Smart Drugs, Attention Doping, and Screen Addicts: The Drug Attention Industrial Complex in Education

With this book, Keneth J. Saltman argues that drugs are at the center of the most significant transformations of schooling. Children are increasingly being drugged to compete on standardized tests, to increase their attention levels in school, and are being diagnosed with ADHD at exponentially increasing rates. Saltman describes the material stakes in what he calls the education drugs attention complex, namely: educational profiteering through the mutually supportive sales of drugs and testing products; drugs and digital screen technologies; drugs and trauma/resilience programs; and drugs and the school to prison pipeline. He shows how each of these examples are part of a vast interlocking drug and attention industry in which pharma and tech companies are commercializing and producing youth problems for profit and are targeting the most vulnerable young people. The book covers the prevalence of screen addiction, the misuse of hormone therapies for transgenders youth, anxiety and trauma medication, the connection between race and drugs, and in the final chapter offers critical, democratic, and practical solutions for educators and policy makers to tackle these issues.

Kenneth J. Saltman is Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, USA. He is the author of The Swindle of Innovative Educational Finance (2018) and The Politics of Education, 2nd edition (2018) and The Disaster of Resilience (Bloomsbury, 2023). He is a fellow of the National Educational Policy Center and a Fulbright Chair in Globalization and Culture.