People get a little more easygoing, a little more tolerant, a little more forgiving, a little less inclined to snap when you dawdle a half-second past when the light turns green. There is time and a dare to replicate the smile in the sky. There is anticipation of something good around the corner.

That’s my theory of summer, unaided by science of any kind. But something’s been messing up that theory lately, especially the part that has to do with anticipation and forgiveness.

On my husband’s desk in his man-cave is a framed photo about a dozen years old now. It jostles for space with photos of grandbabies, CDs and stuff. It is a lovely picture, taken by Gary, who lived across the street from us. It shows a doe and another, probably its fawn, grazing in our front yard on a sunny day.

Cute was what we thought when we opened that email. Thomas Kinkade couldn’t get any sweeter scene than this, living within a city, to have deer at the doorstep. We would catch a rare glimpse of deer in the backyard and scramble for a camera. We would stop and gape at deer crossing our street and ask in wonder: Did you see that?

Enthralled is now out of the question. Truth is, when I see a round-eyed roamer now, I wish not for a camera but a catapult.

You know what I said about anticipation? Nothing comes closer to replicating the smile in the sky than flowering plants. I anticipate summer just for the tiny patch of flowers I manage to coax out of the ground.

I weed. I water. I weed. I water. I trip over tangled water hoses and hope the biting insects have no acquaintance with any malady with Nile or Lyme in its name.

Then triumph of triumphs, I see the beginnings of something good. Stems shoot up with buds at the top of them. I begin to develop favorites, the overachievers. It’s an unconscious thing, really. An incentive system kicks in: First plant to flower gets an extra serving of feed — to encourage the stragglers to get with it.

But three years straight I have tended lilies and hostas and not seen one single bud open up to a flower.

If you think kids have an attitude, you have to meet the deer in my neck of the woods. They come in ones and twos and threes, sometimes a whole family together. One day last summer I almost hit the curb, mesmerized by a deer hoofing it on Garman Road at dusk. Was there a deer confab or something at Stan Hywet Hall?

I drove up my driveway on a recent afternoon, and there was this magnificent creature in the flower bed. It raised its head and stared at the source of the disturbance.

I honked; it stared some more and went back to nibbling: Yes, I am eating your plants, so sue me!

We are in The Far Side territory. Skinny stems poked up where buds should have been, their nudity a reminder of wasted labor.

Put down human hair around the beds, said a friend. How much hair? I don’t have a whole lot to spare, and it takes more courage than I have to go a-begging for hair at barber shops and salons.

The smell of dried blood keeps them away, said a well-meaning guy at a garden store. He pointed me to a shelf lined with products to ward off creatures great and small. But the way I was feeling, Mr. Deer himself had to donate the blood.

An egg concoction aged a few days works very well, said a helpful shopper. I know what a rotten egg smells like. I prefer to live amicably with my neighbors.

But if rotten eggs work, why not garlic? The stuff is supposed to keep even ghosts at bay, no? With a great deal of malice aforethought, I have invested in large quantities of garlic powder — and cayenne pepper, for good measure. Mix ’em up and serve liberally to each plant. The first time, I applied the mix, by the spoonful, the breeze turned, and I got a faceful of my medicine. The second time, it poured down rain within the hour.

Bambi’s revenge, d’you think?

But on Sunday evening, I saw four flowers fully open (I counted), promising a summer of yellow bliss. But it’s a long season, and I know better than to declare victory over God’s lovely roaming creatures.

Ofobike is the Beacon Journal chief editorial writer. She can be reached at 330-996-3513 or by email at lofobike@thebeaconjournal.com.

She was a teacher at Buchtel High School, she said, team-teaching a class of 10th-graders in American studies. The class was working on a special project. An example of the focus on innovative styles of teaching (some might say “holistic”), this project was designed to pull together lessons in English, history, current affairs, volunteering, community engagement, fundraising and all the soft skills necessary to raise awareness and generate action on a specific topic.

