On the first day of Spring, there was a scientific study that made its way through all the major news outlets concerning the behavioral issues of children born to mothers addicted to methamphetamine. In a nutshell, the story reads in a predictable fashion: children born to meth-addicted mothers exhibited behavioral problems, which were exacerbated by poverty and the lack of a man in the household.

That’s pretty standard reporting considering this was the first study of its kind and most researchers don’t want to jump to conclusions, which are always subject to change. But there was something missing from the coverage that would normally accompany drug research findings.  Luckily, Jezebel hinted at the void with its headline “Meth Babies Are the New Crack Babies.”

So what was missing from all the coverage?

Fear … Hysteria … A Presidential, Oval Office, Fireside chat with Americans about how tough we need to be on meth users and sellers, complete with a full scale ratcheting up of the “War on Drugs” and new mandatory minimum prison sentences for these “soulless creatures” ripping away at the fabric of small, rural middle-America, people who Sarah Palin coined “Real America.”

Jezebel’s headline is still relevant to its primarily white audience if you peruse the comment section. Because of its very real moral significance to America’s narrative, evoking the ghosts of crack babies is clever but is it a fair comparison?

Bearing in mind blacks for the most part are still enduring, suffering, and surviving in rural poverty or crack and other illicit drug-infested inner cities — arguably the only robust black communities left after “integration” — the black children born to crack mothers seem to fill the role of test subjects — yoked, branded, and monitored in projects as representations of a time when black life was patently evil and destructive yet seductively commodifiable, a time only glorified in Hollywood.

In comparison, the behavioral issues seemingly inherent in meth babies will probably be used to explain some isolated violent incident in Montana or Fresno, California but it will not come to define a generation of whites as opposed to how crack did to blacks. There will be no hyperbolic headlines like “Babies Offer Reminder Of Crack’s Cruel Legacy; Congressmen Get Close Look at Suffering,” or “Sex, Crack, and Infant Deaths.”

The coverage of meth will be treated as a news story with the common dramatic story lines that engage any audience. But unlike crack babies of the 1980s and 90s, the contrast lies within the humanization of white sellers and users, both rogue players who will never define whiteness or white people.

Even though we live in a 24-hour news cycle, whole white communities have not had the intense media spotlight placed on them like the wall-to-wall, salacious coverage of crack-infested black communities.

Granted the crystal meth issue in America is not as widespread or concentrated as the so-called crack epidemic, which spread quickly throughout America’s major cities, but American meth labs also didn’t have the unabashed support of the Central Intelligence Agency to help the toxic substance permeate middle-America.

Interestingly, methamphetamine production doesn’t receive the media’s vitriolic outbursts over its impact on the surrounding environment. Crack became synonymous with the deterioration of black communities, producing some of the highest murder rates in outside of war zones, with countless stories spelling out doom for not just inner cities but for the nation as a whole. Conversely, meth is a highly toxic, chemically hazardous, drug, which contaminates and destroys all life in its path. For every pound of meth produced, between five and six pounds of highly toxic waste is generated.

Meanwhile, farmers in some of the highest meat and produce producing states complained that meth lab runoff is a major concern and poses a threat to the food industry:

“These guys were filtering their chemicals and then dumping the toxic residue right into the drainage.”

This potentially suggests that meth production has a far reaching probability that it may poison so-called crack babies who grow up inner cities flooded with cheap meats, inorganic produce, and tainted water supplies. Go figure!

Outside of branding children for life, the most glaringly egregious aspect of the crack baby narrative was the demonization of the black mother. Portrayed as natural victims to vice, the young black mother — whose aggressive, Womanist nature, by the 1980s, was already blamed for the dysfunction in the black family (see Patrick Moynihan) — was now unredeemable and indistinguishable from the failure of the neighborhoods from which she came.

From New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, to South Central Los Angeles and Oakland, whole cities became crack baby havens. One the other hand, there is not one city in America’s that one could identify with meth babies. They are always somewhere in the country or in some trailer park in some city.

This invisibility is what allows white meth mothers to be sympathetic victims of any drug addiction not just meth. They’re written and profiled as rouge individuals who have made bad choices but are not a reflection upon white women as a whole, which they shouldn’t.

But why wasn’t this understanding afforded to blacks?

Instead, in an effort to help these broken families headed primarily by black women, black communities received militaristic policing, which gave way to the current “Stop and Frisk” preemptive measures, where every African-American male may be a behaviorally inept crack baby. Should we really be surprised that a neighborhood watchmen still has the support of police after shooting and killing an unarmed 17-year-old boy? That’s the legacy of crack babies. Meth babies will never have this stain.

