Crack Babies
00:00You're supposed to be writing your emails at about a seventh grade level because I think thoseare 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 youhad 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 sufferingin the first moments of their life because they were going through withdrawals from crack.
00:50I'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 quantitiesor as something that the police knew to pay attention to.Was the writer of the Spin article white?
01:28He was black, which I think is why, well, actually, I mean, it was 1986. So I think a white writerwould have gotten away with this at the time, but he had various lines, you know, he's writingabout Harlem and the opening is, is this a jungle? Yikes.He talks about how apparently some crack users started free-basing after Richard Pryorset 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 thinkresponds when you see something in the news about people doing some new drug epidemic.You're like, well, it must be pretty good.
02:09It'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 firstmoments 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 spoonand 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 bitmore complicated than that, Michael. No. Yeah. So the reason, and let me guess, actually,
02:47I'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 youngdrug pusher, got the idea that a lot of money could be made if he bought an ounce of cocainegoing for $1,900 to $2,000 today and made and packaged his own free base, take away theexclusivity mystery and danger surrounding free base, and place it in the hands of theaverage Joe, Tiffany drugs at Woolworth prices. So the narrative that comes out in this article isthat coke gets cheap because of supply and demand. It's a commodity. Commodities fluctuate in price
03:29and 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 inits peer form. And so there's also a nice description of how to make your own crackif 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 bottlesimilar 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 itinto a pot of boiling water and let it boil from three to five minutes. I also love, by the way,
04:13that 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 chipsinside 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 bakingsoda. 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 Ifeel like crack was something that I heard about without having any real idea what it was and also
04:52because I didn't really wonder or care. I was just like, crack, that's something all the adults areafraid 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 houserises 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.
05:35So 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 ofthe more influential studies and the only studies that's going to be carried out on crack babiesfor a while appears. And so Ira Chasnoff, who is a pediatrician in Chicago, publishes an article in1985, the New England Journal of Medicine. And it's actually about cocaine use because accordingto 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 yousnort some nice Hollywood cocaine or you smoke some crack in New York, it's going to have the
06:26same 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 didon 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 todrug exposure. How old were these kids? None of them were out of toddlerhoodat the time of this study. So young children that are born to mothers that are addicted to cocainehave severe behavioral and mental problems. I don't even think all of them exhibited severe
07:12problems, but he noticed this trend. One of the issues with the study is that he has no controlgroup 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 medicaljournal things don't tend to get. And then the public starts to develop anxieties. And 1986 comesand the spin feature comes out and crack becomes something that appears a lot in mainstream newsand becomes, I think when we talk about the crack epidemic in this time, it's also a way of talkingabout 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,
08:06white people start getting afraid of crack. We are afraid of the inner cities. And we startseeing this rhetoric develop about the crack babies. And my perception of crack babies growing up inthe 90s was, and this is also a debunkable thing, is when I was a kid, I used to work trauma life inthe ER with my mom all the time. And I remember an episode where they had a baby that was born toa 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 compressionson 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,
08:54fragile, 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 samethe sense of it as a kid at that time of they're all these babies and they're born addicted todrugs and nobody knows what to do and it's really sad for the babies. The rhetoric that I was notexposed 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 addictedto drugs or that they were being born premature and would have all these health issues, but thatthey had this problem with socialization that's pointed to in the initial study and that they have
09:40that they're aggressive and they don't know how to play and they don't know how to interact witheach other. There's a UCLA pediatrician around this time named Judy Howard who tells a Newsweekarticle that what makes us human beings capable of discussion or reflection has been wiped outin crack babies. It just seems like it's perfectly designed to play into racial fears. There's awhite population that is separated physically from the black population at that point because ofwhite flight. Black people are sort of exoticized and then it's like you plant this little nuggetwhere it's like well what's really happening is there's so many black people whose mothers areaddicted to cocaine that they're incapable of socializing. I don't think that people would say
