Subscribe to Workers Vanguard

View archives

	Workers Vanguard No. 933	27 March 2009

“Crack Babies” Furor Was Big Lie

Down With Racist “War on Drugs”!

There’s a “crack baby epidemic,” the press shrieked in the 1980s and ’90s. Headlines like “Time Bomb in Cocaine Babies” and “Studies: Future Bleak for Crack Babies” played a key role in whipping up public support for cop invasions of the ghettos in the bipartisan “war on drugs” launched by the Reagan administration. The crack hysteria helped lay the basis for a pervasive demonization of an entire generation of black youth, the evisceration of civil liberties and a vast intensification of police powers, leading to an enormous increase in the prison population. As the bourgeoisie’s moral cops cried “crack babies,” pregnant black and poor women especially were targeted. Many were secretly tested for drug use in hospitals. Mothers lost custody of their children. Hundreds of women were thrown in jail for supposedly “endangering” their fetuses. In 2001, one woman was even sentenced to 20 years in prison on homicide charges for bearing a stillborn child.

Now, decades after who knows how many lives have been wrecked, the bourgeoisie’s main “newspaper of record,” the New York Times, admits there never was any “crack baby epidemic” (“The Epidemic That Wasn’t,” 27 January). The article quotes researchers who have been “systematically following children who were exposed to cocaine before birth” and states: “So far, these scientists say, the long-term effects of such exposure on children’s brain development and behavior appear relatively small.” The article points out that the effects of cocaine are “less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco”—two legal substances enjoyed by many in the general population. (Actually, cocaine is pretty popular too.) The specifically racist character of the anti-drug laws is reflected in the fact that penalties have historically been 100 times harsher for cheap crack, available to the ghetto poor, than for the expensive powdered cocaine favored by middle-class whites.

The New York Times may have treated it as news, but the phony science of “crack babies” was known over 17 years ago. Within a few years after he first anticipated a developmental problem in the offspring of cocaine addicts, Dr. Ira Chasnoff reported, “Their average developmental functioning level is normal. They are no different from other children growing up” (“The Myth of the ‘Crack Babies’,” Boston Globe, 12 January 1992). Another researcher at the time, Claire Coles of Emory University, accurately described the problems of children born to cocaine users as resulting from black poverty in racist America, not the physiological effects of drug use—e.g., the “crack kid” who couldn’t concentrate in class due to hunger, or another who was being raised by a five-year-old sister.

These disclaimers were ignored by the bourgeois rulers and the vast majority of their mouthpieces in the press who promoted the anti-drug witchhunt. At its inception, the bipartisan “war on drugs” was a central part of the bourgeois rulers’ efforts to enforce moral conformity to regiment the population during Cold War II against the “godless” Soviet Union. In short order this proved to be a war on black America. Ludicrous tales of how crack cocaine turned its users into raving psychotic killers were central to the bourgeois rulers’ push for high-tech weaponry for the racist killer cops, “three strikes” laws and longer prison sentences, elimination of parole, expansion of the racist death penalty and the massive incarceration of black men and women, of whom now nearly a million are imprisoned. Black women were doubly hit by the “crack baby” lies. “Moral Majority” reactionaries claimed “fetus rights” were sacred and that pregnant women were mere vessels, as murderous mobs targeted abortion clinics and hysterical “Satanic ritual” prosecutions shut down day-care centers.

An entire generation of black youth was condemned as “superpredators” who could only be safely housed in prison. This was codified in the 1997 “Juvenile Crime Control Act” signed by Democratic president Bill Clinton, under which juveniles are imprisoned alongside adults. Citing the “crack baby” mythology, right-wing Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer declared, “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” (30 July 1989). Similar eugenicist arguments were widely promoted five years later in the Bell Curve, which the New York Times declared “contains serious scholarship.”

The Democratic Party represents this capitalist system of oppression and exploitation no less than the Republicans, though usually with more of a veneer of concern for the “little people.” It’s no accident that among the biggest pushers of Reagan’s “war on drugs” were the Democrats. In the 1980s, Democratic Party demagogue Al Sharpton led anti-drug vigilante sprees through Harlem, while black capitalist politicians made common cause with the biggest racists in America, bringing police shock troops into black communities. Jesse Jackson Sr. pushed endless variations on how “dope,” not the (lynch) “rope,” was the biggest problem for black people—a disgusting apology for racist terror. This was the old “blame the victim” rhetoric, the same tactic employed by President Barack Obama to try to blame black people for their oppression, as when he declared in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, that “minorities, individually and collectively, have responsibilities as well” for their own condition.

As opposed to the “crack baby” myth, one of the very real health problems afflicting ghetto children is lead poisoning. In “Lead Pipes vs. Crack Pipes” (28 January), the Columbia Journalism Review pointed out that the same day the Times wrote about the “crisis that failed to show up,” the Washington Post reported that studies showed that hundreds of children in Washington, D.C., had unsafe amounts of lead in their blood due to corruption of the water supply. The “sad irony,” the Columbia Journalism Review notes, is that “lead poisoning in young children actually produces some of the irreparable cognitive and developmental damage that was once believed to be caused by exposing infants to cocaine…. But while crack babies became a symbol of America’s deteriorating inner city during the Reagan administration, President Reagan cut funding for lead screening and ordered the Centers for Disease Control to stop keeping lead poisoning statistics.”

Most people have understood the dangers of lead poisoning for some time—to say nothing of the effects of poverty, poor education, joblessness and homelessness. But such real threats to children have been downplayed by the capitalist media and politicians because the perps were (and are) landlords, employers and big-city governments—that is, the capitalists and their institutions of racist class rule, for whom the lives of the poor and the black population are cheap.

We are glad that Regina McKnight, the woman convicted of homicide after she suffered the stillbirth of her child in the hospital, was finally released from prison in 2008, as the South Carolina Supreme Court finally recognized that there was no evidence cocaine had caused what was never a crime but a personal tragedy. McKnight’s supporters had worked for nearly a decade to prove that the cocaine theory was wrong. Indeed, a doctor had already pointed this out in a letter published in the Times on 22 May 2001. But there’s almost eight years gone from this innocent woman’s life that she’ll never get back—and how many others are still suffering under racist drug laws?

We oppose all laws against drugs, as well as against all the other “crimes without victims”—prostitution, pornography, gambling and so on. Of course drug addiction, like alcoholism, can be dangerous—but this is a personal and medical matter, not one for the police. Such laws have always been used for social control, not social benefit. Chinese immigrants were persecuted under anti-opium laws in the late 19th century, after they finished building the railroads; Latinos were targeted under 1930s Depression-era anti-marijuana laws; the black population has always been a primary target. The fight for black liberation and women’s liberation from this racist society and its repressive social institutions requires smashing the capitalist economic system and its state apparatus through socialist revolution.