Ritalin is safe

Ganked from :

Rital­in is safe—and it works
Research dis­pels fears that drug hurts kids, and finds that it actu­al­ly helps brains grow

By Detroit News staff and wire reports

NORTHVILLE—For more than a gen­er­a­tion, we’ve been “drug­ging” our unruly chil­dren to calm them down. And in doing so, we have risked dam­ag­ing their young brains and set­ting them up for long-term drug addiction—or so we have been warned. 

But now, that mantra is being turned inside-out. The first long-term results of what some have called a huge drug exper­i­ment on our chil­dren shows what almost no one expected: 

Not only do the stim­u­lant drugs used to treat “atten­tion-deficit-hyper­ac­tive disorder”—or ADHD as it is known—not dam­age the brain, they appear to enhance brain growth, help­ing afflict­ed chil­dren catch up in brain size to their more “nor­mal” peers. 

That block­buster find­ing, print­ed recent­ly in the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion, is final­ly eas­ing the fears of par­ents afraid of these drugs and is send­ing experts on a mis­sion to get the word out.

It’s from Decem­ber 2002, but I had­n’t seen it before.