There was another warning about cocaine today.
Crack now has spread through 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.
There are very very high risk for Cerebral Palsy... Mental retardation.
They are prone to hypertension, strokes, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
These children were 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 replaces it with a nightmare.
But were these infants really doomed?
Nearly three decades later, what is the true legacy of the crack baby era?
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In the early 1980s, Dr. Ira Chaznoff, a young researcher
at North Western 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 pre-maturity.
And, they had higher rates of newborn seizures and other complications.
A lot of the babies exposed to the cocaine are quite small.
We think that that's related to the use of this drug during pregnancy.
We'd seen 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 --
It became an exciting thing to talk about.
What you got? What you need? What you got?
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 phenomenon.
Twenty three babies were born to the cocaine using women in this 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%.
I had lots of people interviewing me.
Dr. Ira Chaznoff, of Chicago's North Western Memorial Hospital
runs the oldest program researching cocaine and the newborn.
It appears that cocaine has just as devastating effect on pregnancy,
and the new born, as heroin.
Chaznoff 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 school room
and function in large groups of children.
Other researchers and doctors echo Chaznoff'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 look to see if we would find the effects that were reported.
And we were saying, "Well...we aren't seeing this."
As Chaznoff's star rose, Dr. Clair Kholes 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 are the so-called classic cocaine babies,
were premature babies.
And the symptoms that were seen on the videos, on television.
the tremoring arms and all of 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 the cause of this,
maternal lifestyle is the cause of this,
social issues are the cause of this.
But Khole's findings didn't fit within the narrative of what had become
a national scare.
Cocaine.. Crack.
If you use drugs while you are 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'll prevent them from doing bad things.
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(door crashing) Police!
The American Agenda tonight poses this question:
What would you do about pregnant women who use drugs
and pass those drugs on to their babies?
By the late 1980s, Chaznoff'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 women
and use this kind of, not very accurate research,
to do so is very disturbing.
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As the prosecutions continued, crack babies grew to toddlers.
No one knows how many there are,
or even how to best 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.
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In the United States this year, at least a hundred thousand crack babies
will be born.
Today the government said it will cost 5 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
will 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.
Almost three decades since Chaznoff's initial research,
which focused on just twenty three babies,
long term studies have found only subtle changes
in the brains of cocaine exposed research subjects like Stone.
There is 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 kinda told myself
I am not 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 Dr. Chaznoff eventually came to himself and said
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 effect newborns?
Well there's no questions that cocaine use during pregnancy
has some real effects on the unborn, and on the newborn child.
But, these effects are not devastating,
and can be addressed through treatment for the pregnant woman and for the child.
Over time, Chaznoff 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.
But 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'd say something three times out loud, people take it as fact.
And also, I think there are certain ideas that people want to believe.
That really fit in with cultural stereotypes.
It is hard to get rid of those.
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