Sarah Marshall:
You're supposed to be writing your emails at about a seventh grade level. Cause I think those are the most responsible and mine are always 10th grade. Michael, tell me, what do you remember about the crack baby phenomenon?
Michael Hobbes:
So my understanding of crack babies is that in the 90s, during the crack epidemic, there were mothers who were addicted to crack and their babies were basically born addicted. So you had hospitals that were inundated with this problem that they didn't know how to solve, which was babies who were born with withdrawal symptoms. And so these poor kids were suffering in the first moments of their life because they were going through withdrawals from crack.
Sarah Marshall:
I'm going to take us back slightly in time to 1986, which is kind of the start of all this. When Spin has--Spin Magazine has a feature called "Crack: a Tiffany drug at Woolworth prices." And it was the first feature article on crack. And the first time that a lot of Americans, a lot of white people in America had heard of crack.
Michael Hobbes:
When did the crack epidemic start? Like how much of a lag time was this?
Sarah Marshall:
Well, this was about a year, I think, after it started really appearing in significant quantities or as something that the police knew to pay attention to.
Michael Hobbes:
Was the writer of the Spin article white?
Sarah Marshall:
He was black, which I think is why, well, actually, I mean, it was 1986, so I think a white writer would have gotten away with this at the time, but he had various lines, you know, he's writing about Harlem and the opening is, "is this a jungle?"
Michael Hobbes:
Yikes.
Sarah Marshall:
He talks about how apparently some crack users started freebasing after Richard Pryor set himself on fire while freebasing in 1979. And people were like, "oh, that sounds pretty good. Maybe." Or that sounds like, I don't know what the logic is, but there is a part of you that I think responds when you see something in the news about people doing some new drug epidemic, you're like, "well, it must be pretty good."
Michael Hobbes:
It's like celebrities wearing Ugg boots. You're like, "maybe I should try these too."
Sarah Marshall:
Yeah. And so apparently, according to this article that was kind of a, one of the first moments in the movement, I guess you would call it.
Michael Hobbes:
It's freebasing cocaine, right? That's the whole thing where you put it in a spoon and you do the lighter thing and it's like a much more condensed, pure version of cocaine. Right? That's what crack is.
Sarah Marshall:
Well, I learned a lot about crack, actually, while researching this. And it's a little bit more complicated than that, Michael.
Michael Hobbes:
No...
Sarah Marshall:
Yeah. So the reason, and let me just actually, I'll start, I'll read you this passage from the Spin article. So, he writes "when the price of coke dropped nearly two years ago, due to a national cocaine glut, crack gained a lot of momentum. Some 'dope boy,' the Harlem terminology for a young drug pusher, got the idea that a lot of money could be made if he bought an ounce of cocaine going for $1900 to $2,000 today and made and packaged his own freebase. Take away the exclusivity, mystery and danger surrounding freebase and place it in the hands of the average Joe. Tiffany drugs at Woolworth prices." So the narrative that comes out in this article is that coke gets cheap because of supply and demand. It's a commodity. Commodities fluctuate in price. And during a period when there's kind of a lot of it, some thoughtful entrepreneur is like, "wait a minute, I could have a bigger profit margin if I distribute it this way versus just in its pure form." And so there's also a nice description of how to make your own crack if you were so inclined. And so this is, he's got an interview with a dealer named Gary Martin and the quotes are, "'the way I've made base' says Martin, 'is to get a little shake bottle, similar to a thermometer but shorter, a half gram of cocaine, a little bit of baking soda, which claims the cut off the coke and a little water inside. You cover the top and place it into a pot of boiling water and let it boil from three to five minutes.'" I also love, by the way, that it says from three to five minutes, it's very precise.
Michael Hobbes:
Like a little recipe.
Sarah Marshall:
It is, it's a little recipe. And it says "'after that, you take it out. And since it's in its purest form, you won't see anything but clear liquid. You take a few ice cubes, crush them, dropping a few chips inside the shake bottle and the remainder around the outside of it until the cocaine cools. After that, you pour the substance onto a silk scarf, which strains out any remaining baking soda. Sometimes it solidifies in pieces and sometimes it's in a big ball. If that happens, you take a razor blade and cut it up and that's crack.'"
Michael Hobbes:
Wow.
Sarah Marshall:
And so I was a child in the 90s, and I feel like crack was something that I heard about without having any real idea what it was. And also because I didn't really wonder or care, I was just like "crack, oh, that's something all the adults are afraid of currently." A lot of what I know about cocaine, I learned from Scarface. And so also in order to consume crack, you needed the police in this article, say that they call it, you know, sucking the glass dick, you need a glass pipe.
Michael Hobbes:
Cause it has to get to a high temperature, right? For this, just for it to sort of break down.