The teachers, Nelson and Drew Hoisington, and the class were exploring the Holocaust and a nearly 70-year-old promise: “Never again.” The class planned to invite a survivor of the Holocaust and a survivor of the atrocities in Darfur. They were planning an evening program May 23, with presentations by the guests.

The students wanted to send the word out that genocide is not history, that people still are dying in Darfur and around the world because of who they are and that there is a promise to keep: “Never again.” Nelson wanted her students to understand they can choose to make a difference. They set a goal to raise a minimum of $1,000 that would go to the Darfur Dream Team Sister Schools program, which supports schools for children in refugee camps in neighboring Chad.

But May 23 was just a few weeks away, and there was much work to be done. There was the challenge of locating survivors who would be able to spend time with students in Akron. There were questions of transportation and accommodation and honoraria. Teachers and students had to make sure their guests would not be addressing a near-empty hall. And, to be a persuasive voice for the voiceless in Darfur, the 10th-graders of Buchtel had to be up on their research.

Quite an ambitious project to pull off. But the pieces started falling into place. I could tell Nelson’s excitement by the number of exclamation points in subsequent emails.

A Holocaust and a Darfuri survivor were coming: Leo Silberman, president of the Kol Israel Foundation of Cleveland, and El-Fadel Arbab of Fur Cultural Revival, a shoestring Darfuri community center in Portland, Maine. The students were working hard, putting together their oral and poster presentations and making fundraising products and fliers. A student had suggested a winning name for the project. They were calling it The Promise Project.

The project grew legs. Math teacher Sarah Mizak helped students with calculations for making bracelets for fundraising. Linda Dillon and her class of juniors and seniors in the Teacher Academy, a program that trains students interested in teaching, got involved, too. The Buchtel PTA and Akron International Friendship stepped up to sponsor the event. Other volunteers lent services, among them Damon L. Blue and David E. Clayton, hosts for Arbab, and videographer Fred Barrett. From a grant that enables teachers to explore such approaches to teaching, the project leaders managed to offer the two presenters a small honorarium.

The evening of May 23, Kristy Nelson was the picture of a proud parent. A good-sized crowd was in attendance. Teenagers, children and adults listened intently to stories of survival they could barely imagine. Her students were on stage in the spacious new auditorium helping to introduce the project and guests, manning poster stations in the gymnasium, connecting history to present circumstances, eager to show how much they had learned about a corner of Sudan worlds away from their own.

What I saw and heard that evening keep rattling around in my head.

I saw teaching that engages.

Nelson and her team demonstrated as well as anyone that how we become knowledgeable enough about our world to act is not by divorcing one subject — history or math or language arts — from another but by melding them in the same way that life melds them. (“Holistic” may be the appropriate term, after all.) There are no divisions, for example, between geography, race, religion and politics in the way tragedy has unfolded in Darfur. A student nattily dressed in a spotless shirt and tie told me he learned about the geographic aspect of the Darfur situation, the question of land resources and the decision by the Sudanese government to deal with the issue militarily.

But this holistic approach takes an enormous amount of time and energy — not to mention vision and grit — to plan and to pull together. Evident in this case, it also takes a “village” effort inside and outside the school system.

It was wonderful to see how well it all worked out. But in an educational system increasingly concerned with quick results, cheaply funded, it is fair to wonder how long teachers and students can afford the luxury of time to plan and engage.

I saw students who were engaging. One rap against “young people these days” is that they are too loud, too disrespectful, overindulged and care too little about anything beyond their noses.

But what I heard bore no resemblance to “young people these days.” They were angered by injustice. They questioned the silence of governments in the face of suffering. They recognized the advantages of their own lives. They sought to wake up their friends and neighbors to a promise unkept. They raised a little over $1,200 for the Dream Team Sister Schools.

What I saw were young people trying to hold up their end of a promise made on their behalf, a promise they want to keep: Never again. Anywhere.

