'Crack Babies' Talk Back

fruitfly

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Antwaun Garcia was a shy boy whose tattered clothes reeked of cat piss. Everyone knew his father peddled drugs and his mother smoked rock, so they called him a "crack baby."

It started in fourth grade when his teacher asked him to read aloud. Antwaun stammered, then went silent. "He can't read because he's a crack baby," jeered a classmate. In the cafeteria that day no one would sit near him. The kids pointed and chanted, "crack baby, crack baby." Antwaun sat sipping his milk and staring down at his tray. After that, the taunting never stopped. Unable to take it, Antwaun quit school and started hanging out at a local drug dealer's apartment, where at age nine he learned to cut cocaine and scoop it into little glass vials.

"Crack baby," he says. "Those two words almost cost me my education."

Antwaun finally returned to school and began learning to read a year later, after he was plucked from his parents' home and placed in foster care. Now 20, he's studying journalism at LaGuardia Community College in New York City and writing for Represent, a magazine for and by foster children. In a recent special issue he and other young writers, many of them born to crack addicts, took aim at a media myth built on wobbly, outdated science: crack babies. Their words are helping expose the myth and the damage it has done.

Crack hit the streets in 1984, and by 1987 the press had run more than 1,000 stories about it, many focusing on the plight of so-called crack babies. The handwringing over these children started in September 1985, when the media got hold of Dr. Ira Chasnoff's New England Journal of Medicine article suggesting that prenatal cocaine exposure could have a devastating effect on infants.

Only 23 cocaine-using women participated in the study, and Chasnoff warned in the report that more research was needed. But the media paid no heed. Within days of the first story, CBS News found a social worker who claimed that an 18-month-old crack-exposed baby she was treating would grow up to have "an IQ of perhaps fifty" and be "barely able to dress herself."

Soon, images of the crack epidemic's "tiniest victims" – scrawny, trembling infants – were flooding television screens. Stories about their bleak future abounded. One psychologist told The New York Times that crack was "interfering with the central core of what it is to be human." Charles Krauthammer, a columnist for the The Washington Post, wrote that crack babies were doomed to "a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority." The public braced for the day when this "biological underclass" would cripple our schools, fill our jails, and drain our social programs.

But the day never came. Crack babies, it turns out, were a media myth, not a medical reality. This is not to say that crack is harmless. Infants exposed to cocaine in the womb, including the crystallized version known as crack, weigh an average of 200 grams below normal at birth, according to a massive, ongoing National Institutes of Health study. "For a healthy, ten-pound Gerber baby this is no big deal," explains Barry Lester, the principal investigator. But it can make things worse for small, sickly infants.

Lester has also found that the IQs of cocaine-exposed 7-year-olds are four and a half points lower on average, and some researchers have documented other subtle problems. Perhaps more damaging than being exposed to cocaine itself is growing up with addicts, who are often incapable of providing a stable, nurturing home. But so-called crack babies are by no means ruined. Most fare far better, in fact, than children whose mothers drink heavily while pregnant.

Nevertheless, in the midst of the drug war hysteria, crack babies became an emblem of the havoc drugs wreak and a pretext for draconian drug laws. Hospitals began secretly testing pregnant women for cocaine, and jailing them or taking their children. Tens of thousands of kids were swept into foster care, where many languish to this day.

Represent magazine was founded at the height of the crack epidemic to give voice to the swelling ranks of children trapped in the foster care system. Its editors knew that many of their writers were born to addicts. But it wasn't until late last year, when a handful expressed interest in writing about how crack ravaged their families, that the picture snapped into focus.

"I remember hearing about crack babies and how they were doomed,'" says editor Kendra Hurley. "I suddenly realized these were those kids."

Hurley and her co-editor, Nora McCarthy, had worked with many of the writers for years, and had nudged and coddled most through the process of writing about agonizing personal experiences. But nothing compared to the shame their young scribes expressed when discussing their mothers' crack use. Even the most talented believed it had left them "slow," "retarded" or "damaged."

The editors decided to publish a special crack issue to help break the stigma and asked the writers to appear on the cover, under the headline 'CRACK BABIES' – ALL GROWN UP. Initially, only Antwaun agreed. He eventually convinced three others to join him. "I said, 'Why shouldn't we stand up and show our faces?'" he recalls. "We rose above the labels. I wanted to reach other kids who had been labeled and let them know it doesn't mean you can't succeed."

