The Media's Meth Baby Mania

By Maia Szalavitz, STATS. Posted September 1, 2005.

When crack was the scariest drug of all, "crack babies" were the culmination of the terror. Columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote of them in 1989, "A cohort of babies is now being born whose future is closed to them from day one. Theirs will be a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority."

As it turns out, none of that was true. In fact, being labeled a "crack baby" appears to have done more harm to these children than the cocaine itself did. And with news stories popping up about "meth babies" in our latest drug panic, we seem to be about to repeat this shameful pattern.

Children born to mothers addicted to crack cocaine did have serious problems--but most of these were related to the fact that their mothers lacked prenatal care, were extremely poor and drank alcohol, smoked cigarettes and took other drugs as well as crack cocaine.

Women who do not stop using drugs or drinking during pregnancy tend to be those with long, complicated histories of victimization and mental illness (Over two thirds have survived childhood sexual abuse and/or are current victims of domestic violence, for example). It's undoubtedly a bad idea to use cocaine (or any drug, for that matter) during pregnancy--but the damage associated with prenatal cocaine exposure is less severe than that caused by alcohol and comparable to the harm done by cigarette smoking.

But being exposed to domestic violence as a baby or young child, in fact, is a far better predictor of behavior problems and low IQ than cocaine exposure in utero is. And, one study found that kids labeled "crack babies" (though they were actually not) were treated far worse than those who had not been tagged that way. When medical professionals thought they were dealing with a "crack baby," they interpreted normal behavior as abnormal and ascribed bad intentions to it.

Which brings us to the current methamphetamine panic. In a story with a headline that could have been pulled from the 1980s crack scare, "A Drug Scourge Creates its Own Form of Orphan" (7/11/05), Kate Zernike of the New York Times reported that 40% of child welfare officials say that methamphetamine has caused a rise in the number of kids taken into foster care; but the national numbers for those in fostercare (which go uncited in the Times article) have declined from 570,000 in 1999 to 523,000 in 2003--a period during which methamphetamine use was supposedly rising.

Foster care numbers often show a lag of several years in relation to drug problems because it takes time for people to become addicted, have children and then come to the attention of child welfare authorities. But during the crack epidemic, the number of kids in foster care went from 243,000 in 1982 to 400,000 in 1990 and it continued rising until 1999, despite the far earlier decline in crack use. So it's clear that if meth is causing an increase, it's nowhere near that associated with crack.

But foster care trends tend to be fed more by perceptions and theories than by the number of kids who are actually abused. Heavily reported instances of kids abused by dangerous parents (the case of Elisa Izquierdo in New York, for example) lead to increases in foster care admissions. Curiously, however, highly publicized cases of abuse in foster care usually don't lead to increased emphasis on "family preservation." Foster care trends, unsurprisingly, are also connected to poverty; but even so, some states tend to take more children from their families than others, regardless of poverty and regardless of drug use trends.

Unfortunately, foster care itself can do harm. According to Richard Wexler, Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, only 20% of kids leaving foster care do well by the standard measures of employment and education and mental health. A study by Casey Family Programs found that foster care kids have double the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder seen in Gulf War veterans.

Maia Szalavitz is a senior fellow at the media watchdog group STATS.

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