The Crack Baby Scare: From Faulty Science to Media Panic

TEXT ON SCREEN: September 12, 1985

ARCHIVAL (ABC, WORLD NEWS TONIGHT, 11-14-89):
PETER JENNINGS: There was another warning about cocaine today.

ARCHIVAL (NBC, NIGHTLY NEWS, 2-27-87):
TOM BROKAW: Crack now has spread to almost every American city.

ARCHIVAL (NBC NEWS, 2-27-87):
NEWS REPORT: It is a problem in Houston, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Tucson, and Sacramento.

NARRATION: In the 1980s, the media sounded the alarm that a new drug – crack cocaine – was taking over American cities and that it had an especially devastating effect on pregnant women and their newborns.

ARCHIVAL (ABC, WORLD NEWS TONIGHT, 11-14-89):
PETER JENNINGS: A new study says that babies born to women who use cocaine during pregnancy are three times as likely to be born with birth defects.

ARCHIVAL (CBS NEWS, 12-30-85):
DR. XYLINA BEAN (NEONATOLOGIST): They tend to be what we call jittery.

ARCHIVAL (ABC NEWS, 7-11-86):
DR. BRIAN UDELL (BROWARD GENERAL MEDICAL CENTER): They are at very high risk for cerebral palsy, mental retardation.

ARCHIVAL:
NEWS REPORT: They are prone to hypertension, strokes and sudden infant death syndrome.

ARCHIVAL (NBC NEWS, 10-25-88):
REPRESENTATIVE GEORGE MILLER (SELECT COMMITTEE ON CHILDREN): These children, who are the most expensive babies every born in America, are going to overwhelm every social service delivery system that they come in contact with throughout the rest of their lives.

ARCHIVAL (CBS NEWS, 9-14-86):
NANCY REAGAN: Drugs take away the dream from every child’s heart, and replace it with a nightmare.

NARRATION: But were these infants really doomed? Decades later, what is the true legacy of the crack baby era?

CRACK BABIES: A TALE FROM THE DRUG WARS

NARRATION: In the early 1980s, Dr. Ira Chasnoff, a young researcher at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, decided to study what he saw as a worrisome trend among his pregnant patients who had used cocaine.

DR. IRA CHASNOFF (UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS COLLEGE OF MEDICINE, PEDIATRICS): Women were coming in and their babies were looking different when they were born. They had higher rates of prematurity. And they had higher rates of newborn seizures and other complications.

ARCHIVAL (MARCH OF DIMES, COCAINE’S CHILDREN):
IRA CHASNOFF: A lot of the babies exposed to cocaine, are quite small. We think that that’s related to the use of the drug during pregnancy.

DR. CLAIRE COLES (EMORY UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, PEDIATRICS): We had seen effects of alcohol, and other substances on children so we were certainly open to the idea that this was a problem. Cocaine was an epidemic. I think that it was something that the media, I mean, it became an exciting thing to talk about.

ARCHIVAL (CBS NEWS, 48 HOURS, 2-27-86):
UNDERCOVER REPORTER (IN CAR): Whatcha got?
DEALER (APPROACHING CAR): Whatcha need?
REPORTER: Whatcha got?
DAN RATHER (ON CAMERA): We call our broadcast 48 Hours on Crack Street.
DAN RATHER: You call this a standard crack house?
POLICE OFFICER: Standard in this precinct.

IRA CHASNOFF: Soon after our paper was published, within days, we were getting calls from media all over the country, and started hearing the term crack babies.

ARCHIVAL (NBC NEWS, 10-25-88):
TOM BROKAW: Spotlight Tonight, our investigative series on cocaine kids.

ARCHIVAL (ABC NEWS, 10-13-88):
PETER JENNINGS: Despite all the warnings, a growing number of babies are being born already addicted to cocaine.

CLAIRE COLES: As it got out into the world it became this, this, phenomenon.

ARCHIVAL (CBSNEWS, 9-11-85):
SUSAN SPENCER: Twenty-three babies were born to the cocaine using women in this study.

ARCHIVAL (NBC NEWS, 10-24-85):
REPORTER: Because the problem has appeared so suddenly, there are few reliable statistics.

ARCHIVAL (ABC NEWS, 3-7-90):
REPORTER: The number of so-called cocaine babies is growing at an astonishing rate.

ARCHIVAL (NBC NEWS, 2-18-86):
REPORTER: The number of babies born addicted has risen more than 500 percent.

IRA CHASNOFF: I had lots of people interviewing me.

ARCHIVAL (NBC NEWS, 10-24-89):
NEWS REPORT: Dr. Ira Chasnoff, of Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital, runs the oldest program researching cocaine and the newborn.

ARCHIVAL (MARCH OF DIMES):
IRA CHASNOFF: It appears that cocaine has just as devastating effect on pregnancy, and the newborn, as heroin.

NARRATION: Chasnoff told reporters that cocaine exposure was causing some babies to be born with brain damage and that others were overwhelmed by even simple eye contact with the mother.

ARCHIVAL (ABC NEWS):
IRA CHASNOFF: These children are not normal in the sense that they are going to be able to enter the classic schoolroom and function in large groups of children.

NARRATION: Other researchers and doctors echoed Chasnoff’s conclusions and a host of seemingly recognizable symptoms took hold.