As it happens, when the crack issue went to press, a group of doctors and scientists was already lobbying The New York Times to drop terms like "crack baby" from its pages. The group included the majority of American researchers investigating the effects of prenatal cocaine exposure or drug addiction. They were spurred to action by the paper's coverage of a New Jersey couple found to be starving their four foster children in late 2003. For years the couple had explained the children's stunted growth to neighbors and friends by saying, among other things, that they were "crack babies." The Times not only failed to inform readers that crack babies don't exist, but reinforced the myth by reporting, without attribution, that "the youngest [of the children] was born a crack baby."

Assistant Managing Editor Allan Siegal refused to meet with the researchers, saying via e-mail that the paper simply couldn't open a dialogue with all the "advocacy groups who wish to influence terminology." After some haggling, he did agree to publish a short letter to the editor from the researchers. While the paper hasn't used "crack baby" in the last several months, it has referred to babies being "addicted" to crack, which, as the researchers told the editors, is scientifically inaccurate, since babies cannot be born addicted to cocaine.

The researchers later circulated a more general letter urging all media to drop the term "crack baby." But the phrase continues to turn up. Of the more than 100 news stories that have used it in the last year, some 30 were published after the letter was distributed in late February.

Represent's writers made a more resounding splash. National Public Radio and AP both featured them in stories on crack's legacy. Inspired by their words, the columnist E.R. Shipp called on New York Daily News readers to consider the damage the crack baby myth has done. A July Newsday op-ed made a similar plea, and also urged readers to avoid rushing to judgment on the growing number of babies being born to mothers who use methamphetamines.

Still, a number of recent "meth baby" stories echo the early crack baby coverage. A July AP article cautioned, for instance, that an "epidemic" of meth-exposed children in Iowa is stunting infants' growth, damaging their brains, and leaving them predisposed to delinquency. In May, one Fox News station warned that meth babies "could make the crack baby look like a walk in the nursery." Research is stacking up against such claims. But, then, scientific evidence isn't always enough to kill a good story.

Mariah Blake is an assistant editor at CJR.
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'Crack Babies' Talk Back
By Mariah Blake, Columbia Journalism Review.
Posted September 9, 2004.

In the midst of drug war hysteria, crack babies became an emblem of the havoc drugs wreak and a pretext for draconian drug laws. But crack babies, it turns out, were a media myth, not a medical reality.

Link
 
This is all full of shit. There's no such thing as "crack baby" syndrome...it's all Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, since most crackheads drink and smoke cigarettes also.
 
The crack baby epidemic created by the media in the 80's...not the article, sorry about the confusion.
 
The Times not only failed to inform readers that crack babies don't exist

Whoa, whoa, fucking whoa. Know what's more destructive than media-hype ammo for cruel schoolchildren? Denying that use of this substance is still a pregnancy danger in suggestion that problematic fetal development from such "doesn't exist".

Yes, (as noted), most relative intellectual difference between the cocaine exposed child and the norm is probably fault of associative upbringing - the household of the former child more statistically run by the kind of parent(s) who knowingly allowed crack into the mother's diet. Yet (as also noted) - immediate birth abnormalities are often apparent, and doctors do hold recognition of subtle, perhaps cognitive differences; not to be concretely blamed on the associative nurture.

I do understand that saying crack babies "don't exist" is less sensational a bit of misinformation than saying one exposed during pregnancy is destined to a life of drooling in a pan - but it's still a destructive stance. And what's this gut feeling based bullshit the author ends the article with; that methamphetamines probably aren't a danger to the developing fetus "either"? Looks like journalistic integrity is nil in either extreme.

~

Now a societal aside in recognizing crack as destructive force in any childs household:

Hospitals began secretly testing pregnant women for cocaine, and jailing them or taking their children. Tens of thousands of kids were swept into foster care, where many languish to this day.

A bit extreme when scaling the conviction to state action route, but on the right path. One of (if not the) greatest causal ills of modern society has to be in upbringing; children not having their most impressionable years crafted by love, attention and role models of responsibility. Unfortunately enough, current systems of foster care can't always supply the most substantial of the three - but they can assure a more reliable atmosphere for all else.

Yes, a single positive test leading to the taking of a mothers' newborn into state care is probably too extreme a benchmark to lead upon. Yet any case of confirmed, reinforced negligence should undoubtedly be met by such force. Cocaine has not been proven a hands down harmless subtance regarding development of the fetus. And realistically, it's difficult to find any solid justification to let a pregnant mother who knowingly puts her child at (considerable) developmental danger raise and 'care' for the same human being.
 
Movie?

Whoever stated that crack-babies are a myth is sorely misinformed. When a baby is born from a mother who is a regular crack user, it is to an extent also a crack user. The baby cries from withdrawals.....

There was an extremely informative movie about this, i think it was called Losing Isiah, I may be wrong. Does anyone know what movie i am talking about?

In the movie the child was abandoned by his crackwhore mother and was adopted by white middle-class parents. It details the learning disabilites and impairments the child has all though its life.
 
