You're Wrong About - Crack Babies

Episode Date: May 4, 2018

Sarah tells Mike about the long history of white anxiety over black motherhood. Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

You're supposed to be writing your emails at about a seventh grade level because I think those are the most responsible and mine are always tenth grade. Michael, tell me what do you remember about the crack baby phenomenon? So my understanding of crack babies is that in the 90s, during the crack epidemic, there were mothers who were addicted to crack and their babies were basically born addicted. So you had hospitals that were inundated with this problem that they didn't know how to solve, which was babies who were born with withdrawal symptoms. And so these poor kids were suffering in the first moments of their life because they were going through withdrawals from crack.

I'm going to take us back slightly in time to 1986, which is kind of the start of all this, when Spin Magazine has a feature called Crack, a Tiffany drug at Woolworth prices. And it was the first feature article on crack and the first time that a lot of Americans, a lot of white people in America had heard of crack. Well, when did the crack epidemic start? Like, how much of a lag time was this? Well, this was about a year, I think, after it started really appearing in significant quantities or as something that the police knew to pay attention to. Was the writer of the Spin article white?

He was black, which I think is why, well, actually, I mean, it was 1986. So I think a white writer would have gotten away with this at the time, but he had various lines, you know, he's writing about Harlem and the opening is, is this a jungle? Yikes. He talks about how apparently some crack users started free-basing after Richard Pryor set himself on fire while free-basing in 1979. And people were like, oh, that sounds pretty good. Maybe. Or that sounds like, I don't know what the logic is, but there is a part of you that I think responds when you see something in the news about people doing some new drug epidemic. You're like, well, it must be pretty good.

It's like celebrities wearing ugg boots. You're like, maybe I should dress these too. Yeah. And so apparently, according to this article, that was kind of one of the first moments in the movement, I guess you would call it. It's free-basing cocaine, right? That's the whole thing where you put it in a spoon and you do the lighter thing and it's like a much more condensed, pure version of cocaine, right? That's what crack is. Well, I learned a lot about crack, actually. Well, researching this and it's a little bit more complicated than that, Michael. No. Yeah. So the reason, and let me guess, actually,

I'll start. I'll read you this passage from the spin article. So he writes, when the price of coke dropped nearly two years ago due to a national cocaine glut, crack gained a lot of momentum. Some, quote, dope boy, the Harlem terminology for a young drug pusher, got the idea that a lot of money could be made if he bought an ounce of cocaine going for $1,900 to $2,000 today and made and packaged his own free base, take away the exclusivity mystery and danger surrounding free base, and place it in the hands of the average Joe, Tiffany drugs at Woolworth prices. So the narrative that comes out in this article is that coke gets cheap because of supply and demand. It's a commodity. Commodities fluctuate in price

and during a period when there's kind of a lot of it, some thoughtful entrepreneur is like, wait a minute, I could have a bigger profit margin if I distribute it this way versus just in its peer form. And so there's also a nice description of how to make your own crack if you are so inclined. And so this is, he's got an interview with a dealer named Gary Martin, and the quotes are, the way I've made base says Martin is to get a little shake bottle similar to a thermometer but shorter, a half gram of cocaine, a little bit of baking soda, which cleans the cut off the coke and a little water inside. You cover the top and place it into a pot of boiling water and let it boil from three to five minutes. I also love, by the way,

that it says from three to five minutes. It's very precise, like a little recipe. It is, that's a little recipe. And it says after that, you take it out and since it's in its purest form, you won't see anything but clear liquid. You take a few ice cubes, crush them, dropping a few chips inside the shake bottle and the remainder around the outside of it until the cocaine cools. After that, you pour the substance onto a silk scarf, which strains out any remaining baking soda. Sometimes it solidifies in pieces and sometimes it's in a big ball. If that happens, you take a razor blade and cut it up and that's crack. And so I was a child in the 90s and I feel like crack was something that I heard about without having any real idea what it was and also

because I didn't really wonder or care. I was just like, crack, that's something all the adults are afraid of currently. A lot of what I know about cocaine I learned from Scarface. And so also, in order to consume crack, you needed, the police in this article say that they call, you know, sucking the glass dick. You need a glass pipe. Because it has to get to a high temperature, right? For this, for it to sort of break down. And then you can't have any old household lighter. You have to have a little butane torch or something like that. And so the crack house rises because you're not going to maybe make this much of an outlay for your own equipment. So you need a place to go and rent essentially the use of your paraphernalia and go smoke up.

