THE MYTH OF THE CRACK BABY

New research has drubbed the last iota of life from the "crack-baby"
myth, but the fact that this fairy tale persisted for so long is troubling.

Crack is a smokable form of cocaine that, while cheap, is potent. It
first became popular in the mid-1980s, and by the 1990s had become,
according to some, a "plague" -- especially in low-income urban
pockets of the United States.

This "plague" gave rise to a myth: the crack baby. Newspapers ran
headline after headline warning that children born to crack-addicted
mothers were in for a rocky future.

The scientific community, however, has long claimed that babies born
with crack in their systems weren't at higher risk of having
long-term developmental problems than babies born with other
dangerous substances in their veins. Now, an ongoing large-scale
study has contributed to the mountain of evidence supporting those claims.

The U.S. scientists running the Maternal Lifestyle Study, the largest
clinical study ever conducted on how prenatal drug exposure affects
children's health, have found that children who had been exposed to
crack in the womb do not suffer major brain development or
behavioural problems. Their analysis of almost 4,500 children found
no significant long-term effects on IQ or language skills.

It's not that crack has no effect, of course, but it does no more
harm than tobacco, and less harm than alcohol. It could be argued
that alcohol is the most dangerous substance of all for a fetus,
considering that, according to recent surveys, only 5.2 per cent of
pregnant women use illicit drugs, while 11.6 per cent use alcohol.
Yet, unlike mothers who drank and smoked, mothers who used crack
were, during the drug's heyday, routinely prosecuted, jailed and
stripped of their children.

This was no doubt due to one simple factor: cigarettes and alcohol
are legal products; crack isn't. And since what society considers
moral is influenced by its legal status, children born to
crack-addicted mothers were not viewed as a health problem, but a
moral problem. A Boston pediatrician, commenting on the study, put it
this way: "Society's expectations of the children and reaction to the
mothers are completely guided not by toxicity, but by the social meaning."

The myth of the crack baby was also a useful political tool.
Politicians who supported The War of Drugs, the United States' famous
prohibition campaign, were eager to demonize crack in the 1990s. As a
result, the effects of the drug were exaggerated. Some anti-drug
crusaders claimed a first-time crack user would become instantly
addicted, which also proved false.

The media are also to blame for spreading the crack-baby myth. Jack
Shafer, the media critic for Slate, has written time and again of
reporters' love of sensational drug stories and their failure to get
the science right. In 2005, he noted that reporters were then
embracing a new myth: the "meth baby."

Our bodies don't care if a substance is legal, newsworthy or a
political bugaboo. To truly understand the health effects of a drug,
it's best to pay attention to those who study it, not those who
merely oppose it.