Sarah Marshall:
And then he can't have any old household lighter. You have to have a little butane torch or something like that. And so the crack house rises because you're not going to maybe make this much of an outlay for your own equipment so you need a place to go and rent essentially the use of your paraphernalia and go smoke up.
Michael Hobbes:
So in 1996, like, white America learns that crack exists, but this is pre crack babies, right?
Sarah Marshall:
Well, it's pre them knowing about crack babies, but it's the year after the first and really one of the more influential studies and the only studies that's going to be carried out on crack babies for a while appears. And so Ira Chasnoff, who is a pediatrician in Chicago, publishes an article in 1985 in the New England Journal of Medicine. And it's actually about cocaine use because according to what I've read, crack didn't really hit it big in Chicago. It was more of a New York drug. Cocaine use and crack use have the same effect on a developing fetus. If you're pregnant and you use coke, you'd snort some nice, you know, Hollywood cocaine, or you smoke some crack in New York, it's going to have the same effect on your baby. Your body doesn't care about what race of drug you're using. But so Ira Chasnoff, a pediatrician in Chicago in 1985 publishes a study that he did on the babies of 23 women who had exposed them to cocaine while they were in the uterus. And his findings was that they were less friendly, less social, didn't interact as much with parents, just less well socialized and displayed these interpersonal problems that he attributed to drug exposure.
Michael Hobbes:
How old were these kids?
Sarah Marshall:
None of them were out of toddlerhood at the time of this study.
Michael Hobbes:
So young children that are born to mothers that are addicted to cocaine, have severe behavioral and mental problems.
Sarah Marshall:
I don't even think all of them exhibited severe problems, but he noticed this trend. One of the issues with this study is that he has no control group that he's studying them against. And it's a study of 23 babies, which is not very many babies. And so what happens is that this is published. It doesn't get that much attention as medical journal things don't tend to get. And then the public starts to develop anxieties and 1986 comes and the Spin feature comes out and crack becomes something that appears a lot in mainstream news and becomes, I think, when we talk about the crack epidemic in this time, it's also a way of talking about white America's fears of black Americans and black poverty and quote "the inner cities." And so crack baby becomes a way of saying black baby. And so this one study is done in 1985, white people start getting afraid of crack. We are afraid of the inner cities. And we start seeing this rhetoric develop about the crack babies and my perception of crack babies growing up in the 90s was, and this is also a debunkable thing, is when I was a kid, I used to watch Trauma Life in the ER with my mom all the time. And I remember an episode where they had a baby that was born to a woman who was really high when she went into delivery, and I don't even actually know on what, and they had footage of him like, being so tiny that I think they were trying to do chest compressions on him and his, the bones in his chest were so small that they just sort of bent inward. And the baby didn't die from that but he was just this incredibly tiny, fragile, sad little baby. It was a great piece of don't get addicted to drugs, Sarah propaganda. That's the one I remember seeing. And I remember having that same, the sense of it as a kid at that time of they're all these babies and they're born addicted to drugs and nobody knows what to do. And it's really sad for the babies. The rhetoric that I was not exposed to at the time, and that seems to have been more present in the late 80s, early 90s was this idea that the problem with crack babies was not just that they were being born addicted to drugs or that they were being born premature and would have all these health issues, but that they had this problem with socialization that's pointed to in the initial study and that they have--that they're aggressive and they don't know how to play, and they don't know how to interact with each other. There's a UCLA pediatrician around this time named Judy Howard, who tells a Newsweek article "that what makes us human beings capable of discussion or reflection has been wiped out in crack babies."
Michael Hobbes:
It just seems like it's perfectly designed to play into racial fears. There's a white population that is separated physically from the black population at that point because of white flight. Black people are sort of exoticized. And then it's like you plant this little nugget where it's like, well, what's really happening is there's so many black people whose mothers are addicted to cocaine that they're incapable of socializing. I don't think that people would say, "oh, black people are all having crack babies" necessarily, but it just plays into this idea that they're so different than us. The gaps are unbridgeable. I definitely don't want my kids at the same school with their kids because their kids can't even socialize. It just seems like it would play into this widening gap between white America and black America that was already so bad at that time.
