Showing posts with label crack cocaine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crack cocaine. Show all posts

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Crack Babies Are Turning Out Okay


Major study concludes that crack panic was overblown.

In an excellent story for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Susan FitzGerald traces the fortunes of Philadelphia children enrolled in a study that began in 1989, at the height of the crack “epidemic” in the U.S. Headed up by Hallam Hurt, then the chair of neonatology at Albert Einstein Medical Center, a group began the in-vitro study of babies exposed to maternal crack cocaine use. One of the longest-running studies of its kind, the NIDA-funded research on 224 babies born between 1989 and 1992, half of them cocaine-exposed, the other half normal controls, was now coming to a close. And the results were not what most people were expecting.

In the Inquirer article, Hurt notes that cocaine can in fact trigger premature labor, raise blood pressure, and risk a condition in which the placenta breaks loose from the uterine wall. So it was natural to go looking for long-term effects in all of those twitching, underweight newborn crack babies viewers  saw on television. Physicians warned that damage to developing dopamine systems would result in long-term or permanent impairments in attention, language, and memory. So Hurt and colleagues went looking—and couldn’t find them. Neither could researchers at other institutions.  Said Hurt: “We began to ask, ‘Was there something else going on?’”

As FitzGerald writes: “The years of tracking kids have led Hurt to a conclusion she didn’t see coming. ‘Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine,'" Hurt said.  For example, babies born to mothers on heroin or methadone will have certain characteristic withdrawal symptoms, which can be managed by informed hospital staff. The same is true with newborns whose mothers have been using crack. In most cases, these withdrawals can be managed without permanent harm to the infant.

In a paper authored by Hurt, Laura M Betancourt, and others, the investigators write: “It is now well established that gestational cocaine exposure has not produced the profound deficits anticipated in the 1980s and 1990s, with children described variably as joyless, microcephalic, or unmanageable.” The authors do not rule out “subtle deficits,” but do not find evidence for them in functional outcomes like school or transition to adulthood.

How did this urban legend get started? In the 1980s, during the Reagan-Bush years, Americans were confronted with yet another drug “epidemic.” The resulting media fixation on crack provided a fascinating look at what has been called “drug education abuse.” This new drug war took off in earnest after Congress and the media discovered that an inexpensive, smokable form of cocaine was appearing in prodigious quantities in some of America’s larger cities. Crack was a refinement to freebasing, and a drug dealer’s dream. The “rush” from smoking crack was more potent, but even more transient, than the short-lived high from nasal ingestion.

Coupled with this development were the cocaine-related deaths of two well-known athletes, college basketball star Len Bias and defensive back Don Rogers of the Cleveland Browns. Bias played for Maryland, a home team in Washington, D.C. Six months earlier, Reagan had brought the military into the drug wars in a major way. The initial test of the directive was Operation Blast Furnace, a no-holds-barred attack on cocaine laboratories in the jungles of Bolivia.

As I wrote in 2008 in The Chemical Carousel:

The death of Len Bias elevated cocaine paranoia to the realm of the mythic. Cocaine became America’s first living-room drug, courtesy of the nightly news. The summer of 1986 will be remembered as the season of the “crack plague,” as viewers were bombarded with long news stories and specials. NBC Nightly News offered a special report on crack, during which a correspondent told viewers:  “Crack has become America’s drug of choice... it’s flooding America....”

The hyperkinetic level of television coverage ultimately led TV Guide Magazine to commission a report from the News Study Group, headed by Edwin Diamond at New York University. The investigators quickly demolished the notion that cocaine had become America’s “drug of choice,” and were at a loss to account for where the networks had come up with it:  “Statistically, alcohol and tobacco are the legal ‘drugs of choice’:  53 million people smoke cigarettes; 17.6 million are dependent on alcohol or abuse it. Marijuana still ranks as the No. 1 illegal drug. According to NIDA, 61.9 million people in the United States have experimented with marijuana.” The study group went on to note that the often-deadly “Black Tar” heroin had hit the streets of American cities the same summer. “Why was crack a big story [that summer] while Black Tar was not? One reason [is that] crack is depicted as moving into ‘our’—that is, the comfortable TV viewers’—neighborhood.”  

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Cocaine is Cocaine: New Sentencing Guidelines


U.S. Supreme Court relaxes jail time for crack crimes.

In a little-noted ruling last month, the U.S. Supreme Court bowed to reality and restored a measure of sanity to cocaine sentencing guidelines. The Court ruled, on a 7-2 vote in the case of Kimbrough v. U.S., that federal judges had the discretion to reduce prison terms for crack-cocaine offenses.

The move was an effort by the Supreme Court to bring crack cocaine sentences more in line with sentencing guidelines for powdered cocaine. Many drug experts expressed relief, noting that the changes were long overdue. “There’s no scientific justification to support the current laws,” said National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) director Dr. Nora Volkow.

Writing for the majority, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted that the two substances in question “have the same physiological and psychotropic effects.” A number of federal judges have long advocated the change, the importance of which was demonstrated when the U.S. Sentencing Commission announced that as many as 20,000 federal inmates serving time for crack possession may be due for sentence reductions, based on the new ruling.

A 1986 law, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, reset mandatory minimum sentences for cocaine, allowing for as much as a 100-to-1 disparity between prison time for crack and prison time for powdered cocaine. As an article in the International Herald Tribune noted, the law allowed a prison term of “five years for trafficking in 5 grams of crack, or less than the amount in two packets of sugar. It would take 100 times as much cocaine [in powder form] to get the same sentence.”

Several bills with a similar aim have been introduced in Congress, including legislation jointly sponsored by Senators Edward Kennedy and Orrin Hatch, which would revise the crack-powder sentencing ratio to 20-1.

This Alice-in-Wonderland situation was triggered by the cocaine-related death of college basketball star Len Bias in 1986. The widely publicized death set off a cocaine panic in America that quickly reached the White House and Congress. In addition, doctors and the press were busy wildly overestimating the number of handicapped “crack babies” being born. Craig Reinarman, author of the book, “Crack in America,” told the Associated Press: “You had politicians manipulating fear, and instead of being seen as a more direct mode of ingestion of a very old drug, [crack] became a demonic new substance.

Moreover, civil rights advocates have long claimed that the sentencing structure is racist: Blacks prefer crack and Whites prefer powder, if arrest records are any indication. (Crack is produced by dissolving powdered cocaine and baking soda in water, then boiling away the water.)

According to Graham Boyd of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) drug law reform project, “This may be the first sentencing decision since the mid-1980s that actually talks about justice, that seems to have some blood in it.”

“There is a sense of a turning point,” Jack B. Weinstein, a federal district court judge in New York, told Newsweek. “The cost [of the current drug war] is tremendous, to the community and to taxpayers.”

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented in the case.
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