ARCHIVAL (MARCH OF DIMES):
IRA CHASNOFF: One of the things that we see about babies who have been exposed to cocaine is they tend to be very tremulous and shaky…. Very fine kinds of tremors.

CLAIRE COLES: We looked to see if we would find the effects that were reported. And we were saying, “Well, we aren’t seeing this.”

NARRATION: As Chasnoff’s star rose, Dr. Claire Coles was reaching a different – though equally startling – conclusion about crack babies, based on her study of infant behavior at Emory University.

CLAIRE COLES: The effects didn’t seem consistent with the action of the drug itself. Many of the children who were the so-called, classic cocaine babies were premature babies and the symptoms that were seen on the videos, on television – the, you know, tremoring arms and all that, that was prematurity. You could have taken any premature baby and gotten the same image. I think that people got very focused on cocaine is the cause of this rather than thinking, substance abuse is a cause of this, maternal lifestyle is the cause of this, social issues are the cause of this.

NARRATION: But Coles’ findings didn’t fit within the narrative of what had become a national scare.

ARCHIVAL (PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT):
Cocaine – beep, beep, beep. Crack. Beep, beep, beep. If you use drugs while you’re pregnant, your baby can die.

CLAIRE COLES: There’s a whole lot of people who feel that if you can just scare people sufficiently about something, that that’s better than actually telling them the truth about something because that will prevent them from doing bad things.

ARCHIVAL (CBS NEWS, 12-17-90):
Police!

ARCHIVAL(ABC NEWS, 7-12-89):
DIANE SAWYER: The American agenda tonight poses this question. What would you do about pregnant women who use drugs and pass those drugs onto their babies?

NARRATION: By the late 1980s, Chasnoff’s findings were being used to justify cases charging pregnant cocaine users as child abusers, drug dealers and killers.

IRA CHASNOFF: I was at first stunned, and then angry that they would distort the information. That’s when I started realizing how a lot of this can be taken out of context and used to bolster any kind of argument.

CLAIRE COLES: People may have felt that they were doing the right thing, but I mean the idea that one would prosecute a pregnant woman and use this kind of not very accurate research to do so is very disturbing.

NARRATION: As the prosecutions continued, crack babies grew to toddlers.

ARCHIVAL (NBC, 10-4-90):
NEWS REPORT: No one knows how many there are, or even how best to identify them. But educators suspect that tens of thousands of crack kids are in kindergartens in inner cities, in suburbia, even in small town America.

ARCHIVAL (ABC NEWS, 10-13-88):
NEWS REPORT: It now threatens to create an entirely new underclass of children, unable to care for themselves, of infants born to suffer.

ARCHIVAL (ABC NEWS, 3-7-90):
PETER JENNINGS: In the United States this year, at least 100,000 crack babies will be born. Today the government said it will cost five billion dollars a year to care for such babies and money doesn’t begin to tell the whole story.

DEVON STONE: I’m supposed to be a victim of that crack era. I was supposed to be disruptive. Mentally unstable. I wasn’t supposed to reach the point where I am now. The initial hypothesis was that drug abuse would lead to huge physical deformities, huge mental deformities in children, and, you know, in myself, I didn’t see any of those things, so it would be easy for me to believe that that science doesn’t hold true.

NARRATION: Decades since Chasnoff’s initial research – which focused on just 23 babies – long-term studies have found only subtle changes in the brains of cocaine-exposed research subjects like Stone.

CLAIRE COLES: There’s no particular evidence of this social-emotional deficit. You’re not seeing really broad scale severe developmental problems as was predicted. The schools have not been overwhelmed by the flood of cocaine exposed children.

NARRATION: In fact, Stone became the first in her family to graduate from college.

DEVON STONE: In learning that I had been exposed I kind of told myself, I’m not going to make this an issue. Whatever I have to do to get around what the effects may be, I’ll do that.

CLAIRE COLES: The paper was a very preliminary kind of finding. And it really shouldn’t have been generalized to the extent it was. Which I believe that Dr. Chasnoff eventually came to himself, and said that he felt that this didn’t really represent the whole of the situation.

ARCHIVAL (ABC NEWS, NIGHTLINE, 9-27-00):
CYNTHIA MCFADDEN: Dr., let’s go to you on this question. You’ve studied this – perhaps one of the first people to study this. How does cocaine use affect newborns?
IRA CHASNOFF: Well, there is no question that cocaine use during pregnancy has some real effects on the unborn and on the newborn child, uh, but these effects are not devastating and can be addressed through treatment for the pregnant woman and for the child.

NARRATION: Over time, Chasnoff did distance himself from some of the extreme pronouncements he was quoted as making in the early days.

IRA CHASNOFF: I probably talked too much or gave long-winded explanations, which were completely cut out. It was one of those feelings where you just feel completely out of control.

NARRATION: But the hysteria that followed his initial research had already taken its toll.

DEVON STONE: It wasn’t even a natural disaster or a war. It was a drug that caused so much harm among my generation and my parent’s generation.

CLAIRE COLES: Certainly cocaine was contributing to this problem, but they got very focused on it as the only sole cause of it. I think people still believe the cocaine story, but alcohol is much more of a problem than cocaine because there is much more alcohol used and it has much more severe effects. I think if you say something three times out loud people take it as fact and also I think there are certain ideas that people want to believe that really fit in with cultural stereotypes, and it’s hard to get rid of those.

(END)