10:27oh black people are all having crack babies necessarily, but it just plays into this ideathat they're so different than us, the gaps are unbridgeable. I definitely don't want my kids atthe same school with their kids because their kids can't even socialize. It just seems like it wouldplay into this widening gap between white America and black America that was already so bad at thattime. Yeah and it feels like this is one of the ways that racism without racists is able to functionwhere you know this woman who this quote is from, I do not for a second believe that she lay awakeand you know in bed at night thinking I know what I'll tell the Newsweek people so that I canincept the rest of America into being afraid of black children, but I think in some subconscious
11:10way 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 littlekids like if we have white medical professionals and academics talking about this because they werethe ones who had the advantages that allowed them to me in these positions of authority to thencomment on other people's children and draw conclusions from their studies of them, thenthere's going to be some racial bias operating in your mind and then another thing that becomesrelevant is that it's necessary sometimes to say really damning things about a population thatyou're working with if you're going to try and get funding to do anything to mitigate the effects of
11:57this thing that they're suffering from and it feels like that's a hard thing to do too if you'regoing to try and ring money out of the government how do you say this is a really dire situationwe need help these kids are almost beyond help but not really they're not don't be afraid of thembe afraid of what's going to happen if you don't help them I feel like that's very hard to not beread as okay we're afraid of them now this reminds me of my time working in human rights whenyou realize that all of the incentives at a human rights NGO are to make your problem the worstproblem in the world so if you work at a human trafficking NGO your incentive is to say humantrafficking is big it's rising it's huge it's affecting 50% of the world's population but
12:38it's also fixable because that is your entire case for funding your organization is this problem isbig it is unprecedented but we can solve it and so I'm sure that doctors and researchers have exactlythe same incentives that they're not necessarily bad people but they also want to get attention totheir issue they want to raise awareness and the way that you raise awareness is by talking aboutthings in grandiose ways that make people turn and look at it so Charles Krauthammer alwayssomething interesting is going to follow when you hear that name oh yeah this will be nuanced andempathic yes so in 1989 in the washington post he writes quote the inner city crack epidemic is nowgiving birth to the newest horror a bio underclass a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies
13:26whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth they will grow up to be a race of subhuman droneswhose future is close to them from day one theirs will be a life of certain suffering of probabledeviance of permanent inferiority the dead babies may be the lucky ones holy shit holy shit dudeand I think that what happens actually is that we make these horrific grim racist predictions inlanguage that really I mean reading that you're like what a great way to incite genocide yeah itreally is I mean he's like always I'm sure that he would deny that there's any racial tone to thathe would say that it's just a coincidence that all of these cocaine babies happen to be AfricanAmerican but looking at it now or I'm sure looking at it then even it's like so fucking
14:18obvious how much of a dog whistle that is oh my god I mean yeah and then what happens is that youknow we make these grim predictions these horrific racist grim predictions and then they don't reallyhappen there was not a wave of subhuman violent impossible to socialize kids who were growingup in the 90s and taking over the schools this is 1989 and this is the period when it seems likepeople start like the there's the first whispers in the mid 80s we start hearingabout crack in the mid 80s late 80s is when the crack baby emerges there's no actual cluster ofsymptoms that is technically associated with it it's just do you test positive for cocaine exposurewhen you're born so it has nothing to do with how you behave or how sick you are or anything else
15:04but it's a figure that you're able to both be afraid of and for Americans could be terrified ofthese crack babies and how they're going to grow up and what kind of subhuman wave ofchildren and adolescents they're going to be but at the same time you can punish their parentsand their communities yeah and then even the people who are characterizing in it in way ofsaying we're not saying these people are not human we're not saying that these cases are beyondfixing then the narrative that mainstream white America and the people with the money to spendon this sort of thing are going to respond to is there is a wave of crack babies and they aregrowing up and they're going to be in schools and they will be in schools with your children well
15:47so much of white flight was driven by schools anyway right that there's better schools andsuburbs and a lot of parents weren't necessarily saying i don't want my kids in school with blackkids they would just say i don't want my kids in bad schools and those bad schools quote unquotecoincidentally were also the schools that were majority minority and so that gave them a veryconvenient cover for moving out to the suburbs and keeping their kids in all white schools yeahit's interesting that this becomes a racial panic when i hear moms doing a bunch of cocainei think like rich upper west side white ladies i think one of the things that happens with druguse in this context and it's similar actually to the way that we talk about abortion and restrict
