There's a much more dangerous drug than cocaine, for babies. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure) It's alcohol, a legal drug. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_syndrome)
It turns out that the placental barrier is pretty awesome.
(http://www.nhs.uk/news/2012/06june/Pages/daily-drinking-preg...)
> “Pregnant women can binge drink safely,” according to a report in today’s Metro. Expectant mothers should be able to “down up to 12 alcoholic beverages a week knowing it will have no ill effect on their offspring before the age of five”, the paper continued. Reports in several other papers were in agreement, with the Daily Mail claiming that a drink a day would not harm the baby’s development and the Daily Express reporting that 12 drinks a week is safe in pregnancy. So should pregnant women heave a sigh of relief and down a large glass of Chardonnay? Unfortunately, no.
(http://www.nhs.uk/news/2013/06June/Pages/Misguided-claims-al...)
> “A glass of wine every day in pregnancy could be good for your baby,” is the entirely incorrect headline in The Daily Telegraph today. Other newspapers reported that drinking while pregnant does ‘no harm’, these claims are also misleading.
(http://www.nhs.uk/news/2012/11November/Pages/Just-one-glass-...)
> has not been made clear in many of the reports, the researchers were also looking at foetal and maternal variations in genes thought to affect the metabolism of alcohol (how long it takes for the body to break down alcohol). Researchers then looked at whether these variations had an impact on the children’s IQ at age eight.
This is UK media, so "one drink" is "one unit", and that means 125 ml of drink of 8% Alcohol by volume. One bottle of wine (750 ml) at 8% has 6 units. Chardonnay is usually about 12.5% ABV, so a bottle has about 9.5 units. One unit of a 12.5ABV chardonnay is going to be 80 ml of wine. This is important because no one ever pours themselves 80 ml of wine.
It would be great if we could tell expecting mothers: "have two drinks a week, you'll be fine." We don't know, so "don't drink at all" is a reasonable statement.
So you're basically saying that it's OK to roll the dice with a child, since after all it's only a 20-sided die? That a mother's temporary gratification is more important than a 5% chance of your child suffering damage?
I find it funny how the "total abstinence" people come up with such amount of unproven facts, like "any consumption of alcohol" will cause harm. You'll be hard pressed to find a mother that hasn't consumed any alcohol whatsoever during pregnancy in Europe.
This looks like it works as well as the "total abstinence" for sex works.
There is quite a huge deal of controversy around the heritability of IQ.
If anything, the story in this article shows that IQ is much more influenced by the environment than genetics.
Smugly determining that "crack baby" was some racist code word cooked up to imprison black people is missing the point. Crack lowered the price point of cocaine dramatically, and was devastating to inner city communities.
You should note who the study didn't look at -- premature babies or the rates of premature delivery of crack abusers vs the average.
Hurt's study enrolled only full-term babies so the possible effects of prematurity did not skew the results.
Nonetheless the head of the study does note that crack cocaine can induce premature labor, among other issues:
Hurt, who is also a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, is always quick to point out that cocaine can have devastating effects on pregnancy. The drug can cause a problematic rise in a pregnant woman's blood pressure, trigger premature labor, and may be linked to a dangerous condition in which the placenta tears away from the uterine wall. Babies born prematurely, no matter the cause, are at risk for a host of medical and developmental problems. On top of that, a parent's drug use can create a chaotic home life for a child.
I think the OP's point is that some (political) groups attribute minority group failure to advance socioeconomically to drug use, whereas this study suggests that poverty has a very relevant effect on child development (and thus prospects of long-term economic success).
That's not to say that there is no truth to the "crack baby" myth, but that like the "welfare queen" myth, it is part of a strategy to delegitimize welfare programs or socioeconomic criticisms by blaming the low-income groups for their lack of success.
Hint: if you believe your own eyes, your sample size is one, confirmation bias and the availability heuristic are dancing the cha-cha all over your results, and you fail at science.
While I agree with the general sentiment, it is worth noting that the original law that created the sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine, the anti-druge abuse act of 1986, was supported by the congressional black caucus [1] because crack was such a serious problem in the black community at the time. So it was not a case of white people conspiring to put black people in prison, it was black people trying to impose prohibition on themselves, which of course backfired badly as prohibition always does.
I don't see any part where the talk about the "amount" of drugs consumed?
There were rougly 1600+ babies who were used as control and ~338 who tested positive for "weed". Some of the things that aren't broken down is the distribution for infant mortality. Perhaps there were outliers in the control group such as premature babies, which, if taken into account might explain some of the differences in mortality rates.
