According to a recent story on WBUR, the NPR radio affiliate in Boston,
Massachusetts hospitals are seeing evidence that the opioid epidemic is affecting the next generation, with an increasing number of babies being born exposed to drugs.
Is this cause for concern? Perhaps, but the “crack baby” scare of the 1980s suggests caution in jumping to conclusions.
In the mid-1980s, as crack use spread and garnered attention from law enforcement officials, the public health community, and the media, it seemed that crack use by pregnant mothers was generating horrific harms. For example, the New York Times reported in 1985 that
Cocaine use may be dangerous for pregnant women and their babies, causing spontaneous abortions, developmental disorders and life-threatening complications during birth, doctors reported today.
Similarly, a 1985 article in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that
these preliminary observations suggest that cocaine influences the outcome of pregnancy as well as the neurologic behavior of the newborn.
And many media assessments were extremely pessimistic; Charles Krauthammer, for example, wrote that
the inner-city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror: a bio-underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth.
Three decades later, however, with the benefit of calm reflection and better data, the assessment of crack’s impact is strikingly different. In 2009, the New York Times wrote:
Read the rest of this post →So far, these scientists say, the long-term effects of [crack] exposure on children’s brain development and behavior appear relatively small.