Science vs. hysterical racism, yet again. There's a reason it's "crack baby", and not "cocaine baby". Helps imprison the right sort of person. (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act</a>)<p>There's a much more dangerous drug than cocaine, for babies. (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure</a>) It's alcohol, a legal drug. (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_syndrome" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_syndrome</a>)
Bad story design... trying to talk about the typical result, then late in the article drop the bombshell "The team considers Jaimee and her mother, Karen, among their best success stories.". If they "have to" go anecdotal, they could have at least picked the median subject. Like doing a report on the health effects of smoking, and intentionally selecting the healthiest 99 year old smoker in the world rather than the most likely outcome.<p>The most interesting part of the whole situation can be summed up by one of the lines describing the babies, "nearly all were African Americans." Even since the first days, It never was about medical issues or science, just a sorta-stealthy way to bash black folks. You'll note there was carefully no outage at the time, or long term medical study, at white coke snorting suburban women, although the blood levels of coke the babies experienced probably were about the same in the end. By analogy it would be like creating a social meme and scientific study of the negative pregnancy impact of malt liquor consumption (by urban black women), carefully ignoring the consumption of fruity margaritas (by suburban white women). Because you can't bash black people unless you can "other" them first.<p>I guess the two startup lessons are if you're trying to make median situation analysis, policy, and decisions, and you must use an anecdote, don't chose an extreme outlier, use a median... unless you've got an axe to grind and you're trying to mislead people, in which case unusual sample selection can be a powerful tool to mislead people. Startup lesson two is one popular way to scam people is to play word definition games as a strategy for divide and conqueror, so look out for that gameplay technique, and/or use word redefinition as a weapon of your own.
<i>Hurt's study enrolled only full-term babies so the possible effects of prematurity did not skew the results.</i><p>Doesn't this mean that their selection sample effectively excluded any babies that had a noticeable physical reaction (other than having cocaine in their system) to the effect of their mothers' cocaine use?
My old room mate did cocaine studies with pregnant mice. He'd inject pregnant mice with cocaine and then raise the mouse pups and place electrodes in on of the "pleasure centers" of their brains. He would then measure the curve of how hard the mice were willing to spin a wheel for a given amount of current into their brains.<p>The model was that mice willing to beat their bodies more for the same amount of stimulation were more susceptible to a wide range of addictions. He found that pups exposed to cocaine in utero did in fact as adults spin the wheel harder for a given amount of stimulation, indicating higher susceptibility to a wide range of addictions.<p>My old room mate would have really liked to perform the same study with nicotine, since many many more human mothers dose their fetuses with nicotine as compared to cocaine. For what the wild speculations of an experienced researcher are worth, he suspected that mouse pups exposed to nicotine would also be more susceptible to addiction (supposing he was actually measuring susceptibility to addiction).<p>However, politicians and lobbyists have made it much easier to get federal grant money for cocaine studies vs. nicotine studies, despite nicotine having a much larger impact on society.<p>On a side note: in 1999, 4.7% of US 8th graders were willing to admit to having used cocaine, so the test group appears to be below US averages for cocaine use, despite their mothers using cocaine. I imagine that being predicated upon having mothers caring enough to place their children in these studies, and mothers responsible enough to stay in contact with researchers, and the subjects knowing they were being studied, skewed the drug usage portion of the study. Nationally, (for those outside of medical trials) I can't imagine the cocaine use rate for those whose mothers used cocaine to be below the rate for those whose mothers did not use cocaine.
This is getting into questions you can't ask, and IQ is a severely flawed metric, but I wonder what the IQs are of the parents, and if the children's scores are higher or lower, and if we can rule out heredity.
"They found that 81 percent of the children had seen someone arrested; 74 percent had heard gunshots; 35 percent had seen someone get shot; and 19 percent had seen a dead body outside - and the kids were only 7 years old at the time."<p>That's not really much different than the national average for kids whose parents aren't crackheads. E.g. 1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age seven that 7 in 20 would have, which is in fact exactly 35%. C.f. <a href="https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/227744.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/227744.pdf</a><p>N.b. that some of these statistics are pretty wonky, e.g. they count getting beat up for your siblings as assault, or getting flashed as being a victim of sexual assault.