Sarah Marshall:
Yeah. And it feels like this is one of the ways that racism without racists is able to function where, you know, this woman who this quote is from, I do not for a second believe that she lay awake and you know, in bed at night thinking, I know what I'll tell the newsweek people so that I can incept the rest of America into being afraid of black children. But I think in some subconscious way, you know, if you're the progenitor of that quote and you're saying something, that's just so, I mean, saying that the things that make us human are not present in these babies or these little kids, like, if we have white medical professionals and academics talking about this, because they were the ones who had the advantages that allowed them to be in these positions of authority, to then comment on other people's children and draw conclusions from their studies of them, then there's going to be some racial bias operating in your mind. And then another thing that becomes relevant is that it's necessary sometimes to say really damning things about a population that you're working with. If you're going to try and get funding to do anything to mitigate the effects of this thing that they're suffering from. And it feels like that's a hard thing to do too. If you're going to try and ring money out of the government, how do you say this is a really dire situation we need help. These kids are almost beyond help, but not really. They're not, don't be afraid of them, be afraid of what's going to happen if you don't help them. I feel like that's very hard to not be read as, okay. we're afraid of them now.
Michael Hobbes:
This reminds me of my time working in human rights when you realize that all of the incentives at a human rights NGO are to make your problem the worst problem in the world. So if you work at a human trafficking NGO, your incentive is to say human trafficking is big. It's rising. It's huge. It's affecting 50% of the world's population, but it's also fixable. Because that is your entire case for funding your organization is this problem is big. It is unprecedented, but we can solve it. And so I'm sure that doctors and researchers have exactly the same incentives, that they're not necessarily bad people, but they also want to get attention to their issue. They want to raise awareness. And the way that you raise awareness is by talking about things in grandiose ways that make people turn and look at it.
Sarah Marshall:
So Charles Krauthammer, always something interesting is going to follow when you hear that name.
Michael Hobbes:
Oh yeah, this will be nuanced and empathic. Yes.
Sarah Marshall:
So in 1989 in the Washington post, he writes quote, "the inner city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror. A bio underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth. They will grow up to be a race of subhuman drones whose future is closed to them from day one. Theirs will be a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority. The dead babies may be the lucky ones."
Michael Hobbes:
Holy shit.
Sarah Marshall:
Holy shit, dude. And I think what happens, actually, is that we make these horrific, grim, racist predictions in language that really, I mean, reading that, you're like, what a great way to incite genocide.
Michael Hobbes:
Yeah, it really is. I mean, he's like, always, I'm sure that he would deny that there's any racial tone to that. He would say that it's just a coincidence that all of these cocaine babies happen to be African-American, but looking at it now, or I'm sure looking at it then even, it's like, so fucking obvious how much of a dog whistle that is.
Sarah Marshall:
Oh my God. Yeah, and then what happens is that, you know, we make these grim predictions, these horrific racist, grim predictions, and then they don't really happen. There was not a wave of subhuman, violent, impossible to socialize kids who were growing up in the 90s and taking over the schools. This is 1989. And this is the period when it seems like people start like, there's the first whispers in the mid 80s, we started hearing about crack in the mid 80s. Late 80s is when the crack baby emerges. There's no actual cluster of symptoms that is technically associated with it, it's just a you test positive for cocaine exposure when you're born. So it has nothing to do with how you behave or how sick you are or anything else. But it's a figure that you're able to both be afraid of and for. Americans can be terrified of these crack babies and how they're going to grow up and what kind of subhuman wave of children and adolescents they're going to be. But at the same time, you can punish their parents and their communities. Yeah. And then even the people who were characterizing it in a way of saying, we're not saying these people are not human, we're not saying that these cases are beyond fixing, then the narrative that mainstream white America and the people with the money to spend on this sort of thing are going to respond to is there is a wave of crack babies and they are growing up and they're going to be in schools and they will be in schools with your children.
Michael Hobbes:
So much of white flight was driven by schools anyway, right? That there's better schools in the suburbs. And a lot of parents weren't necessarily saying, I don't want my kids in school with black kids. They would just say, I don't want my kids in bad schools. And those bad schools, quote unquote, coincidentally were also the schools that were majority minority. And so that gave them a very convenient cover for moving out to the suburbs and keeping their kids in all white schools. It's interesting that this becomes a racial panic. When I hear moms doing a bunch of cocaine, I think like, rich, upper West side, white ladies.
Sarah Marshall:
I think one of the things that happens with drug use in this context, and it's similar actually to the way that we talk about abortion and restrict access to it now is that wealthy white women are using coke during this time and some of them are pregnant, but they don't require social services. And they're not in a position of their pediatrician knowing what they're doing or needing help from them because of their drug use or because of something relating to their drug use. So this is something I learned while I was researching abortion access and it blew my mind, private physicians like any regular old physician, you know, a wealthier woman can go to, are allowed to perform abortions in office. And if they do something like, I think it varies state by state, but I think in Texas that they do fewer than 100 in a year. You can do 99 abortions in a year and not have to become technically an abortion provider. You can just keep quietly providing them under the table. So if you're wealthy in one of these States where there are ridiculous restrictions on abortion access, you can go and quietly get your abortion from your private doctor. And nobody has to know about it. And nobody has to make you run the gauntlet that you would have to do if you didn't have those resources and you didn't have a private doctor and you just had to go to the clinic like everybody else, and have people scream at you and have to watch videos about your baby's hands and how they are opening and closing and full of God's love.
