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THE FDA PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGIC DRUGS ADVISORY COMMITTEE HEARINGS 2006
DR. RUDORFER: Thank you.Speaker 36. Noah Wright Smith
MS. SMITH: My name is Noah Wright Smith and I am a 15-year-old victim of legalized drug abuse. My mother had me put on Ritalin when I was 5. I felt sick all the time on Ritalin and it was just the beginning of bad things happening to me because of drugs.
My grandparents won custody of me last year. When they won, they got upset because I was in bad shape and on a lot of drugs. They picked me up at Broughton Mental Hospital in Morganton, North Carolina, and learned I was on 1,000 milligrams of drugs a day. In my lifetime, I have been on 16 psychotropic drugs including Zoloft, Paxil, and Effexor, and all of them made me feel sick and do very bad things.
I wasn’t a bad kid. I was a badly abused kid, abused by my mother and my stepfather. The Department of Social Services knew I was being abused, but they didn’t do anything except put me on more drugs.
The drugs made me sick and do bad things like trying to stab my teacher with scissors.
Sometimes it made me want to kill my parents, and I told them that, and was put in a mental hospital. Some drugs made me have bad nightmares, so I tried very hard not to sleep every night, so they gave me drugs to make me sleep. Some of the drugs made me want to kill myself. I couldn’t stop thinking about killing myself. When I told the doctors, they sent me to still another mental hospital.
One day I tried to jump off a very high railing to kill myself. I was put in a mental hospital again for doing that, but I really wanted to die. I really did want to, and I was so scared and mad, too. In those mental hospitals, they kept giving me more drugs, and I got depressed. I got diabetes and high blood pressure.
My grandparents won my custody and took me to a new psychiatrist. We have worked hard together and he found I really don’t need any
drugs. Last year he took me off all of them, one at a time. No more nightmares or wanting to hurt or kill other people, and I don’t want to kill myself anymore.
Drugs almost ruined my life and almost killed me. What about the kids that have to take these drugs? I don’t want kids to kill themselves.
Who is taking care of them? Who really cares about us kids? I don’t even know if you care, do you?
Somebody had better listen to kids who say the medicines make them want to kill themselves, and make them sick, and do bad things, because they are telling you the truth.
Thank you for listening to me. Now,please, help the other kids, so that they don’t get hurt by drugs, and so they don’t kill themselves.
I almost killed myself and I am glad I am alive.