The thing that worries me is the number of allergic kids taking drugs. Getting these kids off drugs is next to impossible if the allergies aren’t treated at the same time. I’ve treated many drug-addicted young people over the years and the usual case history is as follows. As children they had obvious symptoms of allergy but never had them diagnosed. They always felt sick, tired, unwell and often hyped up, though nothing showed up in tests. They spent their childhood being taken from doctor to doctor. Because none of these could hang a definitive diagnosis on them, they were accused of being attention-seeking malingerers looking for excuses to get out of school. Diagnosis is often supported by low achievement at school and varying degrees of antisocial behaviour. The children go through life in a state of quiet desperation, often suffering from depression, which frequently manifests as quarrelsomeness as it is combined with frustration. The children don’t know whether the doctors are right or not but know they don’t want to feel like this forever.

Feelings of lethargy, low self-esteem, disenchantment and inability to cope leads kids into mood-altering recreational drugs in an attempt to elevate their spirits and physical disposition. Drugs don’t prove to be the full answer but do give them temporary respite for the time they’re on them. Marijuana is usually the choice of the hyperactive young person (often described as ‘hyped up’ or ‘hypertensive’ by them or their parents). Heroin tends to be the choice of those suffering from ‘the blues’.

The other scenario is the child who had enough of the commonly recognised symptoms of allergy (sinusitis, hayfever, skin rashes, eczema) for the doctor to prescribe antihistamines. Antihistamines aggravated the symptoms of mental and physical sluggishness which were never associated with allergy by the doctor. A childhood spent on antihistamines has the teenager feeling worse than ever before, not only do they still have their allergies, they have these foreign chemicals in them as well. Drugs are sought as the only way out as ‘anything’s got to be better than feeling like this’.

It’s significant that among the most popular and widely abused drugs of young people are those of the amphetamine family. In these synthetic stimulants so many of today’s kids are trying to find the innate vitality of youth that has been denied them by the allergies that afflict them—allergies that have cither never been treated or worse than that, have been suppressed by potent tranquillising drugs (antihistamines). Kids that have been raised to believe they need synthetic drugs to get through childhood can’t be condemned for thinking they need still other synthetic drugs to get them through adulthood. They’ve been conditioned to think that drug taking is part of normal living and that’s a crying shame. Some take amphetamines to boost their energy levels and marijuana to calm their hyperactivity (prolonged hyperactivity brings with it chronic fatigue).

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