Ofobike is the Beacon Journal chief editorial writer. She can be reached at 330-996-3513 or by email at lofobike@thebeaconjournal.com.

The black helicopters are circling. The federal government is orchestrating a sneak attack to take away our liberties, and if we don’t roll out the heavy artillery to halt this subversion in its tracks, we lose our sovereignty. The campaign is on in state capitols, Ohio included, and in Congress to stop the assault … by the federal Department of Education.

And what is the vehicle of this federal subversion? The Common Core State Standards initiative.

Yes, now at the center of a gathering political storm is the reform program that the bipartisan National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State Schools Officers have worked on for at least seven years to beef up curriculum content and testing.

Granted, the rhetoric to save our education freedom hasn’t reached the fever pitch that health-care reform evokes (nothing ever will, I suspect), but it is early yet, and the conservative and tea-party groups leading the charge are just warming up, expressing their grave concerns about a federal takeover of parental control, state control, local control, data control, mind control ….

John Becker, for one, is quite unhappy. The Columbus Dispatch reported last week the state lawmaker is concerned “that source material under Common Core could require reading Environmental Protection Agency manuals, Greenpeace writings and allow for ‘liberal, socialist indoctrination of our children.’ ”

Opponents of the Common Core have swung into action. What they see are bureaucrats and Big Business in cahoots to dumb down elementary and secondary education and make zombies of students with ceaseless testing. As part evidence of the feds trying to slip one past the citizenry, they lament that parents are mostly unaware of the changes in store.

The lack of awareness I can believe. Most people have enough on their plates with their own problems as it is. To expect them to monitor capitol agendas may be asking too much. But a federal agenda to take over education?

First, the Common Core did not begin with the federal government or with President Obama and Arne Duncan, his education secretary. The drive to raise content standards and develop more accurate ways of assessing what students know and can do began in the mid-2000s with Republican and Democratic governors seeking best practices in education. It evolved in response to business leaders’ complaints about the declining quality of American schools and the graduates they produce. It also was an effort to address comparisons that indicate American students perform at academic levels below many of their foreign counterparts.

Ultimately, the Common Core is supposed to produce students who graduate from high school equipped to make it in college or a career. How subversive is that? The idea of the Common Core program is to ensure that students — no matter where in this country they study — receive a common base of knowledge and skills of a quality that can be vouched for anywhere in the country (and in the world, for that matter). If that is “nationalizing” education, I am all for it. In a highly mobile world, the education you get in Akron or Mogadore better match the standards in play in Boston, Helsinki or Shanghai.

Also, Ohio was not coerced into signing up for the Common Core, having been an early participant in the reform process from the start and a member of the consortium of more than 20 states, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, that is developing the assessments for the program.

The Obama administration has pumped millions of dollars to help implement the program. It favored the standards in making Race to the Top grants — rightly so, in my view, as the effort coincides with its educational priorities. Participation in the Common Core and in the grant competition is optional. The State Board of Education voted in 2010 to implement the program starting in 2014.

Are there serious issues to be raised about the Common Core? Plenty. Begin with the intense debate we have had over the fairness and frequency of standardized testing since No Child Left Behind went into effect. Then move to the training and technical challenges of scaling up the hardware for exclusively online testing, which is the way of the future.

The response to these real challenges is to seek solutions that enhance the program and its goals, not use a false pretext of federal interference to kill it. State Rep. Gerald Stebelton, the Republican chair of the Ohio House Education Committee, has been forthright he will resist, “kicking and screaming,” any effort to rescind the Common Core. I couldn’t agree more with him.

Ofobike is the Beacon Journal chief editorial writer. She can be reached at 330-996-3513 or be email at lofobike@thebeaconjournal.com.

In effect, what we wind up with in terms of health-care policies depends on the strength and relevance of research on the outcomes of existing policies. It is little wonder then that a research project in Oregon is attracting so much attention with regard to the debate on Medicaid expansion here and across the country.

