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Since the mid-1980s, employment has been identified as a critical outcome for youth with disabilities, particularly when the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation (OSERS) emphasized the importance of facilitating the transition from high school to work. In 1990, specific language on the transition from school to work was included in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), added to the 1997 IDEA Amendments, and recently modified in 2004 reauthorization. When students with disabilities leave high school, some will enter postsecondary educational institutions and some will enter the workforce. This chapter is about those students with mental retardation and developmental disabilities who plan to be employed once they exit the schools. With the passage of IDEA in 2004, an Individualized Education Program (IEP) team must implement by age 16 the type of coursework and experiences students will need to develop the basic skills for employment and other transition outcomes.

Sex offending behavior in persons with intellectual disabilities (ID) is a serious problem with significant consequences for the victims, offenders, and their social communities (Barron, Hassiots, & Banes, 2002; Nezu, Nezu, & Dudek, 1998). A growing awareness of such problems in people with ID, as well as heightened societal and cultural sensitivity to the occurrence of sex offenses, requires effective solutions with regard to assessment and treatment.

Ever since the discovery of antipsychotic drugs in the 1950s, pharmacotherapy has been common in people with mental retardation. Surveys differ greatly in reported prevalences, but most of the recent drug surveys within institutions have reported psychotropic drug rates between 30 and 40% (Rinck, 1998). Studies of adults living in community settings often report rates between 25 and 35% (Rinck, 1998). Prevalence of psychotropic medicines among individuals with autism (across the life span) is currently around 45% (Aman, Lam, & Collier-Crespin, 2003; Langworthy- Lam, Aman, & Van Bourgondien, 2002). It is clear that drug therapy is common among people with mental retardation and developmental disabilities, and hence workers interested in this field cannot afford to be uninformed about pharmacotherapy.

In what may be the last chaxpter written of my professional career, I may cause considerable discussion and debate because the topic of this chapter is a many-faceted and complex issue rife with controversy and strong opinion held by people with opposing viewpoints. Two aspects of this review are obvious: first, I can only cover some (Sprague, 1994) of the many aspects of ethical issues surrounding individual with developmental disabilities, and second, even the relatively few issues that are covered may bring about strong dissent from the readers because the spread of opinions about these issues is so vast. But now, having little to fear about promotion and salary reviews that do not exist for me any more in retirement, I will plunge ahead into the controversial fray.

Ethical situations are complex circumstances in which actors take one or another course of action upon having engaged in evaluative responses with respect to the anticipated consequences of those actions (Hayes, Adams, & Rydeen, 1994). So analyzed, ethical conduct comprised two phases, a first phase in which the anticipated consequences of alternative courses of action are compared with reference to standards of right and wrong, and a second phase in which the course of action leading to the consequences deemed right by that comparison is taken. From this perspective, the responses to future (i.e., absent) circumstances implicated in the first phase of such situations are not held to arise from within the responding organism, but are rather assumed to be coordinated with substitute stimulus functions having their sources in currently participating verbal events; whereas the action taken in the second phase is interpreted as an end point in an historical continuity of action, also implying the absence of agency in such events.