16:26access to it now is that wealthy white women are using coke during this time and some of them arepregnant but they don't require social services and they're not in a position of their pediatricianknowing what they're doing or needing help from them because of their drug use or because ofsomething relating to their drug use so this this is something i learned while i was researchingabortion access and it blew my mind private physicians like any a regular old physicianyou know a wealthier woman can go to are allowed to perform abortions in office and if they dosomething like i think a very state by state but i think in texas if they do fewer than 100in a year you can do 99 abortions in a year and not have to become technically an abortion provider
17:11you can just keep quietly providing them under the table so if you're wealthy in one of thesestates where there are ridiculous restrictions on abortion access you can go and quietly get yourabortion from your private doctor and nobody has to know about it and nobody has to make you run thegauntlet that you would have to do if you didn't have those resources and you didn't have a privatedoctor and you just had to go to the clinic like everybody else and have people scream at you andhave to watch videos about your baby's hands and how they are opening and closing and full of god'slove this reminds me of reporting that i was doing recently where i've been interviewing all thesestigma researchers and somebody was telling me that the stigma against mothers who drink during
17:53pregnancy so fetal alcohol syndrome that stigma is really bad like mothers who drink during pregnancyare not people that like we as a society venerate and so this doctor was telling me that a lot ofpeople a lot of doctors don't screen for fetal alcohol syndrome because the mothers immediatelyare like what kind of person do you think i am but if they have a more adversarial relationshipwith their patient they will screen for it so african-american mothers are much more likelyto be screened for fetal alcohol syndrome because they tend to have less rapport withtheir mostly white doctors so i wonder if there's something like that going on here too with thedifference between crack and cocaine a mother who comes in with a toddler who's acting strange
18:32if that mother is low income and black it seems like the doctor would be more likely to thinkhmm i wonder if she was using crack during pregnancy whereas if a white woman comes inwith a toddler that's acting strange the doctor would be more likely to go hmm i wonder if it'sADHD and i think that's a huge part of this because what happens is that the so-called crack babiesthat are born you know with mothers who test positive for cocaine use or who have cocainein their system when they're born they're not born addicted if you have a baby that is exposed tosay heroin use in utero then they do deal with withdrawal after birth and that's something thatthe hospitals has to take care of that's not the case with cocaine use what we later find out
19:14is that cocaine exposure leads to low birth weight and that's pretty much it so the laterstudies find that the effects of exposure to cocaine in the womb are this is a new york timesarticle quote less severe than those of alcohol incomparable to those of tobacco so this is alater analysis of a pool of studies of 14 groups of cocaine exposed children 4419 and all rangingin age from 4 to 13 the analysis failed to show a statistically significant effect on IQ or languagedevelopment in the largest of the studies IQ scores of exposed children averaged around fourpoints lower at age seven than those of unexposed children so that's a different so small as to bestatistically insignificant right so all this stuff about everything that makes them human
20:02that didn't really pan out that it's not turning them into non people it's it's not good for thembut it's not an existential threat to the family and america and everything else yeah there areseveral quotes from various people in articles debunking this saying that if you have a roomfull of kids and some of them have been exposed to cocaine and utero and some haven't then youcan't tell the difference even as a clinician there's a quote from a woman who worked in akindergarten program for crack babies at the time saying that became a lightning rod for the mediabecause they had to come and get their images of the crack babies and the crack kids and theywould come and what they asked her for was footage of children trembling because that was one of the
20:44things that they had been told was a symptom and so then in these later articles offering thedebunking information they talk about well you know there's this one mother who has a um has achild with these behavioral issues who was exposed to cocaine in the womb but that's because he'sautistic so nice so you look at the descriptions of of the crack babies in the 80s and what theytalk about is that they don't have what they need to be human they don't look you in the eyethey don't like to be held they get over stimulated really easily some of these kids were probably onthe autism spectrum right or just difficult kids or squirmy kids once you exit the frame of thismust be crack doing this to them you can imagine 50 million reasons why kids would be acting strangely
21:31at that age this is probably going to be another theme for us that there are times in Americawhere we're like why are kids acting strangely and the answer is well it could be any of 100different factors and the answer we want is it is this one thing that we can then stamp outand so what comes from that is that in also in a way that is emerging as a pattern for us we attemptto combat this one thing and we end up developing methodologies that are harmful to children insome capacities hospitals during the late 80s and early 90s develop strategy where if theyhave a baby who's born and test positive for cocaine then they're like okay this is a crackbaby so what we have to do is swaddle him and put him in a dark room and confiscate him from his
