The Epidemic That Wasn’t

[groovedaddy]

BALTIMORE — One sister is 14; the other is 9. They are a vibrant pair: the older girl is high-spirited but responsible, a solid student and a devoted helper at home; her sister loves to read and watch cooking shows, and she recently scored well above average on citywide standardized tests.

There would be nothing remarkable about these two happy, normal girls if it were not for their mother’s history. Yvette H., now 38, admits that she used cocaine (along with heroin and alcohol) while she was pregnant with each girl. “A drug addict,” she now says ruefully, “isn’t really concerned about the baby she’s carrying.”

When the use of crack cocaine became a nationwide epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s, there were widespread fears that prenatal exposure to the drug would produce a generation of severely damaged children. Newspapers carried headlines like “Cocaine: A Vicious Assault on a Child,” “Crack’s Toll Among Babies: A Joyless View” and “Studies: Future Bleak for Crack Babies.”

But now researchers are systematically following children who were exposed to cocaine before birth, and their findings suggest that the encouraging stories of Ms. H.’s daughters are anything but unusual. So far, these scientists say, the long-term effects of such exposure on children’s brain development and behavior appear relatively small.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/health/27coca.html?th&emc=th

[Warpy]

1. They whole "crack baby" hysteria was debunked over

a decade ago, at least in medical circles. Everything they attributed to the evil drug was found to be directly attributable to poverty and lackluster parenting by addicts, not the drug.

"Crack babies" born to mothers who had the wherewithal to get into treatment and succeed had a miserable few days after birth but went on to have completely normal development afterward.

The whole hysteria was just more racist garbage, IMO, to explain away the cost of poverty to the country's children and blame their often minority parents for causing it.

[groovedaddy]

2. And as a further justification for the "war on drugs." n.t