
'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result - unfasten
http://www.philly.com/philly/health/20130721__Crack_baby__study_ends_with_unexpected_but_clear_result.html
======
calibraxis
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.
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act))

There's a much more dangerous drug than cocaine, for babies.
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure))
It's alcohol, a legal drug.
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_syndrome))

~~~
rayiner
Alcohol isn't really that dangerous for babies either. The prevalence of fetal
alcohol syndrome is less than 5% for babies of women who drink more than 14
drinks per week during pregnancy:
[http://www.motherisk.org/prof/updatesDetail.jsp?content_id=2...](http://www.motherisk.org/prof/updatesDetail.jsp?content_id=299).
There's very little evidence that low levels of alcohol consumption during
pregnancy are bad for babies:
[http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2023984,00.ht...](http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2023984,00.html).
Indeed, the available data shows the opposite: babies whose mothers drink
lightly during pregnancy have better balance and higher IQs:
[http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57589867/moderate-
drinki...](http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57589867/moderate-drinking-
during-pregnancy-may-not-harm-babys-neurodevelopment). This is largely due to
maternal predisposition; higher-IQ women are more likely to drink during
pregnancy.

It turns out that the placental barrier is pretty awesome.

~~~
raverbashing
You're presenting facts, the "total abstinence" people don't like that.

I find it funny how the "total abstinence" people come up with such amount of
unproven facts, like "any consumption of alcohol" will cause harm. You'll be
hard pressed to find a mother that hasn't consumed any alcohol whatsoever
during pregnancy in Europe.

This looks like it works as well as the "total abstinence" for sex works.

~~~
dalke
Can you really speak with such authority about all of Europe?

In Sweden, where I live, alcohol and pregnancy are not suppose to mix. For
example, translating from
[http://www.vardguiden.se/Tema/Gravid/Livsstilsfragor/Alkohol...](http://www.vardguiden.se/Tema/Gravid/Livsstilsfragor/Alkohol/)
: "Since no one knows where the border lies, the recommendations in Sweden and
many other countries are to not drink alcohol at all during pregnancy."

Or translating from
[http://www.lakartidningen.se/07engine.php?articleId=12235](http://www.lakartidningen.se/07engine.php?articleId=12235):
"It's been known for a long time that alcohol consumption during pregnancy can
damage the fetus, and most women also stop drinking alcohol when they discover
that they are pregnant."

I'm lead to believe that the other Nordic countries are similar.

~~~
raverbashing
You're right, that's the recommendation

But about this I'm not so sure: "most women also stop drinking alcohol when
they discover that they are pregnant."

~~~
dalke
Just like I and others are "not so sure" about your original statement.

Again I ask, how well can you claim to speak for the entirety of Europe? My
observation is that Nordic women abstain from drinking during pregnancy at
least as often as women who are native born to the US.

What would you accept as evidence that your original statement is incorrect?
Perhaps the journal article "Alcohol consumption among pregnant women in a
Swedish sample and its effects on the newborn outcomes", which finds: "Before
pregnancy, 89% of the women regularly consumed alcohol and 49% reported
occasional or frequent binge drinking. Nicotine was used by 15% before and by
5% during pregnancy. During pregnancy, 12% continued using alcohol and 5% also
admitted binge drinking." ?

Compare this to the statement in "FOCUS ON: Biomarkers Of Fetal Alcohol
Exposure And Fetal Alcohol Effects", which says that "roughly one of every
eight women in the United States continues to drink during her pregnancy". 16%
is higher than 12%, though I don't know the error bars to tell if that's
significant.

If you don't like self-reported tests, then perhaps "Measurement of direct
ethanol metabolites suggests higher rate of alcohol use among pregnant women
than found with the AUDIT—a pilot study in a population-based sample of
Swedish women" is useful. It concludes "Twenty-six women (25.2%) were
identified as possible alcohol consumers by the combined use of AUDIT and
direct ethanol metabolites."? (Note though that hair cosmetics and other
things can cause false positives in a direct metabolites test.)

I interpret this to mean that 75% of Swedish women certainly do not drink
alcohol while pregnant.

In other words, it's very easy in Sweden to find women who don't drink while
pregnant.

Then for Germany, in "Smoking, alcohol and caffeine consumption of mothers
before, during and after pregnancy--results of the study 'breast-feeding
habits in Bavaria" the researchers report "25.3% of the mothers reported any
alcohol consumption during pregnancy, 69.0% of pregnant women were drinking
caffeine-containing beverages. The consumption rates were reduced clearly
during pregnancy."

And for France, in "Is pregnancy the time to change alcohol consumption habits
in France?" reports that "A total of 52.2% of women indicated that they had
consumed alcohol at least once during their pregnancy".

Why did you make such a large, encompassing statement about all of Europe,
when (1) there is such a variable rate, depending on the country, and (2) it
looks like better than even odds that a 'European' woman does not drink once
she knows she's pregnant.