Michael Hobbes:
This reminds me of reporting that I was doing recently, where I've been interviewing all these stigma researchers. And somebody was telling me that the stigma against mothers who drink during pregnancy, so fetal alcohol syndrome, that stigma is really bad. Like mothers who drink during pregnancy are not people that like, we as a society venerate. And so this doctor was telling me that a lot of people, a lot of doctors don't screen for fetal alcohol syndrome because the mothers immediately are like, what kind of person do you think I am? But if they have a more adversarial relationship with their patient, they will screen for it. So African-American mothers are much more likely to be screened for fetal alcohol syndrome because they tend to have less rapport with they're mostly white doctors. So I wonder if there's something like that going on here too, with the difference between crack and cocaine, a mother who comes in with a toddler who is acting strange, if that mother is low income and black, it seems like the doctor would be more likely to think, "hmm. I wonder if she was using crack during pregnancy." Whereas if a white woman comes in with a toddler, that's acting strange, the doctor would be more likely to go, "hmm, I wonder if it's ADHD."
Sarah Marshall:
And I think that's a huge part of this, because what happens is that the so-called crack babies that are born, you know, with mothers who test positive for cocaine use or who have cocaine in their system, when they're born, they're not born addicted. If you have a baby that is exposed to say heroin use in utero, then they do deal with withdrawal after birth. And that's something that the hospitals has to take care of. That's not the case with cocaine use. What we later find out is that cocaine exposure leads to low birth weight, and that's pretty much it. So the later studies find that the effects of exposure to cocaine in the womb are, this is the New York Times article quote, "less severe than those of alcohol and comparable to those of tobacco." So this is a later analysis of a pool of studies of "14 groups of cocaine exposed children, 4,419, and all ranging in age from four to 13, the analysis failed to show a statistically significant effect on IQ or language development in the largest of the studies IQ scores of exposed children averaged around four points lower at age seven than those of unexposed children." So that's a difference, so small as to be statistically insignificant.
Michael Hobbes:
Right? So all this stuff about everything that makes them human, that didn't really pan out. That it's not turning them into non people. It's not good for them, but it's not an existential threat to the family and America and everything else.
Sarah Marshall:
Yeah. There are several quotes from various people in articles debunking this saying that if you have a room full of kids and some of them have been exposed to cocaine in utero and some haven't, then you can't tell the difference. Even as a clinician. There's a quote from a woman who worked in a kindergarten program for crack babies at the time that became a lightning rod for the media because they had to come and get their images of the crack babies and the crack kids. And they would come. And what they asked her for was footage of children trembling, cause that was one of the things that they had been told was a symptom. And so then in these later articles offering the debunking information, they talk about, well, you know, there's this one mother who has a child with these behavioral issues who was exposed to cocaine in the womb, but that's because he's autistic so...
Michael Hobbes:
Nice.
Sarah Marshall:
So you look at the descriptions of the crack babies in the 80s and what they talk about is that they don't have what they need to be human. They don't look you in the eye. They don't like to be held. They get overstimulated really easily. Some of these kids were probably on the autism spectrum.
Michael Hobbes:
Right. Or just difficult kids or squirmy kids. Once you exit the frame of this must be crack doing this to them, you can imagine 50 million reasons why kids would be acting strangely at that age.
Sarah Marshall:
This is probably going to be another theme for us that there are times in America where we're like, why are kids acting strangely? And the answer is, well, it could be any of a hundred different factors. And the answer we want is it is this one thing that we can then stamp out. And so what comes from that is that in, and also in a way that is emerging as a pattern for us, we attempt to combat this one thing and we end up developing methodologies that are harmful to children in some capacities. Hospitals during the late 80s and early 90s developed strategy where if they have a baby who's born and test positive for cocaine, then they're like, okay, this is a crack baby. So what we have to do is swaddle him and put him in a dark room and confiscate him from his family and not talk to him or interact with him because crack babies don't like that.
Michael Hobbes:
No fucking way. So hospitals started doing this stuff when they detected cocaine in the baby?
Sarah Marshall:
Yeah. And they call them border babies like, boarding house.
Michael Hobbes:
So how long would they keep them under those conditions? That sounds like a terrible way to spend your first couple of days of life.