So in 1986, like white America learns that crack exists, but this is pre-crack babies, right? Well, it's pre them knowing about crack babies, but it's the year after the first and really one of the more influential studies and the only studies that's going to be carried out on crack babies for a while appears. And so Ira Chasnoff, who is a pediatrician in Chicago, publishes an article in 1985, the New England Journal of Medicine. And it's actually about cocaine use because according to what I've read, crack didn't really hit it big in Chicago. It was more of a New York drug. Cocaine use and crack use have the same effect on a developing fetus. If you're pregnant and you snort some nice Hollywood cocaine or you smoke some crack in New York, it's going to have the

same effect on your baby. Your body doesn't care about what race of drug you're using. But so Ira Chasnoff, a pediatrician in Chicago in 1985, publishes a study that he did on the babies of 23 women who had exposed them to cocaine while they were in the uterus. And his findings was that they were less friendly, less social, didn't interact as much with parents, just less well socialized and displayed these interpersonal problems that he attributed to drug exposure. How old were these kids? None of them were out of toddlerhood at the time of this study. So young children that are born to mothers that are addicted to cocaine have severe behavioral and mental problems. I don't even think all of them exhibited severe

problems, but he noticed this trend. One of the issues with the study is that he has no control group that he's studying them against. And it's a study of 23 babies, which is not very many babies. And so what happens is that this is published, it doesn't get that much attention as medical journal things don't tend to get. And then the public starts to develop anxieties. And 1986 comes and the spin feature comes out and crack becomes something that appears a lot in mainstream news and becomes, I think when we talk about the crack epidemic in this time, it's also a way of talking about white America's fears of black Americans and black poverty and quote the inner cities. And so crack baby becomes a way of saying black baby. And so this one study is done in 1985,

white people start getting afraid of crack. We are afraid of the inner cities. And we start seeing this rhetoric develop about the crack babies. And my perception of crack babies growing up in the 90s was, and this is also a debunkable thing, is when I was a kid, I used to work trauma life in the ER with my mom all the time. And I remember an episode where they had a baby that was born to a woman who was really high when she went in delivery and I don't even actually know on what. And they had footage of him like being so tiny that I think they were trying to do chest compressions on him and his the bones in his chest were so small that they just sort of bent inward. And the baby didn't die from that, but he was just this incredibly tiny,

fragile, sad little baby. It was a great piece of don't get addicted to drugs, Sarah, propaganda. That's the that's what I remember seeing. And I remember having that same the sense of it as a kid at that time of they're all these babies and they're born addicted to drugs and nobody knows what to do and it's really sad for the babies. The rhetoric that I was not exposed to at the time, and that seems to have been more present in the late 80s, early 90s, was this idea that the problem with crack babies was not just that they were being born addicted to drugs or that they were being born premature and would have all these health issues, but that they had this problem with socialization that's pointed to in the initial study and that they have

that they're aggressive and they don't know how to play and they don't know how to interact with each other. There's a UCLA pediatrician around this time named Judy Howard who tells a Newsweek article that what makes us human beings capable of discussion or reflection has been wiped out in crack babies. It just seems like it's perfectly designed to play into racial fears. There's a white population that is separated physically from the black population at that point because of white flight. Black people are sort of exoticized and then it's like you plant this little nugget where it's like well what's really happening is there's so many black people whose mothers are addicted to cocaine that they're incapable of socializing. I don't think that people would say

oh black people are all having crack babies necessarily, but it just plays into this idea that they're so different than us, the gaps are unbridgeable. I definitely don't want my kids at the same school with their kids because their kids can't even socialize. It just seems like it would play into this widening gap between white America and black America that was already so bad at that time. Yeah and it feels like this is one of the ways that racism without racists is able to function where you know this woman who this quote is from, I do not for a second believe that she lay awake and you know in bed at night thinking I know what I'll tell the Newsweek people so that I can incept the rest of America into being afraid of black children, but I think in some subconscious