Oregon several years ago sharply cut back its Medicaid program. Then it discovered in 2008 that it had enough money to cover 10,000 more people. Some 90,000 applied, so the state picked 10,000 by lottery. It also initiated a long-term study to track and compare health-care usage and outcomes for the lottery winners and those who remained uninsured. By force of circumstance, the Oregon Health Study thus became a national first — a large-scale, randomized controlled test of what impact Medicaid access has on recipients.

The first survey report was released last August. The newly insured on Medicaid reported themselves healthier. They were more likely to have and visit a regular doctor. They also were more likely to get cholesterol screening and mammograms.

As interesting — and hardly a surprise with health-care expenses reduced — the newly insured felt more financially secure, were less likely to borrow money or skip paying medical and other bills.

Last week, the findings from the second year of tracking were released. Coming as it does in the heat of national debate on Medicaid expansion, the Oregon study likely will receive more than passing reference in the months ahead.

The second set of findings reinforced the first-year findings. People felt healthier. The financial advantages to beneficiaries also appeared stronger: Having insurance practically eliminated catastrophic medical expenses and reduced financial stresses, such as borrowing for or evading medical payments, by more than 50 percent. Observed rates of depression declined by 30 percent.

Also, the use of health services went up — more doctor visits, prescriptions, hospitalizations and preventive services. The probability increased that beneficiaries would get cholesterol and mammogram screenings and diagnosis of depression and diabetes. All came at added cost of about 35 percent.

What the study did not find are significant differences in chronic conditions such as hypertension and high cholesterol rates between the insured group and uninsured control group.

The Oregon study adds to the body of hard data on the place of Medicaid as the nation struggles to provide affordable health insurance and high-quality care to as many citizens as possible. For one, screenings and diagnoses of potentially serious chronic conditions went up, suggesting the message of preventive care has gotten through. Whether the care after diagnosis is effective is a different question.

The lack of difference in hypertension and cholesterol rates between the Medicaid and control groups thus raises intriguing questions: Would there be a significant difference if hypertensive Medicaid patients were compared to privately insured hypertensive patients? Could it be that the quality of care and education about certain chronic diseases, hypertension in this case, is not as effective as it should be?

Millions of Americans are covered by Medicaid. Millions more will be depending on decisions in state capitols across the country. Only the second year in what will be a lengthy study, the Oregon experiment so far shows that given access, people do seek care in the appropriate settings and experience positive outcomes. It suggests some impacts are more immediate (financial security and reduced depression, for example), while other positive outcomes will require rethinking the way care is delivered. The reminder is that a turnaround in public health will not come overnight or be without cost.

Ofobike is the Beacon Journal chief editorial writer. She can be reached at 330-996-3513 or by email at lofobike@thebeaconjournal.com.

If the recent dustup over Medicaid expansion in the Ohio Statehouse is anything to go by, three years have not dulled the passions stirred by health reform. As controversies go, the Medicaid debate has provided a useful reminder that “health reform,” whether federal- or state-inspired, is far from a settled issue.

Architects of the Affordable Care Act believe they put together policy machinery whose parts must hum together if we ever are to have a system that delivers better medicine and spends less, much less, of the national wealth on health care. But even they don’t argue their work represents the last word on efficiency. Neither have they promised an overnight miracle in lower spending.

Indeed, for sobering perspective that the Affordable Care Act amounts to just the beginning of hard choices ahead, an analysis of health-spending trends released Monday by the Kaiser Family Foundation suggests that if history holds true, spending most likely will resume a more rapid climb as the economy grows stronger.

From 2008 to 2012, spending on health care grew at the lowest rate in about 50 years, at 4.2 percent a year on average, compared to 8.8 percent a year in 2001-2003. But the Kaiser analysis indicates that 77 percent of the sharp decline in growth can be attributed to a weak economy during the past several years, primarily the Great Recession and unusually low inflation.

