Having A Mother Using Cocaine Doesn't Hurt Kids Nearly As Much As Poverty & Violence

(This image is from the webpage of the Institute of Jewish Education.)

Back in the 1980's the use of cocaine, especially crack cocaine, was rampant (some even saying it was an epidemic). And one of the ways used to fight that drug use was to point out how bad the use of that drug was for women expecting a child. A whole mythology was built up around the idea of "crack babies" -- children born of mothers using cocaine, whose lives would be ruined because of that by having a lifetime of health and educational problems.

In 1989, Hallam Hurt, chair of neonatology at the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, decided a scientific study was needed to define the risks of expectant mothers using cocaine. Hurt started a long-term study of this issue by choosing 224 near or full-term babies born in that hospital between 1989 and 1992. Half of those babies had mothers who had used cocaine while pregnant, and half had mothers who avoided drug use while pregnant.

Hurt had expected to find that the children born of cocaine users would exhibit significant problems in growing up. But an odd thing happened. Hurt found after studying those children for years that there was no significant difference between the children in the two different groups. The children with cocaine-using mothers showed no more health or educational problems than the children in the other group. The stories of "crack babies" having more problems turned out to be just a myth.

Now you may be thinking that this was just one study, and maybe that study had been flawed in one way or another. But two other similar studies were done -- one by Claire Coles, a psychiatry professor at Emory University, and the other by Deborah A Frank, a pediatrics professor at Boston University. And both those studies reached the same conclusion.

But this does not mean that nothing affects the health and education of children. All three of those studies found a couple of factors that significantly affected the well-being of children -- poverty and an early exposure to violence. These two problems affect the health and education of children more negatively than anything else.

Maybe it's time this nation stopped wasting huge amounts of money (more than a trillion dollars so far) on the failed "war on drugs", and start using that money to attack our real problems -- poverty and violence.