way you know if you're the progenitor of that quote and you're saying something that's just so, I mean saying that the things that make us human are not present in these babies or these little kids like if we have white medical professionals and academics talking about this because they were the ones who had the advantages that allowed them to me in these positions of authority to then comment on other people's children and draw conclusions from their studies of them, then there's going to be some racial bias operating in your mind and then another thing that becomes relevant is that it's necessary sometimes to say really damning things about a population that you're working with if you're going to try and get funding to do anything to mitigate the effects of

this thing that they're suffering from and it feels like that's a hard thing to do too if you're going to try and ring money out of the government how do you say this is a really dire situation we need help these kids are almost beyond help but not really they're not don't be afraid of them be afraid of what's going to happen if you don't help them I feel like that's very hard to not be read as okay we're afraid of them now this reminds me of my time working in human rights when you realize that all of the incentives at a human rights NGO are to make your problem the worst problem in the world so if you work at a human trafficking NGO your incentive is to say human trafficking is big it's rising it's huge it's affecting 50% of the world's population but

it's also fixable because that is your entire case for funding your organization is this problem is big it is unprecedented but we can solve it and so I'm sure that doctors and researchers have exactly the same incentives that they're not necessarily bad people but they also want to get attention to their issue they want to raise awareness and the way that you raise awareness is by talking about things in grandiose ways that make people turn and look at it so Charles Krauthammer always something interesting is going to follow when you hear that name oh yeah this will be nuanced and empathic yes so in 1989 in the washington post he writes quote the inner city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror a bio underclass a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies

whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth they will grow up to be a race of subhuman drones whose future is close to them from day one theirs will be a life of certain suffering of probable deviance of permanent inferiority the dead babies may be the lucky ones holy shit holy shit dude and I think that what happens actually is that we make these horrific grim racist predictions in language that really I mean reading that you're like what a great way to incite genocide yeah it really is I mean he's like always I'm sure that he would deny that there's any racial tone to that he would say that it's just a coincidence that all of these cocaine babies happen to be African American but looking at it now or I'm sure looking at it then even it's like so fucking

obvious how much of a dog whistle that is oh my god I mean yeah and then what happens is that you know we make these grim predictions these horrific racist grim predictions and then they don't really happen there was not a wave of subhuman violent impossible to socialize kids who were growing up in the 90s and taking over the schools this is 1989 and this is the period when it seems like people start like the there's the first whispers in the mid 80s we start hearing about crack in the mid 80s late 80s is when the crack baby emerges there's no actual cluster of symptoms that is technically associated with it it's just do you test positive for cocaine exposure when you're born so it has nothing to do with how you behave or how sick you are or anything else

but it's a figure that you're able to both be afraid of and for Americans could be terrified of these crack babies and how they're going to grow up and what kind of subhuman wave of children and adolescents they're going to be but at the same time you can punish their parents and their communities yeah and then even the people who are characterizing in it in way of saying we're not saying these people are not human we're not saying that these cases are beyond fixing then the narrative that mainstream white America and the people with the money to spend on this sort of thing are going to respond to is there is a wave of crack babies and they are growing up and they're going to be in schools and they will be in schools with your children well

so much of white flight was driven by schools anyway right that there's better schools and suburbs and a lot of parents weren't necessarily saying i don't want my kids in school with black kids they would just say i don't want my kids in bad schools and those bad schools quote unquote coincidentally were also the schools that were majority minority and so that gave them a very convenient cover for moving out to the suburbs and keeping their kids in all white schools yeah it's interesting that this becomes a racial panic when i hear moms doing a bunch of cocaine i think like rich upper west side white ladies i think one of the things that happens with drug use in this context and it's similar actually to the way that we talk about abortion and restrict

access to it now is that wealthy white women are using coke during this time and some of them are pregnant but they don't require social services and they're not in a position of their pediatrician knowing what they're doing or needing help from them because of their drug use or because of something relating to their drug use so this this is something i learned while i was researching abortion access and it blew my mind private physicians like any a regular old physician you know a wealthier woman can go to are allowed to perform abortions in office and if they do something like i think a very state by state but i think in texas if they do fewer than 100 in a year you can do 99 abortions in a year and not have to become technically an abortion provider