Sarah Marshall:
They would keep them that way sometimes for several weeks. And one of the things I find most fascinating in the history of our cultural understanding of mother-baby development is that in, for example, Bellevue hospital in New York, in the 19-teens and 20s--this is a problem we have as a species. We learn about one thing and then we get really overenthusiastic. Like, we're kind of, we're a nation of Kramers, you know, who everyday is like, it's all gonna be levels, Jerry. You know? So we learned about germs. We discovered germs. We're like, oh fuck, germs. So for example, at Bellevue, people who took care of infants who were in the hospitals because they had been orphaned or found in a Foundling home type of a ward, hospitals prided themselves on handling the babies as little as possible. And they would prop feed them which meant that they had an apparatus that would lower a bottle that the baby could feed from. So the baby didn't need to be held.
Michael Hobbes:
Oh my God.
Sarah Marshall:
Yes.
Michael Hobbes:
Like a little horrible robot arm.
Sarah Marshall:
Yeah. The goal was to touch and handle the baby as little as possible. And so what happens is that a lot of these babies exhibit what is called failure to thrive and they have all of the physical resources they need but they sort of waste and wither away and nobody knows why. And so for a while they're like, well, it's malnutrition. And then science makes some strides in the forms of nutrition. And we know that the babies are getting adequate nutrition and they're like, well, it's infection, that's why the babies are dying. And yet the more we try and avoid contaminating them with germs, the more they seem to be dying of things related to germs. And finally, pediatricians and scientists come in and are like babies actually like being handled. Like, babies need to be held and touched and looked at to be happy humans. And so at Bellevue, for instance, they Institute a new policy where there's a sign up in the room where they kept these infants, that they previously prided themselves on touching as little as possible, that said, you cannot enter this room without touching a baby. And nurses were instructed to touch them and to touch them when they didn't need to be doing so for a functional reason, but just, you know, to hold them and interact with them. And they start doing better and they start dying less. And then in the 80s we have kind of this return of the sterile room methodology of caring for newborns, where we're like, okay, these are not regular babies. These are crack babies. And we need to leave them the fuck alone and not touch them and not interact with them potentially for the first few weeks of their life. And then after that, since we've seized them from their parents, since their moms are these dangerous crack using moms, then we're going to put them in state custody, or they're going to maybe go to a foster home or something like that. And what we know, which I feel like I'm not generalizing to say, is that weeks of sustained non-interaction with other human beings followed by becoming a ward of the state followed by going with whoever is desperate enough to take care of one of these crack babies that we're hearing about on the news, who apparently are going to become, you know, who are not going to be human and are inevitably going to be violent, anti-social murderers. The people who are taking in the crack babies are either saints or people who really need the extra government money. And so you're gonna end up with a child who is affected by that being the circumstances of the very start of their life. So in order to combat this specter of the demon of crack, we create our own within the system.
Michael Hobbes:
I think there's something here about, we focus on the things that we do know about, and we never focus on the things we don't know about. That it's very easy to say, well, we know this one thing is making children worse. So we're going to do everything we can to prevent that one bad thing. But of course, for any child, there's 50 million things making their lives worse and 50 million things making their lives better. Many of which we don't actually know very much about and don't know how to measure or just haven't discovered yet. And so it's like, well, we're going to take this one thing among many, and we're going to do everything we can to prevent that one thing. Even if overall it makes the kids worse.
Sarah Marshall:
And also, and it's something that it's, I think people definitely had the tools to realize, even at the time, disproportionately affected mothers of color because white women and women of color use drugs to exactly the same extent. Everybody likes drugs. You know, there are some people who don't do them, but especially if we're talking about an addictive substance, it's not something that is going to affect you differently physiologically based on race, regardless of however much various conservative pundits would like to believe that that's not true. This leads then to additional material for incarcerating women of color. Because then if you are coming into a hospital, you know, for a prenatal appointment, or if you're going to give birth and you are seen as someone who's potentially through your own selfishness, right? Giving wave to this epidemic of super predator in human crack babies who are going to then--and the rhetoric, of course at the time also is, you know, pretty soon they're going to be school age, and then there'll be invading our schools. And then what, what are we going to do? And so we have another reason for the law to come down like the hammer of Thor on expectant. Mothers of color and laws are put on the books in the 90s in several states, including in Wisconsin, where I currently am recording this episode. Redefining legally, what a child is, according to state statutes, as an unborn child. Previously, you couldn't accuse someone of abusing their unborn child, but now we open the door to being able to do so legally. And so we see the effects of those laws still where women can be brought to trial and have an attorney appointed for their unborn child to potentially incarcerate them based on their drug use having constituted a form of child abuse and endangered their child's life.