A combination of ongoing health-policy reforms (for example, increased consumer cost-sharing, reduced payments to providers and a better managed-care system) in Medicare and Medicaid as well as in the private system account for the remaining 23 percent. The analysts also observe that historically, trends in health spending tend to lag economic changes by about six years.

Besides the central mandates, the Affordable Care Act applies a host of pilot programs, mandates and incentives, with the goal to accelerate those features that help to drive down spending. But put together the analysts’ conclusions, and the notion recedes that the legislation, at least in its early years, will sufficiently “bend the curve” on spending. In fact it sounds like we have yet to hit the rough patch on the road to a more economically sustainable health system. A system that does not consume nearly 20 percent of the national income. One that does not leave about 50 million citizens in the cold. One that offers better outcomes for everybody.

Last week brought a new report recommending ways to kick up the effort to hold down health spending. Call the authors the Gang of Four for health reform, as Washington appears to need gangs that don’t mind going out on a limb. They are Tom Daschle, a Democrat who used to be the majority leader of the Senate; Pete Domenici, a Republican who used to be chairman of the Senate Budget Committee; Bill Frist, a Republican who was majority leader of the Senate; and Alice Rivlin, an economist who was a founding director of the Congressional Budget Office.

Together, they lead the Health Care Cost Containment Initiative of the Bipartisan Policy Center. They hope to launch a “respectful dialogue” around recommendations they hope break the pattern of “disjointed efforts” that have led to the false suggestion that “we must choose between investments in health care and fiscal health.” The report, “A Bipartisan Rx for Patient-Centered Care and System-Wide Cost Containment,” can be accessed at the center’s website, bipartisanpolicy.org.

The reality that we have barely started fixing the creaky system raises some troubling questions: What does the bitter residue of the recent effort at systemwide reform bode for continuing the discussion? Are we capable anymore of “reasoned negotiation” and respectful dialogue in health care?

Ofobike is the Beacon Journal chief editorial writer. She can be reached at 330-996-3513 or by email at lofobike@thebeaconjournal.com.

Granted, the state budget for 2014 and 2015 is a long way from complete, but whether Ohio ends up with a funding system that matches the Statehouse rhetoric about all-around success remains as uncertain as it has been in the past four years.

The continuing numbers game is deeply disappointing in its familiarity. But there is something else only slightly less disappointing in the way the budget-making is shaping up.

Both Kasich and House leaders have played an expectations game, building up anticipation that this time around, things will be different; that they will put schools on firmer footing, providing them adequate means to shine or be hammered for failure.

A newly elected Gov. Kasich in 2011 summarily dumped his predecessor’s funding plan as worthless, suggesting a new model would soon be forthcoming. Meanwhile, a temporary “bridge formula” kept schools in operation. A year passed with no new model in sight. As StateImpact Ohio reported, Rob Nichols, the governor’s spokesman, offered to share some ideas “once we have it right.” Ron Amstutz, chairman of the House Finance and Appropriations Committee and a veteran of a few school-funding battles, interpreted the official-speak at the time: “I think they have discovered that this is not something they can move on as quickly as they had hoped.”

True enough — and a point legislators hope you will keep in mind. As Gerald Stebelton, who heads the House Education Committee, explained last week, it is “really, really difficult” to craft a single formula “when you have 612 school districts and so many different demographics.”

True again, but who said it was going to be easy? We have been at this since 1997.

The Kasich replacement model eventually arrived last month. A good thing is well worth the wait, the saying goes. Fair enough. The trouble is, few people agree the Achievement Everywhere plan got it right, after all.

The House Republican leaders certainly didn’t. They just neutered that long-awaited plan.

For one, the Kasich plan practically wished away a central issue that has driven litigation and Ohio school-budget policies since 1991: How much does it cost to educate a typical student in Ohio and what share of it should be the state’s responsibility?

