“We’re going to have to get him on Ritalin,” the doctor said, watching my son toddle around his office.

The boy was being a boy, poking around with curiosity at knobs, handles and shiny objects. But instantly, the doctor concluded he was “hyperactive.”

Whether the good doctor, a friend, was joking, Mrs. Kirkwood and I never knew. But now, everyone knows more than a few doctors aren’t joking. With the all-too-willing permission of addled or lazy parents, they are doping our kids.

Between 1987-1996, a new study shows, the number of kids on psychiatric drugs has more than doubled.

The study, news reports say, considered 900,000 children. In 1987, about 2.5 percent of children and adolescents took some sort of medication like Ritalin or Adderall, which are used to control a mysterious and perhaps fictive illness known as attention deficit disorder.

By 1996, it was 6.2 percent. The demographic changed, with 10-19 year-olds receiving more drugs than 5-9 year-olds. The older kids take more serious psychiatric medications such as Paxil and Prozac.

Bemused because they can’t explain the increase, doctors wonder whether children are tested adequately before getting the dope. “You can’t do that evaluation,” one rightly told the Washington Post, “in a 5-10 minute office visit.”

The Post also quoted the lead researcher: “Other than zonking you, we don’t know that behavioral management by drug control is the way to learn to behave properly. If we are using drugs to control behavior, that doesn’t change the underlying problem.”

Exactly. Behavior, not genuine mental illness, is the main reason these drugs are used. Even conceding that some children need drugs, the number cannot have doubled in 15 years.

That means doctors, prodded by parents and school officials, the latter weary of unruly pupils they cannot chastise without inviting a lawsuit from the former, pass out pills like street-corner pushers. The kids are “hyperactive.” They have “anxiety.” They’re “depressed.”

They can’t just be bad, undisciplined, or incorrigible. Their parents can’t be clueless or lax. The problem must be “illness.” Get out the happy pills.

Problem is, no one knows the neurological damage these drugs do. As one doctor observed, “we’re doing these experiments more or less with our own children.”

Great idea. Your kid fidgets a little, the teacher complains, the doctor whips out the prescription pad, and eight years later … who knows? What happens when he stops the dope? Who knows?

Who cares?! For now, he’s quiet.

But don’t think that’s the only harm. Recall the young guns who shot up our schools; recall Columbine and Klebold and Harris, et. al. Many of them took psychiatric drugs. Did anyone notice?

Whatever. It’s time someone told the unvarnished truth. Most of the kids taking these drugs don’t need them. They aren’t “sick,” they’re brats. They aren’t “hyperactive,” they’re unruly. They aren’t “depressed,” they’re melancholy. They’re sullen.

The cause is not psychiatric illness, but everything from obesity to pimples to unrequited puppy love. They’re angry because they don’t get their way. Then parents surrender. They’re bored because they watch too much television and play too much Nintendo. They’re lonely, and bored and angry again, because Mom and Dad are out to lunch, and don’t know that love includes attention, discipline, boundaries and rules.

Kids don’t need good drugs. They need good parents.

R. Cort Kirkwood is managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Va. His e-mail address is: [email protected]