you can just keep quietly providing them under the table so if you're wealthy in one of these states where there are ridiculous restrictions on abortion access you can go and quietly get your abortion from your private doctor and nobody has to know about it and nobody has to make you run the gauntlet that you would have to do if you didn't have those resources and you didn't have a private doctor and you just had to go to the clinic like everybody else and have people scream at you and have to watch videos about your baby's hands and how they are opening and closing and full of god's love this reminds me of reporting that i was doing recently where i've been interviewing all these stigma researchers and somebody was telling me that the stigma against mothers who drink during

pregnancy so fetal alcohol syndrome that stigma is really bad like mothers who drink during pregnancy are not people that like we as a society venerate and so this doctor was telling me that a lot of people a lot of doctors don't screen for fetal alcohol syndrome because the mothers immediately are like what kind of person do you think i am but if they have a more adversarial relationship with their patient they will screen for it so african-american mothers are much more likely to be screened for fetal alcohol syndrome because they tend to have less rapport with their mostly white doctors so i wonder if there's something like that going on here too with the difference between crack and cocaine a mother who comes in with a toddler who's acting strange

if that mother is low income and black it seems like the doctor would be more likely to think hmm i wonder if she was using crack during pregnancy whereas if a white woman comes in with a toddler that's acting strange the doctor would be more likely to go hmm i wonder if it's ADHD and i think that's a huge part of this because what happens is that the so-called crack babies that are born you know with mothers who test positive for cocaine use or who have cocaine in their system when they're born they're not born addicted if you have a baby that is exposed to say heroin use in utero then they do deal with withdrawal after birth and that's something that the hospitals has to take care of that's not the case with cocaine use what we later find out

is that cocaine exposure leads to low birth weight and that's pretty much it so the later studies find that the effects of exposure to cocaine in the womb are this is a new york times article quote less severe than those of alcohol incomparable to those of tobacco so this is a later analysis of a pool of studies of 14 groups of cocaine exposed children 4419 and all ranging in age from 4 to 13 the analysis failed to show a statistically significant effect on IQ or language development in the largest of the studies IQ scores of exposed children averaged around four points lower at age seven than those of unexposed children so that's a different so small as to be statistically insignificant right so all this stuff about everything that makes them human

that didn't really pan out that it's not turning them into non people it's it's not good for them but it's not an existential threat to the family and america and everything else yeah there are several quotes from various people in articles debunking this saying that if you have a room full of kids and some of them have been exposed to cocaine and utero and some haven't then you can't tell the difference even as a clinician there's a quote from a woman who worked in a kindergarten program for crack babies at the time saying that became a lightning rod for the media because they had to come and get their images of the crack babies and the crack kids and they would come and what they asked her for was footage of children trembling because that was one of the

things that they had been told was a symptom and so then in these later articles offering the debunking information they talk about well you know there's this one mother who has a um has a child with these behavioral issues who was exposed to cocaine in the womb but that's because he's autistic so nice so you look at the descriptions of of the crack babies in the 80s and what they talk about is that they don't have what they need to be human they don't look you in the eye they don't like to be held they get over stimulated really easily some of these kids were probably on the autism spectrum right or just difficult kids or squirmy kids once you exit the frame of this must be crack doing this to them you can imagine 50 million reasons why kids would be acting strangely

at that age this is probably going to be another theme for us that there are times in America where we're like why are kids acting strangely and the answer is well it could be any of 100 different factors and the answer we want is it is this one thing that we can then stamp out and so what comes from that is that in also in a way that is emerging as a pattern for us we attempt to combat this one thing and we end up developing methodologies that are harmful to children in some capacities hospitals during the late 80s and early 90s develop strategy where if they have a baby who's born and test positive for cocaine then they're like okay this is a crack baby so what we have to do is swaddle him and put him in a dark room and confiscate him from his

family and not talk to him or interact with him because crack babies don't like that no fucking way so hospitals started doing this stuff when they detected cocaine in the baby yeah and they called them border babies like boarding house so how long would they keep them under those conditions that sounds like a terrible way to spend your first couple days of life they would keep them that way sometimes for several weeks and one of the things I find most fascinating in the history of our cultural understanding of mother baby development is that in for example Bellevue Hospital in New York in the 19 teens and 20s we keep this is a problem we have as a species we we learn about one thing and then we get really over enthusiastic like we're kind of