Very funny though, with actual data to back up some part of your claim, made me think... :)
> Mortality rates between the drug-positive group or specifically, the cocaine-positive, morphine-positive, or cannabinoid-positive groups were not significantly different from the drug-negative groups (P < .3)
A number of 8.9 to 15.7 deaths per 1k live births doesn't necessarily imply a protective factor, especially when considering all the variable factors and a much smaller sample size compared to the drug negative group.
Also, caffeine isn't mentioned once on there, sure you don't mean cocaine?
Probably more importantly these are not just "inner city kids". Nearly all of them are African American which means they are less likely to enroll in/graduate college overall; and they are all the children of parents who were addicted to crack at some point (and probably continued to struggle with it). That puts them at even more of a disadvantage.
Yes, the homicide rate is high, but I find the low college graduation rate more disturbing.
On a side note: shot, stabbed, or strangled doesn't make much difference to the homicide victim or their loved ones. Hopefully you'd have the same reaction if two of them were stabbed to death.
This is science correcting itself after power has ceased to care what position science takes on the existence of the crack baby.
The most interesting part of the whole situation can be summed up by one of the lines describing the babies, "nearly all were African Americans." Even since the first days, It never was about medical issues or science, just a sorta-stealthy way to bash black folks. You'll note there was carefully no outage at the time, or long term medical study, at white coke snorting suburban women, although the blood levels of coke the babies experienced probably were about the same in the end. By analogy it would be like creating a social meme and scientific study of the negative pregnancy impact of malt liquor consumption (by urban black women), carefully ignoring the consumption of fruity margaritas (by suburban white women). Because you can't bash black people unless you can "other" them first.
I guess the two startup lessons are if you're trying to make median situation analysis, policy, and decisions, and you must use an anecdote, don't chose an extreme outlier, use a median... unless you've got an axe to grind and you're trying to mislead people, in which case unusual sample selection can be a powerful tool to mislead people. Startup lesson two is one popular way to scam people is to play word definition games as a strategy for divide and conqueror, so look out for that gameplay technique, and/or use word redefinition as a weapon of your own.
I disagree. If you're trying to tell a compelling story, you want to reinforce the story that you're trying to tell in every way that you can. That makes it more compelling, and sells more page views.
The danger being, of course, that making reasoned decisions based on compelling story lines is dangerous. But this article isn't in that business - it wants to sell page views.
If suburban white women consuming fruity margaritas were much more responsible with their drinking, so that they never consumed while pregnant, then we could study the effects of alcohol on pregnancy solely by focusing on the effects of malt liquor on pregnancy.
Crack use was widespread and used by poor pregnant women. Cocaine use has never been as widespread in suburban white populations. So researchers aren't being racist, they're investigating the problem where it actually exists.
Doesn't this mean that their selection sample effectively excluded any babies that had a noticeable physical reaction (other than having cocaine in their system) to the effect of their mothers' cocaine use?
It is a logical thing to study, and most likely is being studied, by someone else. After all, this study wasn't looking at premature babies. That doesn't prematurity with crack isn't a problem, only a different problem.
Excluding premature babies of course limits the study's relevance, though the results may be remarkable even if they only apply to full-term babies.
A study of only premies would be interesting, but might yield the same result as this study.
The rate of premature birth among all pregnant women is around 4.3% (that includes smokers and drug users so the rate amongst healthy non-smokers is even lower than that). Amongst crack cocaine users the number is between 17–27%. So the prematurity issue is pretty significant. You might even say dominant.
"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine, conditional on being carried to full term."
It's a good thing to back up with a scientific study and facts, but I'd hardly call it surprising (the article did) except to those who have no idea what this poverty looks like.
Another interesting part of the bias might be that I've never heard the term "crack baby" (or similar) outside the context of US ghettos, while cocaine is used globally in many countries.
I think this is a very important observation. Sometimes poverty doesn't look anything like this.
I'd like to note that although I grew up in "technical" poverty, e.g. in a small rural community with a median income of $11,121, very few saw much violence or any of the markers of poverty lifestyle this article talks about.
Although my anecdote is not scientific, I do think this has much more to do with observed culture than with an arbitrary signifier like poverty. Urban poverty and rural poverty are entirely different things, for instance. As is transient and temporary versus chronic poverty.
The results are surprising in the sense that what was said, and generally believed even by professionals in the field, at the height of the issue was that it would be impossible for these children to develop at all. Poverty has a known affect on development, it was believed that these crack babies wouldn't even have the chance to hit that level.
The surprise comes from that the previous belief couldn't be more wrong. The actual effect was basically non-existent.
It is true that people with low IQs will tend to become poorer (though conscientiousness is often a bigger factor), but reversion to the mean should limit the impact of that in the children of poor people.