22:16family and not talk to him or interact with him because crack babies don't like that no fuckingway so hospitals started doing this stuff when they detected cocaine in the baby yeahand they called them border babies like boarding house so how long would they keep them underthose conditions that sounds like a terrible way to spend your first couple days of life they wouldkeep them that way sometimes for several weeks and one of the things I find most fascinating inthe history of our cultural understanding of mother baby development is that in for exampleBellevue Hospital in New York in the 19 teens and 20s we keep this is a problem we have as aspecies we we learn about one thing and then we get really over enthusiastic like we're kind of
22:57we're a nation of Kramer's you know who every day is like it's all going to be levels cherry youknow so we learn about germs we discovered germs we're like oh fuck germs so for example at Bellevuepeople who took care of infants who were in the hospitals because they had been orphaned or foundin a foundling home type of award hospitals prided themselves on handling the babies as little aspossible and they would prop feed them which meant that they had an apparatus that would lower a bottlethat the baby could feed from so the baby didn't need to be held oh my god yes like a little horriblerobot arm yeah the goal was to touch and handle the baby as little as possible and so what happensis that a lot of these babies exhibit what is called failure to thrive and they have all of
23:45the physical resources they need but they sort of waste and wither away and nobody knows whyand so for a while they're like well it's malnutrition and then science makes somestrides in the forms of nutrition and we know that the babies are getting adequate nutritionthey're like well it's infection that's why the babies are dying and yet the more we try and avoidcontaminating them with germs the more they seem to be dying of things related to germs and finallypediatricians and scientists come in and are like babies actually like being handled like babiesneed to be held and touched and looked at to be happy humans and so at Bellevue for instance theyinstitute a new policy where there's there's a sign up in the room where they kept these infants
24:30that they previously prided themselves on touching as little as possible that said you cannot enterthis room without touching a baby and nurses were instructed to to touch them and to touch them whenthey didn't need to be doing so for a functional reason but just you know to hold them and interactwith them and they start doing better and they start dying less and then in the 80s we have kindof this return of the sterile room methodology of caring for newborns where we're like okay theseare not regular babies these are crack babies and we need to leave them the fuck alone and nottouch them and not interact with them potentially for the first few weeks of their life and thenafter that since we've seized them from their parents since their moms are these dangerous
25:09crack using moms then we're going to put them in state custody or they're going to maybe go to afoster home or something like that and what we know which I feel like I'm not generalizing to sayis that weeks of sustained non-interaction with other human beings followed by becoming a wardof the state followed by going with whoever is desperate enough to take care of one of thesecrack babies that we're hearing about on the news who apparently are going to become you know whoare not going to be human and are inevitably going to be violent anti-social murderers the peoplewho are taking in the crack babies are either saints or people who really need the extra governmentmoney and so you're you're gonna end up with a child who is affected by that being the circumstances
25:56of the the very start of their life so in order to combat this specter of the demon of crack wecreate our own within the system I think there's something here about we focus on the things thatwe do know about and we never focus on the things we don't know about that it's very easy to saywell we know this one thing is making children worse so we're going to do everything we can toprevent that one bad thing but of course for any child there's 50 million things making their livesworse and 50 million things making their lives better many of which we don't actually know verymuch about and don't know how to measure or just haven't discovered yet and so it's like well we'regonna take this one thing among many and we're gonna do everything we can to prevent that one thing
26:38even if overall it makes the kids worse and also and it's something that it's I think was peopledefinitely had the tools to realize even at the time disproportionately affected mothers of colorbecause white women and women of color use drugs to exactly the same extent everybody likes drugsyou know there are some people who don't do them but and if we're especially if we're talking aboutan addictive substance it's not something that is going to affect you differently physiologicallybased on race regardless of however much various conservative pundits would like to believe thatthat's not true this leads then to additional material for incarcerating women of color becausethen if you are coming into a hospital you know for a pre-natal appointment or if you're going to
27:23give birth and you are seen as someone who's potentially through your own selfishness rightgiving wave to this epidemic of super predator inhuman crack babies we're gonna then and therhetoric of course at the time also is you know pretty soon they're gonna be school age and thenthey'll be invading our schools and then what what are we gonna do and so we have another reason forthe law to come down like the hammer of Thor on expectant mothers of color and laws are put onthe books in the 90s in several states including in Wisconsin where I currently am recording thisepisode redefining legally what a child is according to state statutes as an unborn childpreviously you couldn't accuse someone of abusing their unborn child but now we open the door to