we're a nation of Kramer's you know who every day is like it's all going to be levels cherry you know so we learn about germs we discovered germs we're like oh fuck germs so for example at Bellevue people who took care of infants who were in the hospitals because they had been orphaned or found in a foundling home type of award hospitals prided themselves on handling the babies as little as possible and they would prop feed them which meant that they had an apparatus that would lower a bottle that the baby could feed from so the baby didn't need to be held oh my god yes like a little horrible robot arm yeah the goal was to touch and handle the baby as little as possible and so what happens is that a lot of these babies exhibit what is called failure to thrive and they have all of

the physical resources they need but they sort of waste and wither away and nobody knows why and so for a while they're like well it's malnutrition and then science makes some strides in the forms of nutrition and we know that the babies are getting adequate nutrition they're like well it's infection that's why the babies are dying and yet the more we try and avoid contaminating them with germs the more they seem to be dying of things related to germs and finally pediatricians and scientists come in and are like babies actually like being handled like babies need to be held and touched and looked at to be happy humans and so at Bellevue for instance they institute a new policy where there's there's a sign up in the room where they kept these infants

that they previously prided themselves on touching as little as possible that said you cannot enter this room without touching a baby and nurses were instructed to to touch them and to touch them when they didn't need to be doing so for a functional reason but just you know to hold them and interact with them and they start doing better and they start dying less and then in the 80s we have kind of this return of the sterile room methodology of caring for newborns where we're like okay these are not regular babies these are crack babies and we need to leave them the fuck alone and not touch them and not interact with them potentially for the first few weeks of their life and then after that since we've seized them from their parents since their moms are these dangerous

crack using moms then we're going to put them in state custody or they're going to maybe go to a foster home or something like that and what we know which I feel like I'm not generalizing to say is that weeks of sustained non-interaction with other human beings followed by becoming a ward of the state followed by going with whoever is desperate enough to take care of one of these crack babies that we're hearing about on the news who apparently are going to become you know who are not going to be human and are inevitably going to be violent anti-social murderers the people who are taking in the crack babies are either saints or people who really need the extra government money and so you're you're gonna end up with a child who is affected by that being the circumstances

of the the very start of their life so in order to combat this specter of the demon of crack we create our own within the system I think there's something here about we focus on the things that we do know about and we never focus on the things we don't know about that it's very easy to say well we know this one thing is making children worse so we're going to do everything we can to prevent that one bad thing but of course for any child there's 50 million things making their lives worse and 50 million things making their lives better many of which we don't actually know very much about and don't know how to measure or just haven't discovered yet and so it's like well we're gonna take this one thing among many and we're gonna do everything we can to prevent that one thing

even if overall it makes the kids worse and also and it's something that it's I think was people definitely had the tools to realize even at the time disproportionately affected mothers of color because white women and women of color use drugs to exactly the same extent everybody likes drugs you know there are some people who don't do them but and if we're especially if we're talking about an addictive substance it's not something that is going to affect you differently physiologically based on race regardless of however much various conservative pundits would like to believe that that's not true this leads then to additional material for incarcerating women of color because then if you are coming into a hospital you know for a pre-natal appointment or if you're going to

give birth and you are seen as someone who's potentially through your own selfishness right giving wave to this epidemic of super predator inhuman crack babies we're gonna then and the rhetoric of course at the time also is you know pretty soon they're gonna be school age and then they'll be invading our schools and then what what are we gonna do and so we have another reason for the law to come down like the hammer of Thor on expectant mothers of color and laws are put on the books in the 90s in several states including in Wisconsin where I currently am recording this episode redefining legally what a child is according to state statutes as an unborn child previously you couldn't accuse someone of abusing their unborn child but now we open the door to

