ONCE WRITTEN OFF, 'CRACK BABIES' HAVE GROWN INTO SUCCESS STORIES

Ryan Reed Kaufman was 4 years old, unwanted by a mother who smoked
crack while she was pregnant, living with a foster family who
pacified him with NyQuil every night at bedtime. He had no reason to
expect that the grown-ups who came to visit him one day at child
protective services might take him home with them.

But he knew enough to try. When they handed him a coloring book, he
stayed within the lines as best as he could. When they gave him a box
of Legos, he asked to build a house. When it was done, he placed a
toy boy inside it and then asked, "Who will take care of the little boy?"

Ryan recalls that moment only vaguely, but he's heard the story since
that meeting in 1992, back when the term "crack baby" was used to
describe children such as him and experts predicted that children
born to addiction would become a biological underclass,
super-predators who would cause the crime rate to surge, a lost generation.

John Silber, then president of Boston University, spoke of "crack
babies who won't ever achieve the intellectual development to have
consciousness of God."

"Theirs will be a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance, of
permanent inferiority," Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer
said in 1989.

They were written off even before they could talk. But in the two
decades that have passed since crack dominated drug markets in the
District and across the nation, these babies have grown into young
adults who can tell their stories -- and for the most part, they are
tales of success.

Many of the crack-exposed infants ended up as boarder babies,
abandoned at the hospital by parents who couldn't care for them. Some
have been troubled throughout their lives. But national crime rates,
predicted to soar when the children came of age, have instead dropped
to record lows. Despite decades of research, it can be hard to parse
whether children born to crack-addicted mothers have struggled
because of early exposure to drugs, troubled upbringings or simple
teenage defiance.

It was at the height of the crack epidemic that a little girl named
Marika came to live with Eunice Boone. Her Capitol Heights house was
known as the "reject home," because she would take the children no
one else wanted. After Marika was born, Boone said, the girl's
biological mother told a social worker: "Didn't I tell you to let
that [expletive] die?"

Doctors determined that Marika, born with cocaine and other drugs in
her system, had cerebral palsy, which Boone thinks is related to her
mother's drug use. She was not expected to live past the age of 5.
This June, she will graduate from high school, and in August, she
will turn 21. She cannot talk or walk on her own, but she loves
music, coloring and wrestling.

"She's doing beautiful," said Boone, who has two biological children
and adopted six others in addition to Marika. "With these children
that are on crack, or any kind of drug, I think there's hope for
them. It just takes time and patience."

A federal study found that about 22,000 babies were left at hospitals
in 1991 by parents unwilling or unable to care for them. Washington
had the third-highest number of any U.S. city.

"We called it a crisis because the space was just filling up in the
nursery," said Linda Ivey Lewis, who as an administrator at D.C.
General Hospital was instrumental in opening the boarder baby
nursery, where volunteers could come in to hold the infants. "Worst
case for me was for them to not be humanized."

Many were born prematurely. Some had serious illnesses, including
HIV. But Lewis and others believed that many of the babies needed
only a good home to make up for a slow start on life.

The Pendulum Swings

Barry Lester, a psychologist at Brown University who leads the
largest federal study of children with prenatal cocaine exposure,
said a lot of misinformation surfaced in the late 1980s and early
1990s, including that these children had suffered severe brain
damage. Then came a period in which studies seemed to say the
opposite, that there were no effects from early cocaine exposure.

"Now what you are seeing is the pendulum is swinging back to the
middle, where it belongs," Lester said. "People are convinced that
cocaine doesn't cause severe damage, but I also think they are
beginning to realize that it does have important effects."

Early exposure to the drug has been shown to make children more
impulsive and diminish executive function, affecting the part of the
brain responsible for planning and inhibition, Lester said. "They may
not have the bells going off in their heads saying, 'I know you want
to do that, but don't do that.' "

Several women contacted for this article acknowledged using crack
while pregnant but declined to speak publicly about their experience
for fear of causing their children fresh pain. "The one I used crack
with has graduated and now relocated," one woman wrote in an e-mail.
"She is employed and has escaped the drama that I have placed on her life!"

Similarly, nearly 100 calls to health and faith professionals
elicited many reminders of the powerful stigma still attached to the
label "crack baby." Leonard Sipes, a spokesman for the D.C. Court
Services and Offender Supervision Agency, has found ex-offenders to
be willing to talk to reporters about child abuse and sexual assault.
"But this seems to be more sensitive," he said.

"No One Wants to Criticize Mom."

Sipes, who has worked for the justice system for 40 years, recalled
the predictions that crack babies would become "super-predators."

"We were warned over and over and over that this was our fate," he said.

Instead, the national violent crime rate in 2008, the last year for
which data are available, hit its lowest level since 1972, when the
Bureau of Justice Statistics began its annual survey. According to
FBI data for the District, from 1990 to 2008, murders dropped from
472 to 186, rapes from 303 to 186, and robberies from 7,365 to 4,154.

"The super-predator did not surface," Sipes said.

What did happen to those babies? Researchers caution that there is no
single answer. Genetics, the birth mother's other habits, prenatal
health care and home environment play a role.

