Yale Researcher Links Childhood ADHD To Adult Crime, Drug Dealing

A little noticed study came out in the obscure Journal of Mental Health Policy and Economics in September from a researcher at Yale University and a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Jason Fletcher and Barbara Wolfe respectively. It's not the first time researchers have pushed this line of fear, but I'll just quote from the abstract while I scrape my jaw off the floor:

"Results: The empirical estimates show that children who experience ADHD symptoms face a substantially increased likelihood of engaging in many types of criminal activities. An included calculation of the social costs associated with criminal activities by individuals with childhood ADHD finds the costs to be substantial.

"Discussion: Our study provides the first evidence using a nationally representative dataset of the long term consequences on criminal activities of childhood ADHD. Our results are quite robust to a number of specification checks. Limitations of our study include that our measures of ADHD are retrospective, we have no information on treatment for ADHD, and it remains possible that our results are confounded by unmeasured variables.

"Implications: Our results suggest that children showing ADHD symptoms should be viewed as a group at high risk of poor outcomes as young adults. As such, a good case can be made for targeting intervention programs on this group of children and conducting evaluations to learn if such interventions are effective in reducing the probability that these children commit a crime. Development of such intervention programs and evaluating them for efficiency could be dollars well spent in terms of crime and drug abuse averted."

Isn't it nice that they are seeing such implications when their study cannot even establish whether or not study subjects were on-meds, off-meds or in psychotherapy?

A Yale press release claimed that "crimes where ADHD is a factor cost society $2 to $4 billion annually." With a $14.2 trillion GDP for the US in 2008 that estimated "damage" to society doesn't strike me as particularly important, macroeconomically speaking. It strikes me as infinitesimal, even if the claim is correct. Certainly, it's not big enough to justify slamming every boy with ADHD with Ritalin.

So why do researchers keep pushing on the benefits of ADHD treatment (you'll see how they are in a second)? Because they are trying to save a crumbling paradigm. In the UK, there's been an utter backlash against ADHD and its treatments and in the US there's been loads of evidence coming out that argues ADHD treatments are of limited effectiveness and that, developmentally, they aren't much help. They only produce minor test score increases, too. And a study earlier this year linked ADHD meds to a risk of sudden cardiac death. And the FDA recently linked ADHD stimulants to a risk of sudden death in otherwise healthy children.

So the public health crowd and the fine folks at Harvard/MGH have been fighting like crazy and squirming real hard in their desk chairs and ruminating at their computers (all signs of ADHD!) about how to protect their hegemony over little boys' behaviors and lives. Last year, for example, Joseph Biederman and Timothy Wilens of Harvard/MGH and Congressional investigation fame, separately published studies claiming that ADHD meds don't lead to later drug abuse in young adulthood and that ADHD meds keep girls from smoking and drug abuse. In other words, they are grasping at straws.

More from the press release:

"Fletcher said the link between ADHD and criminal activity will be further investigated by examining whether pharmacological treatments may reduce the risk of illegal activities as an adult. He is also investigating the relationships between childhood ADHD symptoms and labor market outcomes, such as employment and earnings."

Well, what wonderful reductionist public health researchers this pair is. I'll be honest and say that studies like this creep me out because the real world implications in public school could easily be schools demanding that disruptive boys (and girls) be medicated lest they turn into criminals of some kind down the road otherwise schools are somehow shirking their responsibility. I hope we aren't there yet as a culture but I fear that we are close.

Unless we start pushing back in the US the way they have in the UK.

BTW, the write-up of the Yale study in the New Haven Register is so unquestioning and unbalanced with contrary information about ADHD treatments that it is biased by omission.

Thanks to the reader who made me aware of this study.