28:09being able to do so legally and so we see the effects of those laws still where women can bebrought to trial and have an attorney appointed for their unborn child to potentially incarceratethem based on their drug use having constituted a form of child abuse and endangered their child'slife I guess you can call this a chapter in the generations long othering of african-americansright that yeah there's always this idea that african-americans are fundamentally differentand that the way they raise their kids is different the way that they eat is different the drugs theyuse is different because that was already so primed in american life especially for everybody in poweragain it's like what do you not need evidence to believe sounds like here it fits the same pattern
28:53as the satanic panic where you don't need all that much evidence to believe that african-americanmothers are bad and that african-americans are scary and using these scary drugs that whitepeople have never heard of you don't need great evidence for that it's like these little tinyspikes of evidence are enough to shift policy there's all these other things that we learn thatdon't result in shifts in policy right that we have high domestic violence rates among unemployed menbut we don't see a huge shift in policy to say oh let's make sure that every unemployed man inamerica gets whatever domestic violence training we don't have those big shifts because it's likewell you know what's really going on and let's let's find more information and let's understand
29:34this problem a little bit more whereas whenever it comes to african-americans it's like the minutewe get a blip of data it's like oh my god their kids are in danger let's change laws immediatelylike it's fascinating to me how drastic the policy response was on so little information or what'sbasically a collection of anecdotes and i think that what happens too is that we get really excitedas white people you know generalizing about our culture what we see what we seem to really loveis if there's some sort of some sort of anecdotal or pretty unsubstantiated data that points to aproblem in communities of color where the risk where the a potential response is incarcerationwe just start rubbing our hands together we're like oh yes if we can prosecute more people and
30:20solve a problem by putting people in prison like let's do that one right this crackdown is goingto fix it all the previous ones haven't resulted in any good outcomes but this one is really goingto crack the case if we had been looking at this as correlative data and saying okay these kids whoare in homes where they're exposed to crack in the womb and crack also corresponds to a wholecluster of socioeconomic things based on where we are observing it being used at this time like wecan also connect it to maternal health and we can connect it to malnutrition both for thepregnant mother and for the baby when it's born we can connect it to the fact that these are ourbabies that are living in you know homes that are often impoverished or where they don't have
31:08parents who are able to be consistent primary caregivers because they're busy working or becausethey're taking you know they're being arrested and stuff and taken away families are being separatedwe have all these complicated factors that we can look at and say maybe america has failed thesecommunities and these families and we need to do all sorts of things to figure out how to help peoplehave healthier home lives and be able to have to live in conditions that they're able to bring ababy into and if it's you know maybe born with a low birth weight to help it get over that initialhump and grow up healthy we're like no crack it's crack i'm pretty sure it's crack i guess the overallinsight is that if you really wanted to help low-income babies or ethnic minority babies there's
31:55lots of stuff you could do that like isn't shitty and would actually be helping mothers you couldbe giving them more money you could be giving them foods delivered to their door so they don'thave to take time off work to go buy baby food there's a million things that you could do they'relike hey this is a population that's struggling like let's do things to help out this populationand working with that population you know you could talk to low-income african-american mothersand say hey what support do you need but of course that never occurs to people in power people inpower always like oh these people are failing these people are different it always goes intothis punitive frame where it's never carrots and sticks it's always just stick stick stick stick
32:34i've also been what been watching again the first season of law and order which is justevery time i watch it it gets more conservative and reactionary the end of the story is alwayssomebody gets put away and it's not even we don't know where they're going we don't reallytalk that much on law and order about what are the conditions of incarceration how is this persongoing to be punished what's it going to be like what is life like in prison what's it like to tryand get out do criminals can they be rehabilitated like i don't think dick wolf thinks that butit's not a conversation that tends to come up it's just you send them away it's not even aboutwhere they're going it's that they're not going to be here anymore they're going somewhere else
33:11and it's an outcome that's so narratively satisfying that i think the more we get accustomed toconsuming that satisfying narrative the less we question it when we see it or see aspects of ithappening in the news or around us i think there's this tendency to think that sort of it's onlypop culture oh it's just a tv show what does it really mean come on it's just a disney movie whatdoes it really mean about gender relations whatever but i think that old shows like this are such agreat diary entry of what we were thinking at the time what was the mainstream consensus and i thinkthis demonstrates the extent to which this punitive get tough on crime war on drugs wave in the 80sand 90s really was the consensus view there was not a whole lot of institutional questioning
