Debunking crack myths
How mothers and babies became scapegoats in the war on drugs
Archived article from Nov 5, 1999
By Caroline Yount
Crack mothers were an easy target. Poor, predominantly African-American and powerless, women who continued to use crack or cocaine during pregnancy became the symbol for everything that was wrong in America during the 1980s, says Drew Humphries, an associate professor of criminal justice on the Camden campus.
In her new book, "Crack Mothers: Pregnancy, Drugs and the Media" (Ohio State University Press), Humphries explores the making of a moral panic.
Before the crack-mother scare began in the late 1980s, medicine and criminal justice were typically at odds when it came to drug users. One treated those on drugs as patients, the other as criminals.
But as the media churned out story after story about "crack babies" -- exaggerating the instant addiction of crack and its threat to the health of women and children -- doctors and prosecutors in some states forged un-precedented alliances that led health providers to turn addicted pregnant women over to the police for arrest, trial and incarceration.
When it came to deterring drug use, however, these actions and their accompanying policies of zero tolerance and mandatory sentencing failed miserably, Humphries discovered in the course of her research. Instead of reducing drug use, they increased the sense of persecution among the urban poor and discouraged drug-addicted pregnant women from seeking prenatal care.
"The war on drugs encouraged officials to scapegoat the poor, blaming crack dealers and crack mothers for an array of problems," she says. "It was easier and far less costly, for example, to blame high infant-mortality rates in Washington, D.C., on women who used crack during pregnancy than to guarantee health care for all the district's poor residents."
The result of 10 years of research, "Crack Mothers" offers, in readable and often compelling language, a more balanced view of the women who use crack and the policies adopted to stop them.
With the help of tapes from the Television News Archive collection at Vanderbilt University (reportedly the world's most extensive and complete archive of television news), Humphries reviewed coverage of women and crime from 1980 to 1994. She found that the media portrayed drug addicts differently depending on their class and race. White middle-class women who used drugs generally received sympathetic treatment, whereas low-income minority women were typically depicted as mindlessly addicted and indifferent, at best, to the plight of their drug-exposed infants.
This media construction, Humphries argues, was based on mainstream desires and fears, not on medical findings."The early research was flawed and weak, but it was treated as fact," she says of reports that seemed to justify dragging women out of hospital beds and throwing them in jail. Later, doctors said that what they saw in their practices did not confirm the dire predictions of the research, but, at the time, practicing physicians tended to remain silent.
"Crack doesn't uniformly produce monsters," Humphries says. "What the media were saying was overblown." Estimates suggest that about 40 percent of crack-exposed infants exhibited deleterious effects. According to Humphries, these ranged from subtle to severe, although the media portrayed the most severe as the norm. In addition, considering the chaotic lifestyles and poor nutrition of the mothers and the lack of prenatal care they received, it was difficult to attribute health problems in infants specifically to cocaine, she says.
Humphries' biggest challenge in writing the book was deciphering the medical studies. She was scrupulous in her research, reading study after study, article after article -- a well-thumbed dictionary of medical terms always within arm's reach. She read about the effects of cocaine on rats, rabbits and sheep; pored over molecular studies; filled her office with boxes of medical research.
The early science tended to confirm reports of adverse effects for prenatal cocaine exposure. Doctors, however, soon began reassessing these earlier research studies and conducting new tests. "As the research got better, the number of negative effects that had been predicted or 'seen' declined," she points out.
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