being able to do so legally and so we see the effects of those laws still where women can be brought to trial and have an attorney appointed for their unborn child to potentially incarcerate them based on their drug use having constituted a form of child abuse and endangered their child's life I guess you can call this a chapter in the generations long othering of african-americans right that yeah there's always this idea that african-americans are fundamentally different and that the way they raise their kids is different the way that they eat is different the drugs they use is different because that was already so primed in american life especially for everybody in power again it's like what do you not need evidence to believe sounds like here it fits the same pattern

as the satanic panic where you don't need all that much evidence to believe that african-american mothers are bad and that african-americans are scary and using these scary drugs that white people have never heard of you don't need great evidence for that it's like these little tiny spikes of evidence are enough to shift policy there's all these other things that we learn that don't result in shifts in policy right that we have high domestic violence rates among unemployed men but we don't see a huge shift in policy to say oh let's make sure that every unemployed man in america gets whatever domestic violence training we don't have those big shifts because it's like well you know what's really going on and let's let's find more information and let's understand

this problem a little bit more whereas whenever it comes to african-americans it's like the minute we get a blip of data it's like oh my god their kids are in danger let's change laws immediately like it's fascinating to me how drastic the policy response was on so little information or what's basically a collection of anecdotes and i think that what happens too is that we get really excited as white people you know generalizing about our culture what we see what we seem to really love is if there's some sort of some sort of anecdotal or pretty unsubstantiated data that points to a problem in communities of color where the risk where the a potential response is incarceration we just start rubbing our hands together we're like oh yes if we can prosecute more people and

solve a problem by putting people in prison like let's do that one right this crackdown is going to fix it all the previous ones haven't resulted in any good outcomes but this one is really going to crack the case if we had been looking at this as correlative data and saying okay these kids who are in homes where they're exposed to crack in the womb and crack also corresponds to a whole cluster of socioeconomic things based on where we are observing it being used at this time like we can also connect it to maternal health and we can connect it to malnutrition both for the pregnant mother and for the baby when it's born we can connect it to the fact that these are our babies that are living in you know homes that are often impoverished or where they don't have

parents who are able to be consistent primary caregivers because they're busy working or because they're taking you know they're being arrested and stuff and taken away families are being separated we have all these complicated factors that we can look at and say maybe america has failed these communities and these families and we need to do all sorts of things to figure out how to help people have healthier home lives and be able to have to live in conditions that they're able to bring a baby into and if it's you know maybe born with a low birth weight to help it get over that initial hump and grow up healthy we're like no crack it's crack i'm pretty sure it's crack i guess the overall insight is that if you really wanted to help low-income babies or ethnic minority babies there's

lots of stuff you could do that like isn't shitty and would actually be helping mothers you could be giving them more money you could be giving them foods delivered to their door so they don't have to take time off work to go buy baby food there's a million things that you could do they're like hey this is a population that's struggling like let's do things to help out this population and working with that population you know you could talk to low-income african-american mothers and say hey what support do you need but of course that never occurs to people in power people in power always like oh these people are failing these people are different it always goes into this punitive frame where it's never carrots and sticks it's always just stick stick stick stick

i've also been what been watching again the first season of law and order which is just every time i watch it it gets more conservative and reactionary the end of the story is always somebody gets put away and it's not even we don't know where they're going we don't really talk that much on law and order about what are the conditions of incarceration how is this person going to be punished what's it going to be like what is life like in prison what's it like to try and get out do criminals can they be rehabilitated like i don't think dick wolf thinks that but it's not a conversation that tends to come up it's just you send them away it's not even about where they're going it's that they're not going to be here anymore they're going somewhere else

and it's an outcome that's so narratively satisfying that i think the more we get accustomed to consuming that satisfying narrative the less we question it when we see it or see aspects of it happening in the news or around us i think there's this tendency to think that sort of it's only pop culture oh it's just a tv show what does it really mean come on it's just a disney movie what does it really mean about gender relations whatever but i think that old shows like this are such a great diary entry of what we were thinking at the time what was the mainstream consensus and i think this demonstrates the extent to which this punitive get tough on crime war on drugs wave in the 80s and 90s really was the consensus view there was not a whole lot of institutional questioning

