Ritalin. At 13, when I was besieged with depression, a psychiatrist put me on Prozac after talking to me for 10 minutes. But without a mood stabilizer, I became manic. In one horrifying instance, I was put on Halidol to control delusions, and I shook so hard I frightened my schoolmates.

Managed care is the scourge of modern medicine. Neurology, especially children's neurology, is little understood, as are the ramifications of mind-altering drugs, but self-absorbed yuppie parents would rather dope up their kids than address their family problems.

-- Lillie Wade

The making of Henry Louis Gates, CEO
BY CRAIG OFFMAN
(06/16/99)

Having worked both as an academic and a manager at the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I find that Craig Offman's piece rings very true. Unfortunately, the situation he describes is characteristic of the way multimedia encyclopedias are produced. Encyclopedias have always been deeply commercial ventures disguised in academic garb, and print encyclopedias were often as rushed and badly managed as Encarta Africana. The digitization of encyclopedias has only increased that trend; and in a period also characterized by a greater reliance on outsourcing and temporary labor and greater attention to marketing, the results have been predictably bad both for people who work on these projects, and for the products. Usually the devotion of serious writers and editors, who don't want their names to be associated with shoddy work and are willing to put in the overtime necessary to do the job right, is the only thing that keeps this work on track. Good products can come out of these efforts, but despite the system, not because of it.

It also comes as no surprise that this style of content production should find its way into the university. Academia has long benefited from skilled, underpaid labor in the form of graduate students; more recently, it has subsidized faculty superstars with underpaid adjuncts. (It's no coincidence that the superstar system was built in the same decade that saw the explosion of adjunct teaching.) Now corporate alliances with universities are giving profit-making ventures access to that pool of talent, but what those on the shop floor will gain from this brave new world is unclear. In simpler times, their low pay was made up for (at least in principle) by career-advancing training in new research techniques, mentorship or co-authorship on scholarly papers. Whether they'll be able to benefit from future efforts to commoditize their intellectual labor -- when universities and "dot coms" begin turning leveraging Web sites into money-making ventures in distance learning, for example -- remains to be seen.

-- Alex Pang
Project Manager, SiliconBase
Stanford University
Stanford, Calif.

Offman writes, "In today's university, academics in the science and technology departments can easily turn a profit from their intellectual work. With the help of a technology licensing office on campus, an academic can become an entrepreneur, often collaborating with a company to distribute his or her invention/discovery in the form of a marketable product."

Offman doesn't cite any examples or other support for the facile argument he makes here -- probably because he is entirely wrong. Employees of a university sign a contract with the university, giving the rights to all inventions and other intellectual property to the university. So academics, especially in the humanities, aren't making any money. Why would they have to rely on corporations for support if they did?

Offman implicitly condemns academics for being remote with his repeated use of the term "ivory tower," yet he also condemns Gates' very public dissemination of knowledge. I wonder if Offman has ever read any of Gates' work, which is highly accessible and interesting, not at all the stuff of the "ivory tower."

If this Web page is supposed to encourage people to think, why does it use such superficial, ranting rhetoric? Why not offer facts and analytic tools rather than cheap and obvious rhetorical strategies?

-- Amy Vondrak
Syracuse, N.Y.

Nothing Personal: No pierced nostril for Barbie
BY AMY REITER
(06/16/99)

Exactly how is Sen. Inhofe responsible for the private, unauthorized behavior of some of his staffers? How does their behavior make him a hypocrite? If he hires a homosexual, does that make him a hypocrite also? According to that view, he must avoid hiring homosexuals in order to be moral.

Actually, we all know why this is being publicized. This story is being used as a club in order to beat Inhofe by those who disagree with him politically -- nothing more.

-- Paul Osborn

Nothing Personal: The nearly nekkid netrepreneur
BY AMY REITER
(06/17/99)

Regarding the "Look out! He's got a fish!" item: One thing which I think we can all agree is really funny is a man assaulting his partner. It's pretty funny when he just uses his fists, but when, in his rage, he gets all inventive -- well, that's for sure going the extra mile. The thing that made this so incredibly hilarious was the way it was accompanied by stories about the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Nancy Richards-Akers at the hands of abusive partners. Genius!

Today's Salon was a class act all the way.

-- Melissa Curley

Drunk like me
BY STEVE BURGESS
(06/16/99)

In Burgess' last paragraph, he goes badly astray. Jack Trimpey's "venom" toward AA is by no means misplaced. Thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous, countless people have been led down a destructive path whereby their chances for recovery are chained to an arbitrary process that forces them to think about booze constantly.

For example: On the rare occasion I feel tempted to drink, I merely swat the idea away like an annoying fly. A member of AA, on the other hand, must go through an unnecessarily drawn-out process of running the steps through their mind, gnashing their teeth as they wait to get to a private phone, get to such a phone and call their sponsor, endure their sponsor's so-called wisdom and, finally, run off to a meeting. My method takes about 24 seconds; AA's consumes nearly 24 hours. While I'm sure that Burgess' experience was more pleasant, mine was more typical: I faced sanctimonious, smug peer pressure and self-righteous demands that I get a sponsor and "work the steps". Thank God for Jack Trimpey (yes, I'm a Christian, and I still dislike AA) and his egalitarian ideas for rational recovery.

-- Rob Anderson

The great Silicon Valley soap opera
BY JANELLE BROWN
(06/17/99)

Apple did not, in fact, steal the ideas for the Mac from Xerox PARC: They purchased the rights to use them, and they have never denied that PARC is where tools like bit-mapped displays, mice and GUIs were invented.

-- Steve Hull