20 year+ study on "crack babies" shows poverty more harmful than cocaine.

[Golden Applesauce]

I wasn't really around for this, but apparently there was some massive moral panic about all these Crack Babies, who were going to be retarded and criminal for their whole lives and cause the end of society?

A 24 year study of over 200 people, from infancy to adulthood, half exposed to cocaine in utero and half not, has found essentially no statistically significant difference between the mental abilities of the so-called "crack babies" and the control group. Not that they weren't below average developmentally on almost every test - they were - but so was the control group.

http://articles.philly.com/2013-07-22/news/40709969_1_hallam-hurt-so-called-crack-babies-funded-study

Hurt organized a study of 224 near-term or full-term babies born at Einstein between 1989 and 1992 - half with mothers who used cocaine during pregnancy and half who were not exposed to the drug in utero. All the babies came from low-income families, and nearly all were African Americans.

...

Hurt, who is also a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, is always quick to point out that cocaine can have devastating effects on pregnancy. The drug can cause a problematic rise in a pregnant woman's blood pressure, trigger premature labor, and may be linked to a dangerous condition in which the placenta tears away from the uterine wall. Babies born prematurely, no matter the cause, are at risk for a host of medical and developmental problems. On top of that, a parent's drug use can create a chaotic home life for a child.

Hurt's study enrolled only full-term babies so the possible effects of prematurity did not skew the results. The babies were then evaluated periodically, beginning at six months and then every six or 12 months on through young adulthood. Their mothers agreed to be tested for drug use throughout the study.

The researchers consistently found no significant differences between the cocaine-exposed children and the controls. At age 4, for instance, the average IQ of the cocaine-exposed children was 79.0 and the average IQ for the nonexposed children was 81.9. Both numbers are well below the average of 90 to 109 for U.S. children in the same age group. When it came to school readiness at age 6, about 25 percent of children in each group scored in the abnormal range on tests for math and letter and word recognition.

"We went looking for the effects of cocaine," Hurt said. But after a time "we began to ask, 'Was there something else going on?' "

While the cocaine-exposed children and a group of nonexposed controls performed about the same on tests, both groups lagged on developmental and intellectual measures compared to the norm. Hurt and her team began to think the "something else" was poverty.

As the children grew, the researchers did many evaluations to tease out environmental factors that could be affecting their development. On the upside, they found that children being raised in a nurturing home - measured by such factors as caregiver warmth and affection and language stimulation - were doing better than kids in a less nurturing home. On the downside, they found that 81 percent of the children had seen someone arrested; 74 percent had heard gunshots; 35 percent had seen someone get shot; and 19 percent had seen a dead body outside - and the kids were only 7 years old at the time. Those children who reported a high exposure to violence were likelier to show signs of depression and anxiety and to have lower self-esteem.

...

"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine," Hurt said at her May lecture.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Yep, this is one that I knew, largely because I started looking into adoption in 1996 or so, when the first outcome trajectories were being predicted for the dreaded crack babies.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

AH crack babies. Haven't heard about those in a while. People my age used it as a school yard insult. The 80s were an interesting time.

[Junkenstein]

What's going to be fun here is how this research gets twisted to ramp up prison sentences for crack and justify measures against the impoverished.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

We need to make poverty a crime, that'll teach 'em.

[Doktor Howl]

We need to make poverty a crime, that'll teach 'em.

*looks at the state penitentiary*

We already did.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

We need to make poverty a crime, that'll teach 'em.

*looks at the state penitentiary*

We already did.

[Reginald Ret]

We need to make poverty a crime, that'll teach 'em.

*looks at the state penitentiary*

We already did.

Nigel, did you forget again?
We are living in the future and it is exactly the future we demanded.