Michael Hobbes:
I guess you can call this a chapter in the generations long othering of African-Americans, right? That there's always this idea that African-Americans are fundamentally different and that the way they raise their kids is different. The way that they eat is different. The drugs they use is different. Because that was already so primed in American life, especially for everybody in power. Again, it's like, what do you not need evidence to believe? It sounds like here it fits the same pattern as the satanic panic where you don't need all that much evidence to believe that African-American mothers are bad and that African-Americans are scary and using these scary drugs that white people have never heard of. You don't need great evidence for that. It's like these little tiny spikes of evidence are enough to shift policy. There's all these other things that we learn that don't result in shifts in policy, right? That we have high domestic violence rates among unemployed men. But we don't see a huge shift in policy to say, oh, let's make sure that every unemployed man in America gets whatever domestic violence training. We don't have those big shifts because it's like, well, you know, what's really going on and let's find more information and let's understand this problem a little bit more. Whereas whenever it comes to African-Americans, it's like, the minute we get a blip of data, it's like, oh my God, their kids are in danger, let's change laws immediately. Like, it's fascinating to me how drastic the policy response was on so little information or what's basically a collection of anecdotes.
Sarah Marshall:
And I think that what happens too, is that we get really excited as white people, you know, generalizing about our culture. What we seem to really love is if there's some sort of anecdotal or pretty unsubstantiated data that points to a problem in communities of color where the potential response is incarceration. We just start rubbing our hands together. We're like, oh yes. If we can prosecute more people and solve a problem by putting people in prison, like, let's do that one.
Michael Hobbes:
Right. This crackdown is going to fix it. All the previous ones haven't resulted in any good outcomes, but this one is really going to crack the case.
Sarah Marshall:
If we had been looking at this as correlative data and saying, okay, these kids who are in homes where they're exposed to crack in the womb and crack also corresponds to a whole cluster of socioeconomic things based on where we are observing it being used at this time, like, we can also connect it to maternal health and we can connect it to malnutrition, both for the pregnant mother and for the baby when it's born, we can connect it to the fact that these are our babies that are living in, you know, homes that are often impoverished or where they don't have parents who are able to be consistent primary caregivers because they're busy working or because they're taking, you know, they're being arrested and stuff and families are being separated. We have all of these complicated factors that we can look at and say, maybe America has failed these communities and these families and we need to do all sorts of things to figure out how to help people have healthier home lives and be able to have--to live in conditions that they're able to bring a baby into and if it's, you know, maybe born with a low birth weight to help it get over that initial hump and grow up healthy, we're like, no, crack, it's crack. I'm pretty sure it's crack.
Michael Hobbes:
I guess the overall insight is that if you really wanted to help low income babies or ethnic minority babies, there's lots of stuff you could do that like, isn't shitty and would actually be helping mothers. You could be giving them more money. You could be giving them foods delivered to their door so they don't have to take time off work to go buy baby food. There's a million things that you could do that are like, hey, this is a population that's struggling like, let's do things to help out this population. And working with that population, you know, you could talk to low income African-American mothers and say, hey, what support do you need? But of course that never occurs to people in power. People in power are always like, oh, these people are failing. These people are different. It always goes into this punitive frame where it's never carrots and sticks. It's always just stick, stick, stick, stick, stick.
Sarah Marshall:
Also been watching again, the first season of Law and Order, which is just, every time I watch it it gets more conservative and reactionary. The end of the story is always somebody gets put away and it's not--we don't know where they're going. We don't really talk that much on Law and Order about what are the conditions of incarceration. How is this person going to be punished? What's it going to be like? What is life like in prison? What's it like to try and get out? Do criminals, can they be rehabilitated? Like, I don't think Dick Wolf thinks that, but it's not a conversation that tends to come up. It's just, you send them away. It's not even about where they're going. It's that they're not going to be here anymore. They're going somewhere else. And it's an outcome that's so narratively satisfying that I think the more we get accustomed to consuming that satisfying narrative, the less we question it when we see it or see aspects of it happening in the news or around us.
Michael Hobbes:
I think there's this tendency to think that sort of, it's only pop culture. "Oh, it's just a TV show. What does it really mean? Come on. It's just a Disney movie. What does it really mean about gender relations?" Whatever. But I think that old shows like this are such a great diary entry of what we were thinking at the time, what was the mainstream consensus? And I think this demonstrates the extent to which this punitive get tough on crime war, on drugs wave in the 80s and 90s really was the consensus view. There was not a whole lot of institutional questioning of the war on drugs back then. And I think shows like Law and Order and the tens of millions of cop shows and cop movies that we have are a sign of the extent to which we've all sort of accepted this framing, that there are bad people and good people, and we're rooting out and finding the bad people and that's what cops do. In this whole wave, we were always kind of telling ourselves that it wasn't racial. We were always telling ourselves that it was just about crime. It had nothing to do with race. We're a post-racial society, blah, blah, blah. The same way we say that about ourselves now. When looking back, it's really obvious to see that like, well, it was only one group of people that was being affected by the war on drugs, crime, everything else.