What's more likely, that seeing dead people and being poor lowers your IQ, or that having a low IQ means you'll end up poor?<p>They preselected a bunch of poor people, which means the low IQ could be explained by the fact that their existing IQ put them in this place in society along with the predisposition to cheap drug addiction.
I got the part about not seeing a relationship between crack usage and mental functioning. It's a very interesting result. What I don't understand is "Hurt and her team began to think the "something else" was poverty."<p>Is there any data referenced in the article to actually support that claim? It's the central thesis here, and I don't see any supporting argument. I see some text around seeing people arrested, dead bodies, and so on, but there are lots of poor rural kids who never see that. This is much more a function of urban poverty.<p>Maybe I missed it.
The lede is buried a bit:<p>"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine," Hurt said at her May lecture.
TL;DR "White folks attack wrong devil, again. Lots of black folks dead or suffering, again."<p>It isn't science that's racist. What's racist is the thousands of brilliant minds that took <i>THIS LONG</i> to look in the right direction. Each one of them minutely racist on its own -- it was just one tiny blind spot. One tiny speck on the lens. On every lens.<p>That's all it takes to destroy a community. That and some SWAT boots.
This isn't in fact news, it has long been known that there is no scentific/medical 'crack baby' phenomenon, as documented in the wikipedia article. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure</a><p>What's perhaps more important to talk about is the demonstrated harm of poverty and violence on children.
So, vitamins are actually <i>bad</i> for you and there's really no such thing as a 'crack baby'.<p>It's a bad week for things I learned growing up in the 80s/90s ...
The study outcome is <i>poverty</i> has the bigger impact. Yet there is a lot of discussion about anything else like Alcohol etc. But think about the uncomfortable issue: What to do against poverty? Isn't it a hint that our concern should be "a human right to access minimum wealth" and how to enable it?
<i>Of the 110, two are dead - one shot in a bar and another in a drive-by shooting - three are in prison, six graduated from college, and six more are on track to graduate.</i><p>It seems rather depressing to me that the college graduation rate by 23 is under 10%. Talk about different worlds
I've read that it's notoriously difficult to measure the impact of crack on prenatal development because so many crack-smoking pregnant women also smoke cigarettes, and the latter is so harmful already that it's hard to isolate the effects of the former.
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/booming/revisiting-the-crack-babies-epidemic-that-was-not.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/booming/revisiting-the-cra...</a><p>Great video from the nytimes on this story from may
"Jaimee Drakewood hurried in from the rain" What? This is supposed to be a scientific report? A lay science report? A newspaper? Why does the very first sentence read like a badly written paperback?
<i>"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine," Hurt said at her May lecture.</i><p>And yet somehow immigrants (Nigerian, Vietnamese, Romanian, Armenian) living in poverty somehow find a way to work hard enough to become successful. They make their own outcome. Why is it only the impoverished Americans that cannot succeed.<p>I think we have to look here at what it takes to succeed.<p>1. Dedicated parent(s). Two of them (a mom and a dad) can do far more than one so probability of success rises if both stick around. These inner city kids almost NEVER have a dad in the picture. This leaves mom to work or she is a complete welfare loser and probably on drugs too.<p>2. Standards/Morals. One bad choice can ruin a person's life. We all have turning points in life where we choose to take a hit off a pope, or pass on it. Have unprotected sex, or abstain. Assault someone, commit a robbery, ETC. These choices have a ripple effect on the rest of our lives.<p>3. Hard work. Why work if you can live off of the dole? Why work for white people and help their society since they are so racist? (this is a common attitude).<p>Immigrants come to America with almost nothing. They see opportunity though. They work hard and succeed. They stick together. Dad does not leave, mom does not smoke crack or sleep around. They have values, morals and a strong work ethic. This is what separates immigrants living in poverty and your more typical inner city situation in Philadelphia.