~~~
polymatter
I agree with your broad argument, but it isn't clear to me if you are
referencing actual studies. If you are, please at least state how you are
finding them and/or the journals in which they are published so that others
can do so too.

~~~
foobarbazqux
They're article titles, Google finds them easily.

~~~
dalke
Yeah, I thought the part where I said "journal article" sufficed, and that a
trivial Google search would verify all of them. For what it's worth, I found
the papers through PubMed searches.

I'm surprised sometimes the lengths people will go through in order to not
admit they can be wrong.

------
VLM
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.

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.

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.

~~~
btilly
_Bad story design..._

I disagree. If you're trying to tell a compelling story, you want to reinforce
the story that you're trying to tell in every way that you can. That makes it
more compelling, and sells more page views.

The danger being, of course, that making reasoned decisions based on
compelling story lines is dangerous. But this article isn't in that business -
it wants to sell page views.

~~~
clavalle
Journalists have a responsibility to the public that goes beyond page views.
That is what makes them journalists.

~~~
btilly
If you wish to be consistent and say that the authors of the articles in
virtually every blog of note are not journalists, then I will agree.

Unfortunately lots of people who have nothing resembling "journalistic
integrity" make a living that way. If you're bored, you can turn on Fox News
and see how quickly you can identify one.

------
jdmitch
_Hurt 's study enrolled only full-term babies so the possible effects of
prematurity did not skew the results._

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?

~~~
jlgreco
Yeah, I don't really get that part either. Prematurity is something that is
itself heavily studied; prematurity with crack seems like the logical thing to
study.

~~~
jasonlotito
> prematurity with crack seems like the logical thing to study

It is a logical thing to study, and most likely is being studied, by someone
else. After all, this study wasn't looking at premature babies. That doesn't
prematurity with crack isn't a problem, only a different problem.

~~~
jlgreco
My issue is less with what the experiment studied and more with how it was
summarized (particularly by the headline).

------
ctdonath
tl;dr - "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city
children than gestational exposure to cocaine."

~~~
bittired
Damn lies and statistics, though. Being poor does not cause lower IQ, nor does
lower IQ cause you to be poor. However, you'll find a lot of lower IQ people
at poverty level. You can't guarantee that any college candidate that is poor
is not going to excel, so poverty, sex, race, religion, sexual orientation,
should have absolutely nothing to do with acceptance into any organization,
assuming that everything else is equal, which it isn't. Unfortunately
clothing, shared experience and knowledge, language, etc. significantly
influence testing and decisions.

~~~
rayiner
So the kids in the study were selected because their parents were poor, and
the average IQ of the kids in the study was around 80. That certainly signals
a correlation, and since these are kids and don't have agency over their
economic situation, it suggests a direction of causation too.

~~~
bittired
Logically money should have no direct affect on intellectual capacity (e.g.
see my other argument about taking the money away and giving it to someone
else).

In this case, I think the causation is in the other direction. Over time,
people with less intellectual capacity will be less successful, and therefore
poorer. That is rational. The other direction is irrational.

~~~
rayiner
It depends on how you ascribe causation to hereditary factors. Does it make
sense to say that a 4 year old is poor because of his low IQ? I don't think
so, because a 4 year old has no agency over his economic circumstances.

~~~
btilly
_Does it make sense to say that a 4 year old is poor because of his low IQ?_

No.

But it does make sense to say that a 4 year old is both poor and has a low IQ
because his parents do. And this applies whether you believe that his low IQ
is due to heredity or a poor environment caused by his parents.

------
KMag
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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

------
Almaviva
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.

~~~
lancewiggs
The results of IQ tests are strongly driven by poverty as well.

~~~
jjindev
Related: Six Brain-Damage Scourges That Cripple IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa

[http://www.amren.com/news/2012/04/six-brain-damage-
scourges-...](http://www.amren.com/news/2012/04/six-brain-damage-scourges-
that-cripple-iq-in-sub-saharan-africa/)

~~~
ZeroGravitas
That's a fun comment thread. Poe's Law illustrated beautifully.

------
Alex3917
"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."

