Alcohol is worse than crack — for babies

Yes, it’s true. The whole “crack baby” thing was a myth. Turns out that researchers who follow crack-exposed kids from womb to now find that there is almost no difference between them and kids whose parents weren’t crack-addicted.

It’s official, because it’s in the New York Times:

So far, these scientists say, the long-term effects of such exposure on children’s brain development and behavior appear relatively small.

(snip)

Cocaine is undoubtedly bad for the fetus. But experts say its effects are less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco — two legal substances that are used much more often by pregnant women, despite health warnings.

Of course, you could have learned that three-and-a-half years ago, if you read Slate or the Columbia Journalism Review, whose story back in 2004 chronicled the rise of the new “meth baby” myth.

Or heck, go back another decade, to 1995, and you’ll find a piece in Mother Jones, deconstructing the crack baby “epidemic”:

The crack baby quickly became a symbol for the biological determinism recently promulgated in its rawest form by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in The Bell Curve: These (mostly black) bug-eyed morons weren’t quite human–and no amount of attention could make them so. In the late ’8os, some commentators predicted they would become America’s “biologic underclass.” By 1991, John Silber, president of Boston University, went so far as to lament the expenditure of so many health care dollars on “crack babies who won’t ever achieve the intellectual development to have consciousness of God.”

(snip)

No one suggests using cocaine in pregnancy is harmless. But unlike alcohol, which in heavy doses can cause a set of birth defects known as fetal alcohol syndrome, cocaine is not associated with any pattern of defects. Nor does it produce infantile withdrawal, like opiates. Today there is something approaching scientific consensus that cocaine increases the risk of low birthweight and perhaps premature delivery.

The piece goes on to say that, although low birthweight and premature delivery are no laughing matters, by themselves, they don’t predict what a child will be like at 3 years of age, or 9.

Now, as the Slate piece linked above makes clear, it’s time to inoculate yourself against the awful overreporting of the “meth epidemic.”

“Meth mouth” is probably mostly myth and the rest exaggerated. “Meth babies” I would be surprised to find exist. I’m not going to go out and say let’s all do meth, but let’s take a look at this bit from a 1990 Newsweek article, cited from that very same Slate story:

Don’t tell the kids, but there’s a dirty little secret about crack: as with most other drugs, a lot of people use it without getting addicted. In their zeal to shield young people from the plague of drugs, the media and many drug educators have hyped the very real dangers of crack into a myth of instant and total addiction

Now, where they say “crack” read “meth” or “hillbilly heroin” if you prefer.

So, yeah. Drugs are, not that bad, mmmkay?