Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997 23:07:17 +0200 (MET DST)
Subject: `Crack Baby' Fears Were Unfounded
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs

The following information appeared in this past Tuesday's Washington 
Post. It explains that the "crack baby" scare was without scientific 
foundation. It was in fact propaganda by the U.S. government to scare 
citizens into supporting the U.S. "War On (Some) Drugs".

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           `Crack Baby' Fears May Have Been Unfounded

   Children of Cocaine-Abusing Mothers Are No Worse Off Than Others
                 in Urban Poverty, Study Says

                      By Susan FitzGerald
                 Special to The Washington Post
              Tuesday, September 16, 1997; Page Z10
                      The Washington Post 

Since 1989, researchers at Einstein hospital have been tracking the 
development of more than 200 poor inner-city children - half exposed to 
cocaine in the womb, half not. The researchers so far have turned up 
nothing to distinguish the cocaine-exposed children from their peers.

"The good news is that we don't see anything devastating," said Hallam 
Hurt, Einstein's chairman of neonatology who directs the government-
funded study, one of the largest and longest-running of its kind. "If 
there is a cocaine effect, it's not a tomahawk between the eyes."

These findings suggest that the culprit in slowed development is
not one single factor such as prenatal exposure to cocaine but
all the deleterious effects associated with poverty. 

Much of the early thinking on cocaine's effects on neurological
development grew more out of anecdotal reports than scientific studies.

But early studies attempting to pin down some of these things tended to 
involve too few babies or were so poorly designed that it was 
impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions. 

Still, the crack baby became a powerful symbol as the nation marched 
forward on its war against drugs.

"All this frenzy took place," said Donald Hutchings, a research
scientist at New York State Psychiatric Institute who spent his career 
studying the toxic effects of drugs on fetal development. "Everybody 
bought the story of the crack baby and that just snowballed and took on 
a life of its own."

Ira Chasnoff, a University of Illinois School of Medicine researcher who 
has been studying crack babies since the 1980s, will be reporting at the 
conference on a study of about 170 children, half of whose mothers used 
cocaine and other drugs during pregnancy. He said that at age 6 the 
drug-exposed children did not differ in intelligence from children who 
were not exposed. 

In the Philadelphia study, researchers check their 200 children every 
six months. All the children come from poor inner-city neighborhoods 
with similar family backgrounds. Researchers assess their general 
development, language ability, attention and intelligence. The average 
IQ of the cocaine-exposed children at 4 years of age was 79. For 
children in the control group, it was virtually the same: an average 
of 81.9. The average IQ in the United States ranges from 90 to 109.
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