From: [v--d--t] at [twain.ucs.umass.edu] (Sol Lightman)
Newsgroups: alt.drugs,talk.politics.drugs
Subject: Re: What about Crack Babies?
Date: 10 Dec 1993 21:24:53 GMT
Using an as yet undetermined appendage Dale M. Greer ([g--e--r] at [utdallas.edu]) wrote:
]My question, then, is this: if you are for the legalization of all drugs,
]what is your answer to the question "What about crack babies?"
What about them... in fact.... What ``crack babies''?
--------
"Untruths, unreliable data create obstacles in war on drugs."
From PITCH: Kansas City's News and Arts Weekly (Nov 27-Dec 3, 1991):
by Richard Lawrence Miller
[Secret #6]: THE PERCENTAGE OF CRACK BABIES BORN AT ANY GIVEN HOSPITAL IS
APPROXIMATELY ZERO.
While continually heckling me at a public presentation, a medical man
finally shouted in fury, "You're saying all the crack babies coming into my
emergency room since 1976 are my imagination!" I asked if he agreed that
crack first appeared around 1986, and the medical man nodded. "Then," i
went on, "the first ten years you observed crack babies it was your
imagination, because the substance didn't exist." The medical man looked
embarassed and shut up.
Drug warriors often claim 375,000 crack babies are born annually in the
United States, each one with developmental deficits costing $500,000 to $1
million in medical care. That claim can be tested in several ways.
First we can check if neonatal units are indeed expending $375 trillion
per year on crack babies. The latest published figures for national health
expenditures are from 1987, contained in the "Statistical Abstract of the
United States 1990". The grand total by consumers, government, and
philanthropies for all health purposes (including hospital care, nursing
homes, physician office calls, prescriptions, medical research, and
hospital building construction) was $500 billion. Costs for all hospital
care were $195 billion. Crack baby expenditures cited by drug warriors are
2,000 times greater than the total sum spent for *all* care of all
persons in all hospitals.
Second, we can extrapolate from drug use patterns. Drug warriors claim
that a single use of crack devastates a fetus, but this claim is
incorrect. The claim is also sad because it encourages abortion among
women desiring pregnancy. To cause developmental damage in a fetus, a
pregnant woman must abuse crack in the way that hospitalized alcoholics
abuse alcohol. Studies of cocaine users find that 2.5 percent to 10
percent abuse the drug -- in all varieties. Given four million live births
annually in the United States, 375,000 crack babies born is about 9.4
percent. To get that many crack babies, every pregnant woman in the United
States must be on cocaine.
In reality, few women are using cocaine when they become pregnant, and
almost all of those who are users will stop upon learning they are
pregnant. The percentage of crack users among women of childbearing
age -- let alone pregnant -- is so small that the federal government is
unable to make an estimate (National Institute on Drug Abuse, National
Household Survey on Drug Abuse: Population Estimates 1990).
Yet another way to determine the number of crack babies is to phone
hospitals and ask them. St. Luke's reports 0 percent. Research, 0 percent.
Baptist, 0 percent. KU Med Center, 0 percent. That doesn't mean they
never see a crack baby, but the number is so small as to be virtually
unnoticeable. [Typist's Note: All names above are hospitals in Kansas City,
Missouri, for those of you who aren't Missourians.]
Around Kansas City people repeatedly tell me that 15 percent of infants
born at Truman Medical Center are crack babies. That story is wrong.
Truman does not monitor each mother and newborn for cocaine, so no figure
exists. A one-month survey in 1989 found that 15 percent of mothers giving
birth at Truman showed exposure to cocaine, not that their infants were
crippled by crack or any other form of cocaine. Even so, 15 percent
exposure is far higher than would be expected from a general population.
And in fact, unlike many hospitals, Truman solicits pregnant women from
drug abuse treatment programs. Thus Truman neonatal statistics do not
reflect experience in the general population. Also, among low-income
pregnant women -- exactly the maternity clientele in which Truman
specializes -- a false rumor circulates that cocaine reduces time spent in
labor. "Cocaine-exposed" infants may be from mothers using cocaine for
what they believe is medication rather than recreation.
In hospitals serving affluent women who can buy enough cocaine to wreck
fetal development, the percentage of crack babies should be higher than in
hospitals serving impoverished women. The opposite is reported. We should
ask whether cocaine is being blamed for medical problems caused by
poverty. Cocaine was available for a century before anyone first noticed
a problem among pregnant women in the 1980s. In 1989 analysts examining
files of the Society of Pediatric Research discovered that in 81 percent of
reports claiming fetal damage from cocaine, medical personnel failed to
determine if the pregnant woman actually used cocaine.
"The scientific world is in the midst of correcting itself," declares
Nancy Day, associate professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at the
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. "There will never be this
horde of crack-crazed babies affecting the school system. We are not
finding the birth defects that earlier studies have reported."
........ and another drug war myth bites the dust ........
Brian
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