33:54of the war on drugs back then and i think shows like law and order and the tens of millions ofcop shows and cop movies that we have are a sign of the extent to which we've all sort of acceptedthis framing that there are bad people and good people and we're rooting out and finding thebad people and that's what cops do in this whole wave we were always kind of telling ourselvesthat it wasn't racial we were always telling ourselves that it was just about crime it hadnothing to do with race we're a post-racial society blah blah blah the same way we saythat about ourselves now when looking back it's really obvious to see that like well it was onlyone group of people that was being affected by the war on drugs crime everything else the thing
34:36about the crack baby is that i think white america got addicted to the crack baby and that was reallyone of our drugs of choice at the time if we're talking about reactionary media because i thinksomething happens in the human brain when you're reading a story or a headline that really hitsthat sweet spot of pity and fear you can punish the community to save the baby you can punish thebaby to save your community all of your fears and your anxieties and your various prejudices getsort of caramelized you know i mean it it's like crack it's like i don't want to put you in prisonit's just i have to because i care so much about these babies i'm soi just care i have my heart goes out to these babies so much that i'm really gonna need to
35:19incarcerate their mothers for years i'm so sorry i mean it's just it's perfect because it allows youto be really punitive and also maintain this fiction that you're really only in it for thechildren so you said that their start to come out these meta analyses of what is really the effectof cocaine on children so when do these start coming out these start coming out in the mid 90sat which point the original babies in the study are about you know 10 years old and they're basicallyfine and yeah so here's a quote from a new republic article from a couple years back byNora Kaplan bricker pregnant women all over the country mostly if they were poor and showed up inpublic hospitals had their blood tested if they tested positive for cocaine there were federal
36:04prosecutors waiting it was a new angle of attack on overwhelmingly poor women of color and anotherthing that i read recently that to me kind of sums this up is from a book called blind injusticewhich basically breaks down chapter by chapter a lot of the reasons why wrongful convictions areable to take place what are the conversations happening in prosecutors offices how are they runbecause sometimes wrongful convictions are often wrongful convictions take place becausethere's something like dna testing not being far enough along at the time of the trial togive an accurate result about what happened but sometimes it's just because of the wayprosecutors offices are run and so for living in a society where the goal is to put as many people
36:46away for as long as possible then it's part of our culture and the quote from this that to me sumthis up is nobody ever won a campaign for district attorney or judge with a policy of being soft oncrime right and i think the crack baby meets tough on crime in the late 80s and 90s was just thismatch made in heaven i think as far as if you are in the business of putting people in prisonthen the crack baby becomes a great way to do it going back to the question about did these lawsfollow directly from the crack baby fears these laws that allowed women to be incarcerated forendangering their unborn baby their fetus i think there's too much of a ripple effect to really drawa straight line from that but the crack baby stories provided a point of entry for this kind
37:38of really not to say overzealous but enthusiastic prosecution and i think that we're just the morewe're putting people in prison the more comfortable we feel the more we feel that we're fixing societyand taking the bad elements out and protecting the good elements there's also a thing i feel likea structural weakness of media is that it's very difficult to say let's wait and get more evidencethe correct response to that 1985 study was basically look it's a small sample size there's nocontrol we don't know what the phenomenon is let's hold off find out what the phenomenon is and thenlet's start legislating about it but that's that's a kind of complex and nuanced argument or at leasttoo complex and nuanced for people like charles krauthammer and so it's very difficult to write
38:28that column that isn't necessarily let's do this or let's do that it's let's do nothing and let'sgather more information that's always a really boring argument no one's ever gonna write a hottake saying i don't have a position on universal basic income until we do three or four or fivepilots and then i'll decide what my position is nobody can write that take the take has to behere's the evidence here's the conclusion it sounds like the only debunking came when there was goodevidence that it was bullshit but when there's bad evidence that it's true that's a much moredifficult argument to make yeah and it's not a good defensive position to be in like if you'rethe person if you are you know arguing against someone who's saying we're creating a generation
39:09of super predator crack babies and your argument has to be we don't know let's gather more evidenceyou know that doesn't sound great to john q driveway reading his newspaper in the morningso how did the ship start to turn around on this like when did the hospitals drop these policieswhen did things cool down prosecutorially i mean i think hospitals dropped their policies ofphysically isolating crack babies around the time that these new studies come out in the mid 90s idon't know if anyone's still doing that i wouldn't be surprised that there were places in americawhere that was still policy because it's a big country full of weirdos but um i don't think thatit has cooled down prosecutorially i think one of the overarching things that we're looking at and
