Crack Babies: A Tale From the Drug Wars - Retro Report

Retro Report: In the 1980s, many government officials, scientists and journalists warned that the country would be plagued by a generation of "crack babies." They were wrong.

Read the story here: http://nyti.ms/166g5dg
Please visit http://nyti.ms/13J6wgC in order to embed this video

Subscribe on YouTube: http://bit.ly/U8Ys7n
NYT on Google Plus: http://bit.ly/WnAshF

Watch more videos at: http://nytimes.com/video
Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nytvideo

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.

They 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 into 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?

♪ music playing ♪

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 new born seizures and other complications.

A lot of the babies exposed to the cocaine are quite small.

We think, that is 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 a, 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.

Uh, and, started hearing the term "crack babies".

Spotlight tonight, our investigative series on cocaine kids.

Despite all the warnings, the growing number, of babies, are being born all over 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 500%.

I had lots of people interviewing me.

Dr. Ira Chaznoff, 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 new born, as heroine.

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 are not 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 per-mature babies.

And the symptoms, that were seen on the videos on television

the tremoring arms and all of that, that was per-maturity.

You could have taken any pre-mature baby and gotten the same image.

I think that people got very focused on cocaine is the cause of this

rather than thinking, that substance abuse is the cause of this,

maternal lifestyle is the cause of this,

social issues are the cause of this.

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 are a whole lot of people.

Who feel, that if you can just scare people sufficiently about something,..

..that is better than telling them the truth about something

because it will prevent them from doing bad things.

The American agenda tonight poses this question:

What will you doabout 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.

(music)

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.

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 physical deformities..

...huge mental deformities in children. And...

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 research, which focused on just twenty three babies.

Long term studies, have only found only subtle changes in the brains of cocaine cocaine expose research subjects like Stone.

There is no particular evidence of this social, or emotional, deficit.

You're not seeing really broad scales of 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 that 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 preliminary kind of finding.

It really should not have been generalized, to the extent that it was.

Which I believe Dr. Chaznoff, eventually came to himself and said,...

...that this really didn't 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 is no questions that, cocaine use during pregnancy,...

...has real effects of the unborn, and the newborn, child.

But, these effect are not devastating,

and, can be addressed through treatment for the pregnant woman and for the child.

Over time, Chaznoff did distance himself.

From the extreme pronouncements he was quoted 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 war.

It was a drug that caused so much harm.

Among my generation and my parents generation.

Certainly cocaine was contributing to this problem.

They got very focused on it as the only sole cause of it.

I think people still believe that cocaine story, but alcohol is much more of a problem than cocaine.

Because there is much more alcohol abuse, and it has much more serious effects.

I think if you'd say something three times, out loud, that people take it as fact, and also,

I think there are certain ideas that people want to believe.

That fit in with cultural stereotypes.

It is hard to get rid of those.

(music playing)