Pubdate: Sun, 20 May 2001 Source: Star-Ledger (NJ) Copyright: 2001 Newark Morning Ledger Co Contact: http://www.nj.com/starledger/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/424 Author: Grant Segall, Newhouse News Service CRACK'S TOLL ON CHILDREN HARD TO MEASURE Reasearch Shows A Range Of Effects Raheem Schwarz told his best friends that he was a crack baby. "You don't act like one," they said. In other words, Raheem seems normal. The 11-year-old from East Cleveland, Ohio, shows little sign of the developmental disabilities often associated with children born to mothers who use crack, a cheap, potent form of cocaine. The tall, graceful boy is a starter on his school basketball team. He has just one chronic ailment, hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), which gives him a buzz when he cheats on sweets. He zigzags between A's and D's,, but his adoptive parents blame the boy's motivation, not his ability. Soon after Raheem's birth, his biological father died of an overdose and his biological mother was murdered, apparently over drugs. Actually, Raheem was born with crack and seven other drugs in his veins. But crack seems to be the most studied and stereotyped of the bunch. It is a leading drug in poor black neighborhoods like Raheem's. Yet, after more than a decade of study, little consensus has emerged about the crack generation's size and shape. Health care professionals guess that 45,000 to 375,000 children may be born exposed to crack each year. Their fates seem to range from early death to healthy life. Soon after crack's boom in the mid-1980s, experts warned that millions of exposed children would be hard-pressed to learn, behave or love. But early research showed that they suffered little harm. Then other research showed subtle but lasting damage to many children's mental, physical and emotional skills. Today most professionals seem to agree with Vince Smeriglio, child and adolescent research coordinator for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who said, "The truth lies somewhere in between." "It's not as bad as I had feared," said Robert Arendt, a Case Western Reserve University researcher who leads one of the nation's longest continuing studies, "but it's more complicated than I feared." A leading complication, researchers say, is that they have never met a mother using crack without other toxins, particularly tobacco and alcohol. The mothers are also more prone to depression, domestic abuse and other hardships that might affect babies who remain in their care. Raheem lives with adoptive twin brothers, Lawrence and William, 7, who also were exposed to crack. The adoptive father, author Ted Schwarz ("To Love a Child"), said they are "absolutely normal, which means I want to kill them on a regular basis, like every other parent." Devon Wright, 7, of North Ridgeville, Ohio, seems mature, attentive and helpful - no small virtues in a big family of adoptive, foster and natural children. In a bustling living room, Devon manages at once to complete his homework, hand a toddler a cookie and alert a grown-up when the toddler goes astray. "He's the eyes in the back of mom's head," said Angie Dennison, an adult biological daughter of Devon's adoptive parents, Jeff and Debbie Wright. Like many babies exposed to crack, Devon was born prematurely. He learned to walk and talk on schedule, but was admitted to a preschool for children with disabilities - in his case, intense shyness. He attends regular first-grade classes but might need summer school this year. Debbie Wright suspects that Devon has an attention disorder, which, like other learning disabilities, often emerges in the elementary school years. "I don't want to label him," Wright said. But she has seen convincing signs of crack's damage in other children she has helped raise. A boy cried virtually nonstop until age 1. A girl, now 6, lives in an institution because of her unruly behavior. It would be hard to deny the damage done by crack to the children taken in by Doris Williams of Cleveland. A foster son, 8 (whom she is not allowed to identify), has cerebral palsy - apparently caused by exposure to crack - that keeps him from walking or talking. An adopted son, Justin, 6, has an IQ of 58, or 12 points below the usual threshold for retardation. He has undergone operations on his heart, lungs and other organs. He also needed years of "eating therapy" for a fear of food that used to make him scream at the sight of a restaurant. He still weighs just 35 pounds. Some of Justin's biological siblings have fared even worse. He was one of eight twins carried in four years by a mother on crack. Five of them were miscarried or died during infancy, including his twin sister. Experts attribute crack's hype and scrutiny partly to its appeal to poor, urban blacks. The latest federal survey shows that 55 percent of blacks who use drugs smoke crack, versus 27 percent of white drug users. Enough babies exposed to crack have been found to support 74 published studies. Thirty-six of these were analyzed by Boston University researchers in a report for the March issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Those researchers found inconclusive evidence of crack's damage to children age 6 or younger from a simllar range of backgrounds, mostly poor, urban blacks. At worst, said Deborah A. Frank, the report's lead author, crack seems no more harmful than dozens of other hardships, such as poverty, that fall disproportionately on this group. But studies show crack changes the brain structure of laboratory rats, hurting their ability to learn, bond and handle stress. In humans, Case Western Reserve University researchers say, crack seems to lower many children's scores on a wide range of tests, undermining talents and aggravating disabilities. Starting in 1991, the researchers studied exposed and unexposed children from comparable backgrounds born at two Cleveland hospitals. At 2 years of age, 14 percent of the exposed children scored 70 or lower on IQ tests, versus 7 percent of the drug-free ones. At age 4, heavily exposed children averaged three months behind unexposed ones in developing gross motor skills such as balance. At age 7, exposed children averaged IQs of B0.2, compared with 85.7 for the others. - --- MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager