There was another warning about cocaine today.
Crack now has spread to almost every American city.
It is a problem in Houston, Philadelphia, Kansas City,
Tucson and Sacramento.
In the 1980s, the media sounded the alarm that a new drug - crack cocaine - was taking over American cities
and that it had an especially devastating effect on pregnant women and their newborns.
A new study says that babies born to women who use cocaine during pregnancy
are three times as likely to be born with birth defects.
They tend to be what we call jittery.
They are at very, very high risk for cerebral palsy, mental retardation.
They are prone to hypertension, strokes and sudden infant death syndrome.
These children, who are the most expensive babies ever born in America,
are going to overwhelm every social service delivery system
that they come in contact with throughout the rest of their lives.
Drugs take away the dream from every child's heart,
and replace it with a nightmare.
But where these infants really doomed?
Decades later, what is the true legacy of the crack baby era?
In the early 1980s, Dr. Ira Chasnoff,
a young researcher at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago,
decided to study what he saw as a worrisome trend among his pregnant patients who had used cocaine.
Women were coming in and their babies were looking different when they were born.
They had higher rates of prematurity.
And they had higher rates of newborn seizures and other complications.
A lot of the babies exposed to cocaine, are quite small.
We think that that’s related to the use of the drug during pregnancy.
We had seen the effects of alcohol, and other substances, on children
so we were certainly open to the idea that this was a problem.
Cocaine was an epidemic. I think that it was
something that the media, I mean, it became an exciting thing to talk about.
We call our broadcast “48 Hours on Crack Street.”
Soon after our paper was published, within days we were getting calls from
media all over the country and started hearing the term crack babies.
Spotlight Tonight, our investigative series on cocaine kids.
Despite all the warnings, a growing number of babies are being born
already addicted to cocaine.
As it got out into the world it became this, this, phenomenon.
Twenty-three babies were born to the cocaine using women in the study.
Because the problem has appeared so suddenly there are few reliable statistics.
The number of so-called cocaine babies is growing at an astonishing rate.
The number of babies born addicted has risen more than 500 percent.
I had lots of people interviewing me.
Dr. Ira Chasnoff, of Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital,
runs the oldest program researching cocaine and the newborn.
It appears that cocaine has just as devastating effect
on pregnancy, and the newborn, as heroin.
Chasnoff told reporters that cocaine exposure was causing some babies
to be born with brain damage
and that others were overwhelmed by even simple eye contact with the mother.
These children are not normal in the sense that they are going to be able to enter
the classic schoolroom
and function in large groups of children.
Other researchers and doctors echoed Chasnoff’s conclusions
and a host of seemingly recognizable symptoms took hold. One of the things that we see about babies who
have been exposed to cocaine is they tend to be very tremulous and shaky…
Very fine kinds of tremors.
We looked to see if we would find the effects that were reported.
And we were saying, “Well, we aren’t seeing this.”
As Chasnoff’s star rose,
Dr. Claire Coles was reaching a different - though equally startling -
conclusion about crack babies,
based on her study of infant behavior at Emory University.
The effects didn’t seem consistent with the action of the drug itself.
Many of the children who were the so-called, classic cocaine babies
were premature babies
and the symptoms that were seen on the videos, on television -
the, you know, tremoring arms and all that,
that was prematurity.
You could have taken any premature baby and gotten the same image.
I think that people got very focused on cocaine is the cause of this
rather than thinking,
substance abuse is a cause of this,
maternal lifestyle is the cause of this,
social issues are the cause of this.
But Coles’ findings didn’t fit within the narrative
of what had become a national scare.
Cocaine.
Crack.
If you use drugs while you’re pregnant, your baby can die.
There’s a whole lot of people
who feel that if you can just scare people sufficiently about something,
that that’s better than actually telling them the truth about something
because that will prevent them from doing bad things.
Police!
The American agenda tonight poses this question.
What would you do about pregnant women who use drugs
and pass those drugs onto their babies?
By the late 1980s, Chasnoff’s findings were being used
to justify cases charging pregnant cocaine users
as child abusers, drug dealers and killers.
I was at first stunned,
and then angry that they would distort the information. That’s when I started realizing
how a lot of this can be taken out of context
and used to bolster any kind of argument.
People may have felt that they were doing the right thing,
but I mean the idea that one would prosecute a pregnant woman
And use this kind of
not very accurate research to do so is very disturbing.
As the prosecutions continued, crack babies grew to toddlers.
No one knows how many there are,
or even how best to identify them.
But educators suspect that tens of thousands of crack kids
are in kindergartens in inner cities, in suburbia, even in small town America.
It now threatens to create an entirely new underclass of children,
unable to care for themselves, of infants born to suffer.
In the United States this year at least a 100,000 crack babies will be born.
Today the government said it will cost five billion dollars a year
to care for such babies
and money doesn’t begin to tell the whole story.
I’m supposed to be a victim of that crack era.
I was supposed to be disruptive.
Mentally unstable.
I wasn’t supposed to reach the point where I am now.
The initial hypothesis was that drug abuse would lead to huge physical deformities,
huge mental deformities in children, and,
you know, in myself, I didn’t see any of those things,
so it would be easy for me to believe that
that science doesn’t hold true.
Hi!
Decades since Chasnoff’s initial research
- which focused on just 23 babies -
long-term studies have found only subtle changes
in the brains of cocaine-exposed research subjects like Stone.
There’s no particular evidence of this social-emotional deficit.
You’re not seeing really broad scale severe developmental problems as was predicted.
The schools have not been overwhelmed by the flood of cocaine-exposed children.
In fact, Stone became the first in her family to graduate from college.
In learning that I had been exposed
I kind of told myself, I'm no going to make this an issue.
Whatever I have to do to get around what the effects may be,
I’ll do that.
The paper was a very preliminary kind of finding. And it really shouldn't have been generalized to the extent it was.
Which I believe that Dr. Chasnoff eventually came to himself, and said that
that he felt that this didn’t really represent the whole of the situation.
Doctor, let’s go to you on this question.
You’ve studied this - perhaps one of the first people to study this.
How does cocaine use affect newborns?
Well, there is no question that cocaine use during pregnancy has some
real effects on the unborn and on the newborn child,
uh, but these effects are not devastating
and can be addressed through treatment for the pregnant woman and for the child.
Over time, Chasnoff did distance himself from some of the extreme pronouncements
he was quoted as making in the early days.
I probably talked too much
or gave long-winded explanations, which were completely cut out.
It was one of those feelings where you just feel completely out of control.
Bt the hysteria that followed his initial research had already taken its toll.
It wasn’t even a natural disaster or a war.
It was a drug that caused so much harm among my generation and my parent’s generation.
Certainly cocaine was contributing to this problem,
but they got very focused on it as the only sole cause of it.
I think people still believe the cocaine story,
but alcohol is much more of a problem than cocaine because there is much more alcohol used and it has much more severe effects.
I think if you say something three times out loud people take it as fact
and also I think that there are certain ideas that people want to believe
that really fit in with cultural stereotypes, and it’s hard to get rid of those.