"Crack babies" the media in the mid-80's are the ones who were on the news as all deformed and looking like aliens. It was really fetal alcohol syndrom, combined with cigarette smoking. Read "Smoke and Mirrors", it's a book on the War on Drugs...they discuss this in depth. These people may have been real crack babies, but they weren't the ones the media was talking about.
 
This is one of those rare cases where I partially agree.

Yes the media has blown this out of proportion as they usually do, however no one will convince me that crack/meth/[insert drug name here] is harmless to the fetus and can possibly delay and deter normal development of the child later on in life.

I don't need any studies or IQ tests or whatever, this is simply common sense.

The general idea behind "crack baby myth" was to scare off people, to quit drugs while being pregnant, which IMO is not a bad idea. Of course it got abused and many people went to jail and lost their children due to the laws that changed.

However, don't we as a society have a resposibility to look out for the children ? If the parents are doing drugs during preganancy and possibly after the child is born, that is not the best option for the child upbringing, and we have a social responsibility to give that child the best possible environment we can (enter foster parents).
 
I think what is being said (or what I got from it), is that the predicted long-term deficits of these children just didn't pan out, in the way that fetal alcohol syndrome did. This isn't to say that the use of the drug while pregnant won't hurt the child, it will make it harder for them, but they won't necessarily be doomed for the rest of their life. I think it's interesting that one is discussed as an illness (fetal alcohol syndrome) while the other is more of a label (crack baby). The concern of the article seems to be more fo the effect of the label on the child, when that child might not otherwise be as affected by the use of the mother as previously thought.
 
There we go, right on the button. That's what I was trying to say, that this article isn't about the effects of crack on the kids but the cruel shit that happens in school.
 
Misleading. Again.

On the other hand, the cocaine-exposed children did not perform as well as their peers in a puzzle task that measured their visual-spatial skills, on tests of their general knowledge or, for boys, on tests of their arithmetic skills.

The researchers also found that the quality of the youngsters' home environment seemed to compensate for some of the negative effects of the early cocaine exposure, particularly for those placed in foster or adoptive care.

While 95 percent of caregivers for the comparison group were the biological parents, that was the case for only 55 percent of the cocaine-exposed children. Twenty-two percent of caregivers were adoptive or foster parents and the remaining 23 percent were relatives.

Adoptive and foster parents tended to be better educated and had a more stimulating home environment than did biological parents or relatives of cocaine-exposed children.

Children placed in such environments generally had IQ scores on par with their non-exposed peers, even though they were exposed to cocaine levels that were twice as high as those who remained with their biological mothers or other relatives, the report indicates. They were also less likely to have IQ scores lower than 70, or in the range of mental retardation.

This finding suggests that "early environmental intervention can prevent mental retardation for some cocaine-exposed infants," Singer and her team conclude.

All it takes is such a sensational title uninvestigated to propel ideas that cocaine damage "doesn't exist"
 
Whether crack directly ruins a child at birth may or not be true; It doesn't matter. Its still the truth that cocaine/crack use by adults deters "proper family upbringing" or whatever you want to call it. A single crack addicted mother is just not going to care for her kid as much as she would if she wasn't addicted.

Fuck crack
 
I don't think anyone is suggesting cocaine damage doesn't exist. I think the point of dispelling the "crack baby" myth is to prevent government-sponsored hysteria from destroying more families than drugs already have.

I highly, highly doubt PC vindication of a bullying term is worthy trade off for the petty and downright destructive misleading displayed here.
 
This is another case of the media picking up on a correlation and calling it cuasation. "Crack babies" can be poor and antisocial, but often their parents are also.

In my highschool I actually knew for a fact that two people had been born to crack smoking mothers/ One is 'smart' and one just scraped by, but now they both do coke. How weird is that?
 
Crazeee said:


I don't need any studies or IQ tests or whatever, this is simply common sense.

It used to be common sense that
-alcohol could be used on pregnant women to clam them
-special k was a good prescription drug for babies
-smoking cigs helped peoples health
-black people are generally stupid criminals

Common sense is simply the assumtions you make with imperfect info--experimental science and observation always have more meaning
 
yeah i could see the crack baby thing getting blown out of proportion but that shit has got to fuck a kid up.... such as addiction to crack before they are born...but whatever.... i sure as hell wouldnt let the mother of my kid smoke crack.. would you?
 
I know two people well that came from the womb of a crack smoking mother, and both are brilliant individuals. Smoking rock can lead to miscarrage, low birth weight, and more but it certainly does not cause birth defects or destroy IQ potential.

Do everyone involved a favor, don't smoke rock if your pregnant.
 
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