Still no time for complacency

Abstract

During the height of the crack cocaine epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s, “crack babies” were widely sensationalized in the media as children inevitably destined for educational and social failure, incapable of forming or sustaining normal interpersonal relationships, and doomed to remain a burden on society.1 Since then, longitudinal follow-up of these and other drug-exposed children in carefully controlled clinical studies has shown that these dreadful outcomes are not inevitable, but that the effects of prenatal exposure to drugs of abuse, both legal and illicit, are nonetheless real and measurable. Neurobehavioral teratology—the study of prenatal drug exposure and subsequent development—is often characterized as the science of subtle effects.2 In the absence of dramatic findings, the popular media swung from heralding a lost generation to uplifting stories of children who have done perfectly well when raised in a nurturing and supportive environment. Recently, the media have again reported that children exposed to drugs of abuse during pregnancy are thriving at home and in school if the proper social resources are mobilized around them and their families.3 …