of the war on drugs back then and i think shows like law and order and the tens of millions of cop shows and cop movies that we have are a sign of the extent to which we've all sort of accepted this framing that there are bad people and good people and we're rooting out and finding the bad people and that's what cops do in this whole wave we were always kind of telling ourselves that it wasn't racial we were always telling ourselves that it was just about crime it had nothing to do with race we're a post-racial society blah blah blah the same way we say that about ourselves now when looking back it's really obvious to see that like well it was only one group of people that was being affected by the war on drugs crime everything else the thing

about the crack baby is that i think white america got addicted to the crack baby and that was really one of our drugs of choice at the time if we're talking about reactionary media because i think something happens in the human brain when you're reading a story or a headline that really hits that sweet spot of pity and fear you can punish the community to save the baby you can punish the baby to save your community all of your fears and your anxieties and your various prejudices get sort of caramelized you know i mean it it's like crack it's like i don't want to put you in prison it's just i have to because i care so much about these babies i'm so i just care i have my heart goes out to these babies so much that i'm really gonna need to

incarcerate their mothers for years i'm so sorry i mean it's just it's perfect because it allows you to be really punitive and also maintain this fiction that you're really only in it for the children so you said that their start to come out these meta analyses of what is really the effect of cocaine on children so when do these start coming out these start coming out in the mid 90s at which point the original babies in the study are about you know 10 years old and they're basically fine and yeah so here's a quote from a new republic article from a couple years back by Nora Kaplan bricker pregnant women all over the country mostly if they were poor and showed up in public hospitals had their blood tested if they tested positive for cocaine there were federal

prosecutors waiting it was a new angle of attack on overwhelmingly poor women of color and another thing that i read recently that to me kind of sums this up is from a book called blind injustice which basically breaks down chapter by chapter a lot of the reasons why wrongful convictions are able to take place what are the conversations happening in prosecutors offices how are they run because sometimes wrongful convictions are often wrongful convictions take place because there's something like dna testing not being far enough along at the time of the trial to give an accurate result about what happened but sometimes it's just because of the way prosecutors offices are run and so for living in a society where the goal is to put as many people

away for as long as possible then it's part of our culture and the quote from this that to me sum this up is nobody ever won a campaign for district attorney or judge with a policy of being soft on crime right and i think the crack baby meets tough on crime in the late 80s and 90s was just this match made in heaven i think as far as if you are in the business of putting people in prison then the crack baby becomes a great way to do it going back to the question about did these laws follow directly from the crack baby fears these laws that allowed women to be incarcerated for endangering their unborn baby their fetus i think there's too much of a ripple effect to really draw a straight line from that but the crack baby stories provided a point of entry for this kind

of really not to say overzealous but enthusiastic prosecution and i think that we're just the more we're putting people in prison the more comfortable we feel the more we feel that we're fixing society and taking the bad elements out and protecting the good elements there's also a thing i feel like a structural weakness of media is that it's very difficult to say let's wait and get more evidence the correct response to that 1985 study was basically look it's a small sample size there's no control we don't know what the phenomenon is let's hold off find out what the phenomenon is and then let's start legislating about it but that's that's a kind of complex and nuanced argument or at least too complex and nuanced for people like charles krauthammer and so it's very difficult to write

that column that isn't necessarily let's do this or let's do that it's let's do nothing and let's gather more information that's always a really boring argument no one's ever gonna write a hot take saying i don't have a position on universal basic income until we do three or four or five pilots and then i'll decide what my position is nobody can write that take the take has to be here's the evidence here's the conclusion it sounds like the only debunking came when there was good evidence that it was bullshit but when there's bad evidence that it's true that's a much more difficult argument to make yeah and it's not a good defensive position to be in like if you're the person if you are you know arguing against someone who's saying we're creating a generation

of super predator crack babies and your argument has to be we don't know let's gather more evidence you know that doesn't sound great to john q driveway reading his newspaper in the morning so how did the ship start to turn around on this like when did the hospitals drop these policies when did things cool down prosecutorially i mean i think hospitals dropped their policies of physically isolating crack babies around the time that these new studies come out in the mid 90s i don't know if anyone's still doing that i wouldn't be surprised that there were places in america where that was still policy because it's a big country full of weirdos but um i don't think that it has cooled down prosecutorially i think one of the overarching things that we're looking at and