EDIT: Here's a rather in depth article on the topic: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/race-iq-and-... There's tons of evidence that at a population level wealth is the main driver of IQ differences, though genetics does play a large role at the individual level.
Growing up wealthy entails a lot more advantages than four years of courses, at that.
Down the page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078722 - we have lancewiggs saying that the results of IQ tests are strongly driven by poverty.
What basis do you have for your claim?
This is an interesting and almost 'common sense' observation about demographics. It is more difficult to thrive in a poor environment then it is to do badly out of a rich environment.
That's why we are obsessed about 'rags to riches' stories right?
The model was that mice willing to beat their bodies more for the same amount of stimulation were more susceptible to a wide range of addictions. He found that pups exposed to cocaine in utero did in fact as adults spin the wheel harder for a given amount of stimulation, indicating higher susceptibility to a wide range of addictions.
My old room mate would have really liked to perform the same study with nicotine, since many many more human mothers dose their fetuses with nicotine as compared to cocaine. For what the wild speculations of an experienced researcher are worth, he suspected that mouse pups exposed to nicotine would also be more susceptible to addiction (supposing he was actually measuring susceptibility to addiction).
However, politicians and lobbyists have made it much easier to get federal grant money for cocaine studies vs. nicotine studies, despite nicotine having a much larger impact on society.
On a side note: in 1999, 4.7% of US 8th graders were willing to admit to having used cocaine, so the test group appears to be below US averages for cocaine use, despite their mothers using cocaine. I imagine that being predicated upon having mothers caring enough to place their children in these studies, and mothers responsible enough to stay in contact with researchers, and the subjects knowing they were being studied, skewed the drug usage portion of the study. Nationally, (for those outside of medical trials) I can't imagine the cocaine use rate for those whose mothers used cocaine to be below the rate for those whose mothers did not use cocaine.
http://www.amren.com/news/2012/04/six-brain-damage-scourges-...
Eric Turkheimer has recently been president of the Behavior Genetics Association, and he has the very kind habit of posting most of his peer-reviewed journal articles on his faculty website.
http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm
Lars Penke is another, younger researcher who posts most of his publications on his personal website.
http://www.larspenke.eu/en/publications/publications.html
I have the pleasure of meeting many other researchers in human genetics just about weekly during the school year at the University of Minnesota "journal club" Psychology 8935: Readings in Behavioral Genetics and Individual Differences Psychology. From those sources and other sources, I have learned about current review articles on human behavior genetics that help dispel misconceptions that are even commonplace among medically or scientifically trained persons who aren't keeping up with current research.
An interesting review article,
Turkheimer, E. (2008, Spring). A better way to use twins for developmental research. LIFE Newsletter, 2, 1-5
http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...
admits the disappointment of behavior genetics researchers.
"But back to the question: What does heritability mean? Almost everyone who has ever thought about heritability has reached a commonsense intuition about it: One way or another, heritability has to be some kind of index of how genetic a trait is. That intuition explains why so many thousands of heritability coefficients have been calculated over the years. Once the twin registries have been assembled, it's easy and fun, like having a genoscope you can point at one trait after another to take a reading of how genetic things are. Height? Very genetic. Intelligence? Pretty genetic. Schizophrenia? That looks pretty genetic too. Personality? Yep, that too. And over multiple studies and traits the heritabilities go up and down, providing the basis for nearly infinite Talmudic revisions of the grand theories of the heritability of things, perfect grist for the wheels of social science.
"Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isn't an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size. An effect size of the R2 family is a standardized estimate of the proportion of the variance in one variable that is reduced when another variable is held constant statistically. In this case it is an estimate of how much the variance of a trait would be reduced if everyone were genetically identical. With a moment's thought you can see that the answer to the question of how much variance would be reduced if everyone was genetically identical depends crucially on how genetically different everyone was in the first place."
Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220
http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...
is another interesting review article that includes the statement "Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)."
The review article "The neuroscience of human intelligence differences" by Deary and Johnson and Penke (2010) relates specifically to human intelligence:
http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neur...
"At this point, it seems unlikely that single genetic loci have major effects on normal-range intelligence. For example, a modestly sized genome-wide study of the general intelligence factor derived from ten separate test scores in the cAnTAB cognitive test battery did not find any important genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms or copy number variants, and did not replicate genetic variants that had previously been associated with cognitive ability[note 48]."
The review article Johnson, W. (2010). Understanding the Genetics of Intelligence: Can Height Help? Can Corn Oil?. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(3), 177-182
http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/...
looks at some famous genetic experiments to show how little is explained by gene frequencies even in thoroughly studied populations defined by artificial selection.