"People are looking for a single statement: 'Cocaine does this,' or
'Cocaine does that.' It's just not that simple," Lester said. He
often gets calls from parents considering adopting cocaine-or
methamphetamine-exposed children. "What I almost invariably wind up
telling them is, 'As far as we know, a good environment can make up
for some, if not all, of the deficits that are caused by the drug,
although it's no guarantee.' "

'I Saw Some Light'

After 5 1/2 months of life, the only home Jeffrey had known was the
boarder baby nursery at D.C. General, and that's where Debbie
Anzelone first saw him in 1990. As director of the hospital's infant
development program, she was assessing the children's needs when a
nurse made a joke.

"She said, 'Oh, Jeff, you should smile real pretty for this lady --
she'd make a great mama for you,'" Anzelone recalled.

Within weeks, she would tell her husband, Mike, that she was in love
with this child she'd seen only 10 times. Not long after, they
brought Jeff home. In 1993, they officially adopted him and he took
their last name.

They gave little thought to his history: His mother, who was in
prison when he was born, had abused crack and heroin while carrying
him. "A couple of our friends were like, 'Are you sure you guys know
what you are doing?'" Debbie said in an interview at the family's
Beltsville home. "I was just like: 'He's just a baby. Give me a
break. Whatever will be will be.'"

Jeff first learned his history when he was in middle school. After
Debbie read studies finding that children exposed to drugs early in
life were more likely to fall into addiction, she decided to tell
Jeff before he experimented with drugs. "I was kind of waiting for a
time when I felt like he had developed enough self-confidence that he
wouldn't say, 'I'm this drug baby,'" she said.

Jeff said it never occurred to him to think that way. "I was part of
this family," he said. "We've always been a Christian family, and so
I realized God had a plan."

The only condition Jeff thinks might stem from his biological
mother's drug use is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which
he has controlled with medication since second grade. Lester recently
reported findings at a conference showing that children with prenatal
cocaine exposure were more likely to have behavior disorders, including ADHD.

"Honestly, I had the perception that crack babies were born messed
up, that they went through their life having problems," said Jeff,
who was a B student in high school, played sports and has worked part
time since he was 14. He works at Starbucks and attends Howard
Community College, aiming for a degree in accounting. "I don't see
other kids doing things that I don't see myself capable of doing."

Researchers say the hysteria that surrounded crack-exposed babies
teaches lessons on how to deal with the increasing number of children
being born with prenatal exposure to methamphetamine. "We think
everyone has learned from looking at the cocaine-exposed kids not to
get in an uproar before we have data," said Nicolette Borek of the
National Institute on Drug Abuse, which oversees 15 studies of
children exposed to cocaine before birth.

Many of those babies were born prematurely, with low birth weights
and unusually small heads, but overall, they are "doing a lot better
than we thought," she said. "One of the messages of this is really
how resilient children are and the brain is. Your exposure does not doom you."

Blaming No One

Ryan remembers the foster home where he lived when he met the two
women who eventually adopted him -- Linda Kaufman and Melinda Reed --
as a place where the other children took half his Legos and tore his
book, where beatings were doled out regularly.

"It was bad," said Ryan, 22. "If I had stayed there, I would
definitely have had a lot more anger problems than I already do. For
the longest time, I didn't let anyone touch me, and I definitely
didn't put up with people."

When the women met Ryan, they were struck by a cute child trying hard
to be perfect. They had been told his history: born at Washington
Hospital Center with crack and heroin in his system, taken into city
custody at 11 months with a fractured skull, in and out of several
foster homes.

They were handed photos of other children but quickly decided on
Ryan. "I just saw some light, a different kind of light in his eyes,"
Reed said. His new parents read Ryan bedtime stories, baked cookies,
made snow angels.

Ryan, whose ADHD was diagnosed early on, jumped off a table and
kicked a teacher in nursery school. As a teenager, "if he wanted
something and didn't get it, he'd explode," Kaufman said. As an
adult, he's been in trouble with the law and is serving time in
Arlington County's detention center on charges of grand larceny,
driving under the influence and assaulting a police officer.

"You hope and you pray and you say, 'I love you' a lot," Kaufman
said. But she sometimes questioned whether her parenting skills were
good enough to counter his rough start.

Even in jail, the charm of that 4-year-old playing with Legos comes
through. He's handsome, sharing the high cheekbones and almond eyes
of his biological mother, whom he last saw when he was a toddler. At
18, he had her name tattooed over his heart, and he keeps her prom
picture with him. He doesn't resent her. "She gave me life," he said.

He acknowledges his mistakes and doesn't blame anyone or anything
else -- not his biological mother's drug use, not his years in foster
homes, not his adoptive mothers, whom he didn't always agree with but
said had his best interests in mind. He said he alone is responsible
for his decision to drink, an addiction he's being treated for.

Ryan has worked two jobs since he was old enough to get one. And when
he is released in five months, he plans to become certified in
heating and air conditioning repair. Eventually, he wants to open a
clothing shop.

"I wouldn't change anything about myself," Ryan said. "I wouldn't
change anything about my past. I wouldn't even change me sitting in
jail right now. They all made me who I am."

He's confident that he'll find success, which he recently told his
adoptive parents wouldn't have been a possibility if they hadn't
taken him home.

"I really think if I stayed in that situation," Ryan said, "I most
likely wouldn't have cared if I lived or died."