The response from the Kasich team? “We are not attempting to define, or even propose that we can know, as a state, the correct spending amount that ensures every student in every district will receive just the right amount of teaching and learning for success upon leaving our elementary and secondary schools. …”

But as a state, we do expect every district to achieve a level of success with every student. We do expect from every student the right amount of learning to succeed upon leaving our schools. We are scoring districts for success on performance indicators, achievement gaps and such. We set penalties for lack of success. We demand accountability, threatening schools with closings and educators with firings. Do we do all these without knowing, or attempting to know, and pay for the minimum districts require to achieve the results?

For their part in the expectations game, leaders of the House signaled last year the funding system is fixable. In the spring and summer, with the governor’s plan still a mystery, Amstutz’s committee held a series of meetings and hearings in Columbus and around the state “to promote a shared understanding of the basics of school funding.”

An admirable endeavor, no doubt, that refreshed memories about the many false starts during the past 15 years in funding reform. Still, with all that understanding, the House delivered a plan last week that harks back to a different school-funding basic in Ohio: It is one thing to reach a fair estimate of what schools need to succeed, and quite another to pay for it.

Ofobike is the Beacon Journal chief editorial writer. She can be reached at 330-996-3513 or by email at lofobike@thebeaconjournal.com.

March marked another 10th anniversary, the opening of another hell hole of violence and human suffering.

In Darfur, in the western region of the vast and war-hardened Sudan, Arab militias with military backing from the Arab-dominated central government took on non-Arab rebel forces in a scorched-earth struggle for land and power.

In one of the poorest regions of the world, a campaign of burning by the Janjaweed, the government-enabled militia, destroyed farmlands and whole villages at a time. Year after year, hundreds of thousands of villagers lost their lands and possessions.

Those who could escaped into neighboring Chad. The majority of the dispossessed were left landless and destitute in their homeland. Tens of thousands of others lost life itself. International aid agencies raised the alarm: a genocide in progress.

In 2008, the International Criminal Court accused Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In 2009, the court issued a warrant for Bashir’s arrest, its first such warrant for a sitting head of state. The court in 2010 issued a second arrest warrant, charging Bashir with genocide.

Ten years on, the casualty estimates put Darfur’s dead from the war at 300,000. Nearly 1.5 million remain internally displaced in refugee camps. Aid agencies and the United Nations, which supports a joint peacekeeping force with the African Union in the region, say the violence that captured the attention of the world is greatly diminished, though the conflict is far from over.

Peace in Darfur is still elusive. Conflicts among the rebel forces and the Arab militias have undercut efforts at a negotiated peace. And President al-Bashir goes about the business of being president without any apparent fear of arrest and trial.

In the decade since 2003, Darfur has lost its place in front-page headlines, overshadowed by other tragedies with the force of immediacy: an earthquake in Haiti; a tsunami in Japan; fires, floods and landslides; droughts and famine. Syria is tottering in a grinding civil war that is threatening a catastrophe of dead and displaced. In Iraq and Afghanistan, bombs are still ripping apart the innocent.

If we didn’t forget some things, if the raw emotions provoked by certain events and experiences did not recede over time, many of us would run a good risk of losing our minds over time. Forgetfulness offers some cover. It offers some emotional distance from the waves of natural and man-made disasters that wash over us in the course of a year … a decade …a lifetime.

But forgetfulness can also give plain evil a pass. In the past few years, I admit, Darfur has mainly slipped my mind into that zone of forgetfulness.

Refugee camps with a million-and-a-half souls don’t simply melt away. Three hundred thousand dead still whisper to the conscience: What does it mean to swear: “Never again”?

The state of Qatar brokered a peace agreement between the Bashir government and one of the Dafuri rebel groups in 2011. In a hopeful sign for Darfur’s displaced population, Qatar hosted a conference of donors this week in Doha, the capital, the purpose to build a fund for reconstruction and development to move Darfur’s battered population toward some semblance of normal life.

