CRACK'S CONTRADICTORY LEGACY

CRACK COCAINE ravaged poor communities in the 1980s, destroying families,
filling jails and burdening social services with children who showed
previously unseen levels of impairment, neglect and abuse.

The most memorable victims were the babies, born underweight and addicted,
often abandoned in hospitals and thought by many to be unsalvageable. One
widely quoted prediction said that they would mature into a "biologic
underclass." Now that grim conclusion has been called into question by
researchers who say the bad effects of cocaine in the womb cannot be easily
disentangled from the many other bad things that tended to have happened to
these children -- in particular, prenatal exposure to legal drugs such as
tobacco and alcohol.

The researchers, whose work appears in the current Journal of the American
Medical Association, gathered up 36 long-range studies of children exposed
to crack and other substances in the womb. They found that crack could not
be statistically shown to have produced harm to physical growth, cognitive
ability, language or motor skills -- not, that is, beyond what the myriad
other bad influences in their lives might have been expected to do. The
implication is not that these kids are fine -- in any case, they have been
followed only through age 6, while developmental delays sometimes show up
as late as puberty -- but that the uniquely hopeless and horrified feelings
with which observers confronted the "crack babies" should perhaps now be
brought more into alignment with our responses to other ills that befall
children both in and out of the womb.

One of the tragedies of crack was the way it could erode the already shaky
parenting abilities of an addicted mother to the point where the child's
environment did him or her more damage than the drug itself.

Even some clinicians who disagree with the new study's conclusions --
including several with long experience treating the District's crack babies
- -- say that babies born in bad shape but raised in a nurturing environment
have made enormous, unlooked-for strides.

Some blossomed after being adopted, others when the mother managed to get
off drugs.

One lesson learned is that laws seeking to penalize mothers for "child
abuse" strictly on the basis of having taken drugs during pregnancy may,
besides running up against the Constitution, be too narrowly focused to
protect children of such mothers from the many dangers that threaten them.
Another, even more emphatic lesson is the danger of concluding, on the
basis of not fully understood conditions and circumstances, that any child
is rendered beyond saving.