Incongruously, a report in The New York Times contradicts the narrative surrounding the long term effects of crack addicted newborns. Even though crack babies will have to deal with crack addiction without fully-funded inner city programs, many children are growing up well-adjusted.

Being careful not to suggest that cocaine use is not a major issue for an addicted pregnant woman and her fetus, Dr. Deborah A. Frank, a pediatrician at Boston University, wants people to understand that crack babies do have a chance to live a fruitful lifestyle, especially when social factors line up in their favor:

[C]ocaine-exposed children are often teased or stigmatized if others are aware of their exposure. If they develop physical symptoms or behavioral problems, doctors or teachers are sometimes too quick to blame the drug exposure and miss the real cause, like illness or abuse.

Thus, while on the surface there are many similarities between drug use and its effects on infants born to addicted mothers, hopefully no special needs babies will grow up will the stigma that crack babies still conjure up in the imagination of Americans. Meth babies more than likely will receive the care and attention that national invisibility affords, as small communities deal with and open their collective arms in compassion for the disadvantaged children. At least that’s all we can hope for as meth use remains stable.

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11 Comments

  1. Well written article, and true to form.

  2. Strong piece and very well articulated point young lady. I am a former crack addict who now counsels my neighborhood’s addicts in Akron, Ohio. I want people to know that crack is not dead in our neighborhoods. We must support local homes and rally around the unfortunate jobless and hopeless in our communities. I know firsthand what the stigma of crack feels like for a child who never was given a chance. My son and daughter both came into this world addicted and although both led normal lives my former life continued to follow them throughout their adolescent years. By the grace of God, neither one has had any long term cognitive issues or both rebounded from their small birth weights to play sports.

    I applaud this website and this woman for shedding light on the forgotten youths of crack and the legacy of people such as myself who lacked the love for self and God. I’m blessed God never stopped loving me.

  3. This double standard echoes through the history of the US. Blacks were stripped of their culture and history. Whites voluntarily left their homelands and adopted the US and a new culture. The difference between being made to do something and volunteering is enormous. Now fast forward to this situation and you see the sensationalizing of the crack epidemic in the 80’s. Demonizing whole communities and selling fear which in turn sells products. White people being hurt in any kind of way in America is sold only on a human level where we should be compassionate. Any other kind of people especially blacks are sold as the BOOGIE MAN to white people when really it’s the other way around. White people have fooled themselves into believing they are kind, compassionate, and caring. It’s wrong because they just don’t talk about the horrors that was caused by their race. So the externalize it. Basically in denial.

  4. I hate to say this but white people use crack as well. I know 2 guys who did and one lady. Crack does not care what color you are. Meth does not either and the big dif is meth is less of a big city drug and more of a suburban drug or rural drug. It still hurts a LOT of people just as crack does. I have been told the high does not step in as fast as with crack or coke. And Cocaine seems to be a rich people’s drug of choice. There is a triple standard in the US. The rich can do anything,the poor get treated like scurd and the ones in the shrinking middle get treated almost as bad as the poor. Meth is a huge problem for Native Americans. So is Crack. No one there can afford Cocaine.

  5. The first thing we need to do is get rid of Barack HUSEIN Obammy.

    I ain’t racist or nothin, but the reason we are having all of these problems is that this Muslim from Kenya hates the USA and all white people! The first thing he did was try to take our guns, but when that didn’t work he decided to attack our families.

    Obammy made it perfectly fine for homosexuals and other sex perverts to teach in our schools and be around our kids, these sex freaks in return have been indoctrination our kids with evil liberal values and telling our good white kids to 1. steal from their parents (to lower our wealth) 2. go do drugs and 3. teach our good Christian white girls to intermarry. All this destroys the very prinnciples America was founded on.

    Wake up America! All of this is a war of liberal attrition against good people that hold real values. Wake up before your daughters are married to foreign liberals and have to wear burkas and before you and your family is stoned to death by Sharia law for attending a church on Sunday.

    • Wake up?! To your distorted, uneducated, red-neck version of reality? Maybe you should have finished the 4th grade! You apparently haven’t even learned to think for yourself, you just repeat every idiotic brain fart the G.O.P. conjures up in its feeble attempt to malign the American people. Your pathetic attempts to slander a president who has done more for this country under the most obstructionist congress in U.S. history are nothing more than the pitiful cry of a now defunct RepubliCan’t party; a party that is now self destructing due to their own unscrupulous policies and degenerate leadership. The fact that you try to use religion to justify your racism and ignorance is utterly despicable! We are strong as a nation because of our strength, compassion and diversity – many people coming together as one. There’s no place in this great nation for your platform of fear and ignorance. At some point, you will have to look in the mirror and ‘fess up to the truth – You have become the ugly American…

  6. u wot mate

  7. “I ain’t racist or nothing”

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