CRACK'S TOLL ON CHILDREN HARD TO MEASURE

Reasearch Shows A Range Of Effects

Raheem Schwarz told his best friends that he was a crack baby.

"You don't act like one," they said.

In other words, Raheem seems normal. The 11-year-old from East Cleveland,
Ohio, shows little sign of the developmental disabilities often associated
with children born to mothers who use crack, a cheap, potent form of cocaine.

The tall, graceful boy is a starter on his school basketball team. He has
just one chronic ailment, hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), which gives him a
buzz when he cheats on sweets. He zigzags between A's and D's,, but his
adoptive parents blame the boy's motivation, not his ability.

Soon after Raheem's birth, his biological father died of an overdose and
his biological mother was murdered, apparently over drugs.

Actually, Raheem was born with crack and seven other drugs in his veins.
But crack seems to be the most studied and stereotyped of the bunch. It is
a leading drug in poor black neighborhoods like Raheem's.

Yet, after more than a decade of study, little consensus has emerged about
the crack generation's size and shape. Health care professionals guess that
45,000 to 375,000 children may be born exposed to crack each year. Their
fates seem to range from early death to healthy life.

Soon after crack's boom in the mid-1980s, experts warned that millions of
exposed children would be hard-pressed to learn, behave or love.

But early research showed that they suffered little harm. Then other
research showed subtle but lasting damage to many children's mental,
physical and emotional skills.

Today most professionals seem to agree with Vince Smeriglio, child and
adolescent research coordinator for the National Institute on Drug Abuse,
who said, "The truth lies somewhere in between."

"It's not as bad as I had feared," said Robert Arendt, a Case Western
Reserve University researcher who leads one of the nation's longest
continuing studies, "but it's more complicated than I feared."

A leading complication, researchers say, is that they have never met a
mother using crack without other toxins, particularly tobacco and alcohol.
The mothers are also more prone to depression, domestic abuse and other
hardships that might affect babies who remain in their care.

Raheem lives with adoptive twin brothers, Lawrence and William, 7, who also
were exposed to crack. The adoptive father, author Ted Schwarz ("To Love a
Child"), said they are "absolutely normal, which means I want to kill them
on a regular basis, like every other parent."

Devon Wright, 7, of North Ridgeville, Ohio, seems mature, attentive and
helpful - no small virtues in a big family of adoptive, foster and natural
children.

In a bustling living room, Devon manages at once to complete his homework,
hand a toddler a cookie and alert a grown-up when the toddler goes astray.

"He's the eyes in the back of mom's head," said Angie Dennison, an adult
biological daughter of Devon's adoptive parents, Jeff and Debbie Wright.

Like many babies exposed to crack, Devon was born prematurely. He learned
to walk and talk on schedule, but was admitted to a preschool for children
with disabilities - in his case, intense shyness. He attends regular
first-grade classes but might need summer school this year.

Debbie Wright suspects that Devon has an attention disorder, which, like
other learning disabilities, often emerges in the elementary school years.

"I don't want to label him," Wright said. But she has seen convincing signs
of crack's damage in other children she has helped raise. A boy cried
virtually nonstop until age 1. A girl, now 6, lives in an institution
because of her unruly behavior.

It would be hard to deny the damage done by crack to the children taken in
by Doris Williams of Cleveland.

A foster son, 8 (whom she is not allowed to identify), has cerebral palsy -
apparently caused by exposure to crack - that keeps him from walking or
talking.

An adopted son, Justin, 6, has an IQ of 58, or 12 points below the usual
threshold for retardation. He has undergone operations on his heart, lungs
and other organs. He also needed years of "eating therapy" for a fear of
food that used to make him scream at the sight of a restaurant. He still
weighs just 35 pounds.

Some of Justin's biological siblings have fared even worse. He was one of
eight twins carried in four years by a mother on crack. Five of them were
miscarried or died during infancy, including his twin sister.

Experts attribute crack's hype and scrutiny partly to its appeal to poor,
urban blacks. The latest federal survey shows that 55 percent of blacks who
use drugs smoke crack, versus 27 percent of white drug users.

Enough babies exposed to crack have been found to support 74 published
studies. Thirty-six of these were analyzed by Boston University researchers
in a report for the March issue of the Journal of the American Medical
Association. Those researchers found inconclusive evidence of crack's
damage to children age 6 or younger from a simllar range of backgrounds,
mostly poor, urban blacks.

At worst, said Deborah A. Frank, the report's lead author, crack seems no
more harmful than dozens of other hardships, such as poverty, that fall
disproportionately on this group.

But studies show crack changes the brain structure of laboratory rats,
hurting their ability to learn, bond and handle stress. In humans, Case
Western Reserve University researchers say, crack seems to lower many
children's scores on a wide range of tests, undermining talents and
aggravating disabilities.

Starting in 1991, the researchers studied exposed and unexposed children
from comparable backgrounds born at two Cleveland hospitals.

At 2 years of age, 14 percent of the exposed children scored 70 or lower on
IQ tests, versus 7 percent of the drug-free ones. At age 4, heavily exposed
children averaged three months behind unexposed ones in developing gross
motor skills such as balance. At age 7, exposed children averaged IQs of
B0.2, compared with 85.7 for the others.