The five-part series “Drugging Our Kids” combined exclusive data analysis, powerful narratives, interactive online graphics, poignant photos and a striking 40-minute documentary video to uncover how foster care providers are relying on a risky but convenient remedy to control the behavior of thousands of troubled kids: numbing them with drugs that are untested on and often not approved for children. The series also revealed the high cost to California taxpayers, who spent more on psychotropic drugs over the past decade than on drugs of any other type for foster children. To promote the drugs in the nation’s largest child welfare system, pharmaceutical companies wooed foster care prescribers with millions of dollars in payments for speaking, meals, travel, consulting and company-sponsored research – spending almost four times more on these doctors than the typical California doctor.