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.
[https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/227744.pdf](https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/227744.pdf)

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.

~~~
napoleond
_1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age
seven that 7 in 20 would have_

No I wouldn't, because:

a) I doubt the age distribution for "kids who see people get shot in a year"
is constant. The linked article doesn't include age distributions, but they
surveyed children up to age 17, and I would expect many more 15 year-olds to
see people get shot than 7 year-olds.

b) I doubt the system is stochastic. It's probably more likely for the 1 in 20
from year 1 to see another few of the 7 shots in those 7 years (due to
geographic and socio-economic factors) than it is for the other 19.

In other words, even for a country where gun violence is rampant, a study
population where 35% of children below 7 have seen someone get shot is far
from average.

~~~
Alex3917
Good points. In terms of lifetime prevalence, that study says that,
"Similarly, 3.5 percent of 2- to 5-year-olds had witnessed a shooting during
their lifetimes, whereas more than one in five 14- to 17-year-olds (22.2
percent) had witnessed a shooting."

So the population in question is definitely no where near average, my was just
that strictly in terms of the amount of violence witnessed, the differences
probably aren't as great as one would otherwise assume.

~~~
rlanday
What the hell!? One in five teenagers has witnessed someone being shot? I must
live a sheltered life…

------
chrischen
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?

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.

~~~
yusefnapora
It seems like what's most likely is that you didn't read the article
correctly. They were measuring the IQ of the children, not the parents. These
children didn't 'end up' poor; they started life that way. Their IQ was then
10 to 20 points below average by the time they were four, regardless of the
parents' cocaine usage. Or are you suggesting that four year olds with low IQ
are responsible for their place in society and the poverty of their parents?

~~~
chrischen
IQ most likely has a genetic factor to it. Otherwise, evolution would be
independent of IQ and our society would not have shown an increase in IQ over
time (which studies have shown to be true). So no, I did not misread the
article.

------
DanielBMarkham
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."

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.

Maybe I missed it.

~~~
undoware
It wasn't in the article -- the past few years have been disruptive in the
social sciences because of multiple replicated studies that show stress,
including poverty stress (which is a well-quantified phenomenon) have a
profound impact on working memory ("how much RAM your brain has").

Google it. I first read about it in the Economist, but really, it's where the
conversation starts these days.

Brain damage is one of the main mechanisms by which poverty passes itself down
to subsequent generations.

------
brownbat
The lede is buried a bit:

"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children
than gestational exposure to cocaine," Hurt said at her May lecture.

------
undoware
TL;DR "White folks attack wrong devil, again. Lots of black folks dead or
suffering, again."

It isn't science that's racist. What's racist is the thousands of brilliant
minds that took _THIS LONG_ 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.

That's all it takes to destroy a community. That and some SWAT boots.

------
jrochkind1
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.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure)

What's perhaps more important to talk about is the demonstrated harm of
poverty and violence on children.

------
JulianMorrison
"Crack baby" ALWAYS was simply a synonym for "poor and black".

It turns out that racism harms its victims. Who knew?

~~~
rlanday
Do you think racism harms crack users more than their crack use?

------
callmeed
So, vitamins are actually _bad_ for you and there's really no such thing as a
'crack baby'.

It's a bad week for things I learned growing up in the 80s/90s ...

------
_m_a_u_r_i_c_e_
The study outcome is _poverty_ 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?

------
Brock_Lee
FYI, the information starts at paragraph 18.

------
twohey
_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._

It seems rather depressing to me that the college graduation rate by 23 is
under 10%. Talk about different worlds

------
raldi
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.

~~~
clavalle
That doesn't make a lot of sense since there are plenty of pregnant tobacco
smokers that don't smoke crack.

~~~
raldi
I'm not following; could you elaborate?

~~~
josephlord
The control group should be smokers not non-smokers and if all the cocaine
using group are also smokers the difference should be the effect of the
cocaine.

------
kingkawn
[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/booming/revisiting-the-
cra...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/booming/revisiting-the-crack-babies-
epidemic-that-was-not.html)

Great video from the nytimes on this story from may

------
lotsofcows
"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?

------
guard-of-terra
I guess it's time for a War on Poverty.

Make poverty illegal @ Jail anybody caught poor.

~~~
nullc
I thought we started that program in the 80s?

------
goggles99
_" Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children
than gestational exposure to cocaine," Hurt said at her May lecture._

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.

I think we have to look here at what it takes to succeed.

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.

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.

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).

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.

------
denysonique
Whats the TLDR of the article?