39:51that will continue to come up for us is that we have these faulty narratives these things that areessentially not junk science but junk story that took hold of the american imagination for a periodyou know in the 70s or in the 80s and that we later debunked and that certain uh you know saythe medical establishment changed its best practices in order to reflect but that alteredour culture enough that only felt safe when we were overzealously prosecuting people in terms ofincarceration the numbers have only been increasing and america is now a country where one in 100people is incarcerated and i think that these this was one of the narratives that helped usdown this road that we were already certainly on in the 80s but have only gone farther and farther
40:41down in the intervening decades that this was one of the stories that that helped bring us hereand we haven't come back are we still prosecuting mothers yeah i mean the cocaine mom law was takenoff the books in wisconsin recently because of a high profile case here but they're especially inalabama they i mean they also alabama recently repealed a couple of laws but these are theselaws got put on the books in many states in the 90s and it's easier to make law than it is to changeit especially if you're talking about being tough on crime especially if you're talking aboutpunishing populations that the public is afraid of and alleging to do something in the interestof babies and children it's much easier to make law than it is to repeal it and so there have been
41:27cases there was a case in alabama that was also covered extensively in mother jones where a womanhad taken i think a valium while she was pregnant and because of that yielded a positivedrug test because of that had her baby seized from her no way at birth yeah and the wisconsincase that led to the cocaine mom law being repealed was based on this woman a pregnant woman hadgone in a pregnant white woman no less had gone into a prenatal appointment and they had asked heryou know do you have a history of drug dependency anything like that and she voluntarily providedinformation about a past drug dependency that she had that was over for her and that was enoughinformation 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
42:17like the the adage about a lie can travel around the world before the truth has time to put itsshoes on what we often see if we know to look for it is that these narratives gain culturaltraction we the public become really attached to them and then we may kind of move on and forgetand the average american probably isn't walking around feeling afraid of crack babies anymore butthe laws that get enacted during those periods remain unless somebody has the energy and thetime and the money to take them down and that's much harder to do than to create new legislationand an atmosphere of fear and anxiety and crowd hammer fueled racism yeah it's like theresponse gallops ahead of the facts so far that the facts sort of fade into the distance
43:11i still love law and order i will never be able to not love it but i used to think that it reflectedsome form of legal reality in a way that i now know it doesn't and i remember the first time i gotreally really spent time you know reading briefs reading trial transcripts reading actual actuallegal language reading the the text of american law was you know which was when i was gonna be alawyer for a hot second and then the more i read it the more i had the feeling that you have whenyou're a teacher and you read a paper and you're just like how long did it take you to write thislike i want to believe that you worked hard but i don't think that you were you know our kind ofcorpus of american law if you and if you look at it through the lens of these kinds of scares and
43:53these stories you see that it's this grab bag of of leftover traces from our various societal fearsand anxieties and you can look at a law that was you know put on the books and and whatever yearand look at what are the societal factors that are a play at this time and be like this is not based onan objective reflection on human behavior or what act what or what is going to benefit thecommunities that this law is going to affect this is based on what we were most afraid of at thistime this is based on what we didn't need evidence in order to believe so another episode with a sadending i know the miserable legacy like i knew this was going to be a depressing episode i didn'tknow it's tentacles we're going to stretch this far into the present um i can read something that
44:38will cheer us up please do this is from the spin article which has all of these little bracketedsections explaining what the very confusing lingo the people in it are using so this is a quote fromone of the crack dealers that the journalist profiles and he's and i'll read the bracketedquote along with it crack dealer says here was a man who grew up a few blocks away from a used tobe a dope fiend and became a multi-millionaire driving a new luxury car every week and sportingthe flyest gear the nicest clothes i've ever seen and i figured if he can do it why can't iaw we're living in a in a in america where we don't know what the flyest gear meanslike we work we're so clueless about even the remote you know the tiniest amount of slang that
45:22we need subtitles for it but we're still saying we know what's best for this community i'm i madeit sad again i ruined it i also love that there's like the flyest gear would be really really easyto figure out what he means from context clues yeah he's saying he wants to earn money so he canbuy the flyest gear it's like i wonder what he could mean like you don't actually need theglossary to figure out that he means clothing there it's not that difficult all right i thinki feel like that's that's slightly happier now so yeah that americans read at a fourth grade leveland we need if we need to be spelled out we can't learn anything from context cluesyes i feel better
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