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. 
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