Mind-altering drugs for kids as young three years old? It’s a national scandal that has hit home in Florida.
Twelve percent of children in Florida who have been removed from their homes and are in state foster care are prescribed psychotropic drugs. According to a government accountability report, kids in foster care in Florida are about three times more like to receive the drugs.
The side effects from these drugs can be suicidal thoughts, hallucinations, nightmares, and even death.
“We’re playing with fire. We’re playing with fire,” says Florida State Senator Rhonda Storms, a Republican from Brandon. Storms has a bill, Senate Bill 1808, working its way through the state legislature. Her proposed legislation will make the state have to show a compelling state interest before a child in the Department of Children and Families foster care system is medicated.
“We have the state making decisions for children without proper scrutiny,” says the senator.
Storms is leading the charge to reign in the use of drugs for kids in the welfare system after 7-year-old Gabriel Myers hanged himself in the shower of his foster parents home. A state investigation concluded the use of psychotropic drugs was a contributing factor.
University of Tampa Psychology Professor Joseph Sclafani maintains the drugs are prescribed too often. In 2008, Medicaid paid more than $64,358,968 for the drugs prescribed for children.
The Department of Children and Family tells the 10 News Investigators since Gabriel Myers death the agency has made several changes to try to insure that only children who need psychotropic drugs get them. DCF policy is extremely clear that before any child in foster care can be given a psychotropic drug, two doctors have to sign off on it. Also, a biological parent, not the foster parent, must be notified or a judge has to sign a court order. But, 10 News Investigators have discovered the state doesn’t follow its own rules.
“They wouldn’t give me any information,” says Karen Shaw, whose two sons were removed after she and her former husband were involved in a domestic violence dispute. The boys were prescribed the drugs without her knowledge, without a court order, and, according to court documents, the caseworker lied and said Shaw’s parental rights were terminated when they were not.
Other parents tell the same story. “They are supposed to tell the parent or the court when they are in foster care if they are going to give them any kind of psychotropic drugs. I had no knowledge and they never told me or the court,” she says.
Senator Storms maintains these children need more protection even though DCF says they don’t. “Because they are doing it so well, that’s what they said, which is why we have children who have died. We have children in the system that were given so much psychotropic drugs that their little gums were bleeding when they went to school every day. They couldn’t keep their heads up in class.”
Meanwhile, nationally every week one child goes into a coma, four children die of side effects, and one child commits suicide because these drugs intended to help often don’t.