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 -- The University of Massachusetts at Amherst | _________,^-. Cannabis Reform Coalition ( | ) ,> S.A.O. Box #2 \|/ { 415 Student Union Building `-^-' ? ) UMASS, Amherst MA 01003 [v--d--t] at [twain.ucs.umass.edu] |____________ `--~ ; \_,-__/ * To find out about our on-line library, mail a message with the * pattern "{{{readme}}}" contained IN THE SUBJECT LINE. * You will be mailed instructions; your message will be otherwise ignored