The AP is reporting that government-funded researchers have been testing AIDS drugs on abused and neglected children in foster care, for the last two decades—without providing those children the protections they are supposed to have under federal law and some states’ laws: Several studies that enlisted foster children reported patients suffered side effects such as rashes, vomiting and sharp drops in infection-fighting blood cells as they tested antiretroviral drugs to suppress AIDS or other medicines to treat secondary infections. In one study, researchers reported a “disturbing” higher death rate among children who took higher doses of a drug. That study was unable to determine a safe and effective dosage. There may be an even larger, more disturbing pattern of using the nation’s abused and neglected children in foster care as guinea pigs—or, worse, as a vulnerable population caught up in a system typically staffed by undertrained workers who are more interested in controlling them than caring for them, which makes the system and its Medicaid dollars easy pickings for giant pharmaceutical corporations always looking out for reliable markets for their products. The state of Florida, for example, is just recovering from a scandal over the doping of abused and neglected children in its child welfare system. According to the Miami Herald, “as many as one in four foster children were being given psychiatric drugs, sometimes large ‘cocktails’ of such medications.” The state legislature has just passed a law forbidding the foster care system from consenting to psychoactive prescriptions unless the child’s birth parents or a juvenile court judge approves the drug. The furor over psychiatric drugs began in February 2001, when Coral Springs attorney Andrea Moore told child welfare officials that two of her clients had developed severe side effects as a result of taking an anti-psychotic drug, Risperdal. One girl began lactating, though she wasn’t pregnant. When Moore questioned the use of the drugs on children who were not diagnosed as psychotic, “doctors responded by changing the diagnosis to include either a psychosis or modified an existing diagnosis to include psychotic features, thereby ‘justifying’ administration of the drug,” Moore wrote in a February 2001 letter. Three months later, The Herald reported that a consultant hired by DCF warned that “the widespread use of psychotropic medications is a systemwide issue” in the state’s child welfare program. Florida is not alone: In Texas, Dr. John Breeding, an Austin psychologist, has seen cases where some foster children were placed on as many as 17 drugs and says drugs are being used as chemical restraints in Texas. He wants all SSRIs and neuroleptic drugs banned from use on children. “The SSRIs are extremely harmful and addictive and can cause or exacerbate suicidal or homicidal tendencies; withdrawal is painful and dangerous,” Breeding warns. Meanwhile, as the Online Journal reports, the Bush administration is promoting a scheme designed by the New Freedoms Commission on Mental Health to conduct mental health screenings for all teens before they graduate from high school. Some see this effort as a way to give pharmaceutical companies access to even more children: Despite the fact that SSRI antidepressants are banned for use in children in the UK and despite the FDA "black box" warning label now required on all SSRIs that the drugs increase suicidal thinking and behavior in kids, the NFC not only recommends that the same drugs be prescribed to children, it promotes the very schemes that will increase the number of kids on these drugs in schools and other public institutions. The answer to the problem could be some combination of enforcing current federal law and setting in place tougher requirements for states taking federal foster care dollars to make sure that they are adequately protecting the abused and neglected children in their care. But wait a second: developments in Congress could shut down that option before it is even tried. Republican lawmakers and representatives of state and local governments are considering expanding the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act to make it difficult—and potentially impossible—to set such requirements for the states. One of the fundamental purposes of federal child welfare spending is to use the carrot of federal dollars to induce states to protect children in their care to a level that they just weren’t doing on their own. Although UMRA currently excludes funding conditions and entitlements, such as federal foster care funds, from its coverage, state and local government groups actually want foster care and the rest to be brought in UMRA’s scope. Doping abused and neglected children in foster care—and using Medicaid to pay for it. Another reason that “mandates” matter, and that changing UMRA is a bad, bad idea.