that will continue to come up for us is that we have these faulty narratives these things that are essentially not junk science but junk story that took hold of the american imagination for a period you know in the 70s or in the 80s and that we later debunked and that certain uh you know say the medical establishment changed its best practices in order to reflect but that altered our culture enough that only felt safe when we were overzealously prosecuting people in terms of incarceration the numbers have only been increasing and america is now a country where one in 100 people is incarcerated and i think that these this was one of the narratives that helped us down this road that we were already certainly on in the 80s but have only gone farther and farther

down in the intervening decades that this was one of the stories that that helped bring us here and we haven't come back are we still prosecuting mothers yeah i mean the cocaine mom law was taken off the books in wisconsin recently because of a high profile case here but they're especially in alabama they i mean they also alabama recently repealed a couple of laws but these are these laws got put on the books in many states in the 90s and it's easier to make law than it is to change it especially if you're talking about being tough on crime especially if you're talking about punishing populations that the public is afraid of and alleging to do something in the interest of babies and children it's much easier to make law than it is to repeal it and so there have been

cases there was a case in alabama that was also covered extensively in mother jones where a woman had taken i think a valium while she was pregnant and because of that yielded a positive drug test because of that had her baby seized from her no way at birth yeah and the wisconsin case that led to the cocaine mom law being repealed was based on this woman a pregnant woman had gone in a pregnant white woman no less had gone into a prenatal appointment and they had asked her you know do you have a history of drug dependency anything like that and she voluntarily provided information about a past drug dependency that she had that was over for her and that was enough information for them to come down on her and to use that law as a way to do it it's it's a little bit

like the the adage about a lie can travel around the world before the truth has time to put its shoes on what we often see if we know to look for it is that these narratives gain cultural traction we the public become really attached to them and then we may kind of move on and forget and the average american probably isn't walking around feeling afraid of crack babies anymore but the laws that get enacted during those periods remain unless somebody has the energy and the time and the money to take them down and that's much harder to do than to create new legislation and an atmosphere of fear and anxiety and crowd hammer fueled racism yeah it's like the response gallops ahead of the facts so far that the facts sort of fade into the distance

i still love law and order i will never be able to not love it but i used to think that it reflected some form of legal reality in a way that i now know it doesn't and i remember the first time i got really really spent time you know reading briefs reading trial transcripts reading actual actual legal language reading the the text of american law was you know which was when i was gonna be a lawyer for a hot second and then the more i read it the more i had the feeling that you have when you're a teacher and you read a paper and you're just like how long did it take you to write this like i want to believe that you worked hard but i don't think that you were you know our kind of corpus of american law if you and if you look at it through the lens of these kinds of scares and

these stories you see that it's this grab bag of of leftover traces from our various societal fears and anxieties and you can look at a law that was you know put on the books and and whatever year and look at what are the societal factors that are a play at this time and be like this is not based on an objective reflection on human behavior or what act what or what is going to benefit the communities that this law is going to affect this is based on what we were most afraid of at this time this is based on what we didn't need evidence in order to believe so another episode with a sad ending i know the miserable legacy like i knew this was going to be a depressing episode i didn't know it's tentacles we're going to stretch this far into the present um i can read something that

will cheer us up please do this is from the spin article which has all of these little bracketed sections explaining what the very confusing lingo the people in it are using so this is a quote from one of the crack dealers that the journalist profiles and he's and i'll read the bracketed quote along with it crack dealer says here was a man who grew up a few blocks away from a used to be a dope fiend and became a multi-millionaire driving a new luxury car every week and sporting the flyest gear the nicest clothes i've ever seen and i figured if he can do it why can't i aw we're living in a in a in america where we don't know what the flyest gear means like we work we're so clueless about even the remote you know the tiniest amount of slang that

we need subtitles for it but we're still saying we know what's best for this community i'm i made it sad again i ruined it i also love that there's like the flyest gear would be really really easy to figure out what he means from context clues yeah he's saying he wants to earn money so he can buy the flyest gear it's like i wonder what he could mean like you don't actually need the glossary to figure out that he means clothing there it's not that difficult all right i think i feel like that's that's slightly happier now so yeah that americans read at a fourth grade level and we need if we need to be spelled out we can't learn anything from context clues yes i feel better