Find everyone who talked or wrote about crack babies and every legislator that signed a law about crack and put them in prison for 10 year with no parole.

Don't hold your breath for justice.

Marijuana is still illegal because white women had sex with black men in the 1930s and then there was the JAZZ music - nearly ruined the entire country.

While it may be true that it does no long-term biological damage to a fetus when a mother takes certain drugs during pregnancy, drug-addidicted mothers cannot provide babies with the care they need once born. Anyone who has lived with a drug addict knows that the addict cannot adequately care for another person. Period. Consequently, in my view the problem is not so much pregnancy, but how we are going to take care of babies born to addict parents. How to take care of babies once born shoud be the subject of public policy and debate. Putting the addict in jail does not good, but what does?

It is naieve in the extreme to think that most or even a decent percentage of addict parents are going to clean up their act and care for their kids. A small percentage succeed in drug treatment -- most do not. So, what happens to the babies?

Maybe not an epidemic but this letter is far too one sided to suggest that it is normal for babies of drug addicted mothers to come out perfect.

You just disregard the child who is permanently developmentally delayed as result of his mother's alcohol or drug addiction. The child who, if able to walk or sit independent of a wheel chair, must still wear a helmet due to the frequency of his falling down (for lack of coordination and balance).

You completely disregard the two year old whose parents have taught her to inhale weed or snort coke for their own amusement.

Shouldn't these children be removed from their ailing parents?

Any policy that is racist at its core should be eliminated or made equal. Not to speak ill of the dead, but had Anna Nicole Smith given birth to Dannielynn in the United States, perhaps she would have tested positive for who knows what recreational drugs at birth. And she should have lost custody then, too.

Actual reporting in BS is amazing please keep it up. I wish these laws where off the books but unfortunately it appears they are here to stay along with more similar laws from the teetotalers out there. It is only a matter of time before these laws go into effect against women that drink during pregnancy on the basis of FAS. Despite there never being a case of FAS from a women that drinks less than 35 drinks a month. If a pregnant women has a glass of wine in public the reaction is the same as if she is violently shaking an infant.

I, for one, would really appreciate at least a link to a study or article describing numbers and characteristics of "crack babies." How many were there? How strong was the link between mothers' crack use and impairments in their babies? Were other possible causes of such impairments considered?

There's been a HUGE amount of absolute utter hysterical horseshit spoken and written on the subject of drugs in general over the past century or so; so I really can't give much credit to this talk of "crack babies" unless I see something more than a few vague anecdotes.

OK - so this is all very close to me. My sister is adopted, has FAS, and is a heroin addict, when she discovers she's pregnant. Being in Canada, she actually manages to get into an in-patient methadone program for pg women. Bless her heart - she tried soooo hard. When my nephew, born addicted to methadone and subjected to god-knows-what in utero in the first trimester, was apprehended at 18 months he knew not one single word. Didn't know his name, didn't smile, didn't blow a kiss. He was suffering from profound neglect. My sister enters rehab for the fourth time at this point. She's basically valedictorian of her rehab class. Two months after getting my nephew back, she is arrested in a crack house with my nephew in tow and he is apprehended again.

In and out, in and out, my sister with rehab. Meantime, my nephew is four. Having lived with my parents and now with me since he was two he is now, thank whoever you want to thank, a normal little boy with, admittedly, no apparent long term effects from the drugs. However, I shudder to think where he would be if my sister had been "caring" for him all this time.

I hope, I would pray if I had it in me, that my sister gets through a rehab stint that sticks. I love her to bits and if it takes 30 years for her to do it, I'll be there for her. I am an adult, however, my nephew can't wait for her to recover.

I don't think jail is the answer for these mothers. Some humane program like my sister was in while she was pregnant seems good. However, let's not get all misty-eyed about "reuniting" these kids with their moms. Addicts can't take care of themselves - they sure as hell can't raise a child.

For the last 2 years I've worked with Public Defenders as a social worker helping parents get their children returned from CPS. Roughly 80% of all cases are about neglect, with chemical dependency being the primary issue. 20 years ago, the number were the exact opposite, in that actual physical abuse was the cause for children to be removed. While many of the parents have deficiencies that need to be addressed, most are fully capable of raising their children. The social workers at CPS often espouse white middle class values in addressing the deficiencies, for example, I am frequently told the child cannot be returned home because "the house is too small," or something similar. The real issue at hand in most of these cases is multi-generational poverty and the obstacles that creates. As I have said to more than one social worker, "you and I make enough money to hide our deficiencies." A corollary problem in this mess called Child Welfare is the fact that foster care is proving to be far more damaging than remaining with parents. Statistically, children are 10 times more likely to be sexually abused in foster care, 4 times more likely to be murdered, and the real clincher is that roughly 70 % of all prison inmates have spent time in foster care. Of the 20 clients I work with on a regular basis, 10 had their children removed because they were positive for meth, even though the statute in our state clearly says that being positive for meth is not reason enough to have a child removed. What happens is the state takes the child and then puts the parent under a microscope, order psychological evaluations, "parenting assessments" and every other kind of "thought police" tactic possible. Child Welfare is a mess in our country, and the racist attitudes that underly our "war on drugs" is causing far more abuse and neglect than any mother or father could ever inflict individually on their child.