Sarah Marshall:
The thing about the crack baby is that I think white America got addicted to the crack baby. And that was really one of our drugs of choice at the time, if we're talking about reactionary media, cause I think there's something that happens in the human brain when you're reading a story or a headline that really hits that sweet spot of pity and fear. You can punish the community to save the baby. You can punish the baby to save your community. All of your fears and your anxieties and your various prejudices get sort of caramelized, you know, I mean, it's like, crack.
Michael Hobbes:
It's like, "I don't want to put you in prison. It's just, I have to because I care so much about these babies. I'm so--I just care--my heart goes out to these babies so much that I'm really going to need to incarcerate their mothers for years. I'm so sorry." I mean, it's just, it's perfect because it allows you to be really punitive and also maintain this fiction that you're really only in it for the children. So you said that there start to come out these meta analyses of what is the effect of cocaine on children. So when do these start coming out?
Sarah Marshall:
These start coming out in the mid 90s at which point the original babies in the study are about 10 years old and they're basically fine. And yeah, so here's a quote from a New Republic article from a couple years back by Nora Caplin Bricker. "Pregnant women all over the country, mostly if they were poor and showed up in public hospitals, had their blood tested. If they tested positive for cocaine, there were federal prosecutors waiting. It was a new angle of attack on overwhelmingly poor women of color." And another thing that I read recently, that to me kind of sums this up, is from a book called Blind Injustice, which basically breaks down, chapter by chapter, a lot of the reasons why wrongful convictions are able to take place. What are the conversations happening in prosecutor's offices? How are they run? Because sometimes wrongful convictions are often wrongful convictions take place because of something like DNA testing not being far enough along at the time of the trial to give an accurate result about what happened. But sometimes it's just because of the way prosecutors offices are run. And so if we're living in a society where the goal is to put as many people away for as long as possible, then it's part of our culture. And the quote from this, that to me sum this up, is nobody ever won a campaign for district attorney or judge with a policy of being soft on crime. Right? And I think the crack baby meets tough on crime in the late 80s and 90s was just this match made in heaven I think as far as if you are in the business of putting people in prison, then the crack baby becomes a great way to do it. Going back to the question about, did these laws follow directly from the crack baby fears, these laws that allowed women to be incarcerated for endangering their unborn baby, their fetus. I think there's too much of a ripple effect to really draw a straight line from that. But the crack baby stories provided a point of entry for this kind of really, not to say overzealous, but enthusiastic prosecution. And I think that we're just the more we're putting people in prison, the more comfortable we feel, the more we feel that we're fixing society and taking the bad elements out and protecting the good elements.
Michael Hobbes:
There's also a thing I feel like, a structural weakness of media, is that it's very difficult to say, let's wait and get more evidence. The correct response to that 1985 study was basically, look, it's a small sample size. There's no control. We don't know what the phenomenon is. Let's hold off, find out what the phenomenon is and then let's start legislating about it. But that's a kind of complex and nuanced argument or at least too complex and nuanced for people like Charles Krauthammer. And so it's very difficult to write that column that isn't necessarily let's do this or let's do that. It's let's do nothing and let's gather more information. That's always a really boring argument. No one's ever going to write a hot take saying I don't have a position on universal basic income until we do three or four or five pilots and then I'll decide what my position is. Nobody can write that take. The take has to be here's the evidence, here's the conclusion. It sounds like the only debunking came when there was good evidence that it was bullshit. But when there's bad evidence that it's true, that's a much more difficult argument to make.
Sarah Marshall:
Yeah and it's not a good defensive position to be in. Like, if you're the person, if you are, you know, arguing against someone who's saying we're creating a generation of super predator crack babies, and your argument has to be, we don't know, let's gather more evidence. You know, that doesn't sound great to John Q driveway reading his newspaper in the morning.
Michael Hobbes:
So how did the ship start to turn around on this? Like, when did the hospitals drop these policies? When did things cool down prosecutorial?
Sarah Marshall:
I mean, I think hospitals dropped their policies of physically isolating crack babies around the time that these new studies come out in the mid 90s. I don't know if anyone's still doing that. I wouldn't be surprised if there were places in America where that was still policy cause it's a big country full of weirdos. But I don't think that it has cooled down prosecutorially. I think one of the overarching things that we're looking at, and that will continue to come up for us, is that we have these faulty narratives, these things that are essentially not junk science, but junk story that took hold of the American imagination for a period, you know, in the 70s or in the 80s and that we later debunked and that certain, you know, say, the medical establishment changed its best practices in order to reflect. But that altered our culture enough that only felt safe when we were overzealously prosecuting people. In terms of incarceration, the numbers have only been increasing and America is now a country where one in 100 people is incarcerated. And I think that these--this was one of the narratives that helped us down this road that we were already certainly on in the 80s, but have only gone farther and farther down in the intervening decades. That this was one of the stories that helped bring us here. And we haven't come back.