According to the conference reports, Qatar, among the wealthiest of the Gulf states, has pledged to contribute $500 million toward a multiyear development project to build roads, water facilities and other infrastructure that would help wean Darfur off food and other emergency assistance. For their part, Britain has promised $100 million over a three-year period to Sudan, half of the funds to be used in Darfur to improve agriculture and work training, and the European Union would chip in $35 million.

Thank heavens that in the face of so much human suffering, with aid agencies straining to finance critical humanitarian efforts, Darfur is not entirely off the international radar.

Ofobike is the Beacon Journal chief editorial writer. She can be reached at 330-996-3513 or by email at lofobike@thebeaconjournal.com.

As I learned, the chemical concoctions have nothing at all to do with baths and all to do with the search for novel ways to reach nirvana.

Of course, we don’t own the search for perpetual bliss here in the United States, but the billions of dollars we spend each year as a nation treating drug addictions and fighting drug abuse (not to mention the decades of a shooting war on drugs beyond our borders) indicate clearly enough that the drug culture is extensive and nothing if not resilient. It is always several steps ahead of the best efforts to contain it, with potent new products, designer or not, promising faster relief or higher highs. Bath salts. Meth. Crack. Cocaine. Ecstasy. Heroin. …

The exasperated complaint of many who have become disillusioned by an obviously unwinnable war is that if only Americans could control the insatiable demand for brain-distorting drugs inside the country, there would be no need for the lucrative trade. Or for a war.

Yes, if only. But how to subvert the demand? Therein lies the problem.

Sit through an evening of television ads, and you begin to realize something. Follow the numbing succession of ads for pharmaceutical products and you have to ask: How can we not believe there is a drug for every condition, a cure for every pain — physical and otherwise? How can our children and teenagers not grow up expecting a remedy for anything even remotely uncomfortable?

Adults and children alike, we seem primed for a drug culture, the legal stuff no less than the illegal. From pimples to low testosterone, from vitamin deficiencies to overactive bladders, there is a pharmaceutical something that offers swift relief.

There are few of us, I am sure, who haven’t said a silent thank-you at one time or another on learning there is a medication, over the counter or by prescription, for some bothersome ailment or other. But the question is whether such ease of access, quite apart from whatever predispositions people may have, encourages a frame of mind that makes it that much easier to search for relief beyond legal offerings. To put it another way, how long a step is it from a culture of legal drugs to a culture of illegal drugs?

An article in the New York Times on Monday raised anew fears that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD, is overdiagnosed and overtreated. Controversy over the accuracy of ADHD diagnosis and treatments is not new by any means. But striking about the article, based on new data from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, is the finding that the rate of diagnosis for children ages 4 through 17 has risen 53 percent in the past decade. Among children of high-school age, 19 percent of boys and 10 percent of girls have been given an ADHD diagnosis at some point. About one in 10 boys in high school is on ADHD medication.

Characterized by hyperactivity, loss of concentration and uncontrolled behavior, the disorder typically is treated with powerful prescription stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall, medications that help accurately diagnosed patients achieve focus and balance. Sales of ADHD stimulants rose from $4 billion in 2007 to $9 billion in 2012.

The concern about the rising rate of diagnosis is that a significant percentage of children are being diagnosed improperly and prescribed medications that can promote dependency and abuse, the pressure on doctors to prescribe applied by parents and schools.

Prescription abuse and addictions among teenagers is a growing problem, which makes an observation such as the following from the article a loud wake-up call: “Because the pills can vastly improve focus and drive among those with perhaps only traces of the disorder, an ADHD diagnosis has become a popular shortcut to better grades, some experts said, with many students disregarding the medication’s health risks.”

It is a scary thought that in trying to help young children and teenagers achieve some level of normalcy, a reflex for pharmaceutical fixes may be putting tens of thousands of them on a track to dependency and abuse. For them, prescription stimulants take a place alongside bath salts, Ecstasy and whatever else promises to soften the sharp edges of life.

Ofobike is the Beacon Journal chief editorial writer. She can be reached at 330-996-3513 or by email at lofobike@thebeaconjournal.com.