"Together, however, the developmental natures of GCA [general cognitive ability] and height, the likely influences of gene-environment correlations and interactions on their developmental processes, and the potential for genetic background and environmental circumstances to release previously unexpressed genetic variation suggest that very different combinations of genes may produce identical IQs or heights or levels of any other psychological trait. And the same genes may produce very different IQs and heights against different genetic backgrounds and in different environmental circumstances. This would be especially the case if height and GCA and other psychological traits are only single facets of multifaceted traits actually under more systematic genetic regulation, such as overall body size and balance between processing capacity and stimulus reactivity. Genetic influences on individual differences in psychological characteristics are real and important but are unlikely to be straightforward and deterministic. We will understand them best through investigation of their manifestation in biological and social developmental processes."
Chabris, C. F., Hebert, B. M., Benjamin, D. J., Beauchamp, J., Cesarini, D., van der Loos, M., ... & Laibson, D. (2012). Most reported genetic associations with general intelligence are probably false positives. Psychological Science.
http://coglab.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Chabris2012a-FalsePositiv...
"At the time most of the results we attempted to replicate were obtained, candidate-gene studies of complex traits were commonplace in medical genetics research. Such studies are now rarely published in leading journals. Our results add IQ to the list of phenotypes that must be approached with great caution when considering published molecular genetic associations. In our view, excitement over the value of behavioral and molecular genetic studies in the social sciences should be temperedءs it has been in the medical sciencesآy a recognition that, for complex phenotypes, individual common genetic variants of the sort assayed by SNP microarrays are likely to have very small effects.
"Associations of candidate genes with psychological traits and other traits studied in the social sciences should be viewed as tentative until they have been replicated in multiple large samples. Failing to exercise such caution may hamper scientific progress by allowing for the proliferation of potentially false results, which may then influence the research agendas of scientists who do not realize that the associations they take as a starting point for their efforts may not be real. And the dissemination of false results to the public may lead to incorrect perceptions about the state of knowledge in the field, especially knowledge concerning genetic variants that have been described as 'genes for' traits on the basis of unintentionally inflated estimates of effect size and statistical significance."
That's not really much different than the national average for kids whose parents aren't crackheads. E.g. 1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age seven that 7 in 20 would have, which is in fact exactly 35%. C.f. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/227744.pdf
N.b. that some of these statistics are pretty wonky, e.g. they count getting beat up for your siblings as assault, or getting flashed as being a victim of sexual assault.
No I wouldn't, because:
a) I doubt the age distribution for "kids who see people get shot in a year" is constant. The linked article doesn't include age distributions, but they surveyed children up to age 17, and I would expect many more 15 year-olds to see people get shot than 7 year-olds.
b) I doubt the system is stochastic. It's probably more likely for the 1 in 20 from year 1 to see another few of the 7 shots in those 7 years (due to geographic and socio-economic factors) than it is for the other 19.
In other words, even for a country where gun violence is rampant, a study population where 35% of children below 7 have seen someone get shot is far from average.
So the population in question is definitely no where near average, my was just that strictly in terms of the amount of violence witnessed, the differences probably aren't as great as one would otherwise assume.
This is insane logic. Think about your 20 closest friends. Do you think that 7 of them saw somebody get shot by the time they were 7? I don't know where you grew up but that is definitely not my experience! Continuing the same reasoning, 60% of all 18 year olds should have seen someone be shot. Again, not where I come from.
They preselected a bunch of poor people, which means the low IQ could be explained by the fact that their existing IQ put them in this place in society along with the predisposition to cheap drug addiction.
Is there any data referenced in the article to actually support that claim? It's the central thesis here, and I don't see any supporting argument. I see some text around seeing people arrested, dead bodies, and so on, but there are lots of poor rural kids who never see that. This is much more a function of urban poverty.
Maybe I missed it.
Google it. I first read about it in the Economist, but really, it's where the conversation starts these days.
Brain damage is one of the main mechanisms by which poverty passes itself down to subsequent generations.
>All the babies came from low-income families, and nearly all were African Americans.
"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine," Hurt said at her May lecture.
It isn't science that's racist. What's racist is the thousands of brilliant minds that took THIS LONG to look in the right direction. Each one of them minutely racist on its own -- it was just one tiny blind spot. One tiny speck on the lens. On every lens.
That's all it takes to destroy a community. That and some SWAT boots.
What's perhaps more important to talk about is the demonstrated harm of poverty and violence on children.
It turns out that racism harms its victims. Who knew?
It's a bad week for things I learned growing up in the 80s/90s ...
It seems rather depressing to me that the college graduation rate by 23 is under 10%. Talk about different worlds
Great video from the nytimes on this story from may
Make poverty illegal @ Jail anybody caught poor.
