Crack-exposed children fared no worse than peers once socioeconomic background was controlled

Evidence

During the crack epidemic, the media reported stories of Black women who traded sex for crack cocaine. They were described as lacking maternal instincts and incapable of caring for their babies. This caricature reinforced the idea that Black women were innately dissolute when it came to sexuality and mothering. Numerous Black women were arrested for drug use during pregnancy on the grounds they would give birth to “crack babies,” who were predicted to cause major social problems—in sharp contrast to the largely empathetic response to the toll the opioid epidemic is currently taking on white families. Medical research has since definitively discredited the “crack baby” myth. A study that tracked more than one hundred babies born between 1989 and 1992 for two decades found that children exposed to crack cocaine in utero fared no worse than children with the same socioeconomic background whose mothers didn’t use drugs. The hardships these Black children faced were caused primarily by the structural legacies of slavery, poverty, and other social inequities, not their mothers’ stigmatized behavior. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 228

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing material on the opioid epidemic’s empathetic vs punitive framing disparity; also evokes anti-drug moral panics elsewhere (e.g. midwife’s tale medical-moral panics).