Michael Hobbes:
Are we still prosecuting mothers?
Sarah Marshall:
Yeah, I mean the cocaine mom law was taken off the books in Wisconsin recently because of a high profile case here, but they're, especially in Alabama, they, I mean, they also Alabama recently repealed a couple of laws, but these are, these laws got put on the books in many States in the 90s and it's easier to make law than it is to change it. Especially if you're talking about being tough on crime, especially if you're talking about punishing populations so the public is afraid of and alleging to do something in the interest of babies and children, it's much easier to make love than it is to repeal it. And so there have been cases, there was a case in Alabama that was also covered extensively in Mother Jones, where a woman had taken, I think, a Valium while she was pregnant. And because of that yielded a positive drug test because of that had her baby seized from her at birth. Yeah. And the Wisconsin case that led to the cocaine mom law being repealed was based on this woman. A pregnant woman had gone in--a pregnant white woman, no less, had gone into a prenatal appointment. And they had asked her, you know, do you have a history of drug dependency, anything like that? And she voluntarily provided information about a past drug dependency that she had that was over for her. And that was enough information for them to come down on her and to use that law as a way to do it. It's a little bit like the adage about a lie can travel around the world before the truth has time to put its shoes on. What we often see if we know to look for it is that these narratives gain cultural traction, we the public become really attached to them. And then we may kind of move on and forget. And the average American probably isn't walking around feeling afraid of crack babies anymore. But the laws that get enacted during those periods remain, unless somebody has the energy and the time and the money to take them down. And that's much harder to do than to create new legislation in an atmosphere of fear and anxiety and Krauthammer fueled racism.
Michael Hobbes:
Yeah. It's like the response gallops ahead of the facts so far that the facts sort of fade into the distance.
Sarah Marshall:
I still love Law and Order. I will never be able to not love it, but I used to think that it reflected some form of legal reality in a way that I now know it doesn't. And I remember the first time I got really, really spent time, you know, reading briefs, reading trial transcripts, reading actual legal language, reading the text of American law, you know, which was when I was going to be a lawyer for a hot second. And then the more I read it, the more I had the feeling that you have when you're a teacher and you read a paper and you're just like, how long did it take you to write this? Like, I want to believe that you worked hard, but I don't think that you were. You know, our kind of Corpus of American law and if you look at it through the lens of these kinds of scares and these stories, you see that it's this grab bag of leftover traces from our various societal fears and anxieties. And you can look at a law that was put on the books in whatever year and look at what are the societal factors that are at play at this time and be like, this is not based on an objective reflection on human behavior or what is going to benefit the communities that this law is going to affect. This is based on what we were most afraid of at this time. This is based on what we didn't need evidence in order to believe.
Michael Hobbes:
So another episode with a sad ending.
Sarah Marshall:
I know.
Michael Hobbes:
The miserable legacy, like, I knew this was going to be a depressing episode. I didn't know its tentacles were going to stretch this far into the present.
Sarah Marshall:
I can read something that'll cheer us up.
Michael Hobbes:
Please do.
Sarah Marshall:
This is from the Spin article, which has all of these little bracketed sections explaining what the very confusing lingo the people in it are using. So this is a quote from one of the crack dealers that the journalist profiles. And I'll read the bracketed quote along with it. Crack dealer says, "he was a man who grew up a few blocks away from me. Used to be a dope fiend and became a multimillionaire driving a new luxury car every week and sporting the flyest gear, the nicest clothes I've ever seen. And I figured if he can do it, why can't I."
Michael Hobbes:
Aww.
Sarah Marshall:
We're living in an America where we don't know what the flyest gear means. Like, we're so clueless about even the remote, you know, the tiniest amount of slang that we need subtitles for it. But we're still saying, we know what's best for this community. I made it sad again. I ruined it.
Michael Hobbes:
I also love that there's like, the flyest gear would be really, really easy to figure out what he means from context clues. Like, he's saying he wants to earn money so he can buy the flyest gear. It's like, I wonder what he could mean. You don't actually need the glossary to figure out that he means clothing there. It's not that difficult.
Sarah Marshall:
All right. I think, I feel like that's, that's slightly happier now.
Michael Hobbes:
So yeah, that Americans read at a fourth grade level and we need to be spelled out. We can't learn anything from context clues.
Sarah Marshall:
Yes. I feel better.