The team has kept tabs on 110 of the 224 children originally in the study. The years of tracking kids have led Hurt to a conclusion she didn't see coming. "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine," Hurt said at her May lecture.
Other researchers also couldn't find any devastating effects from cocaine exposure in the womb. Claire Coles, a psychiatry professor at Emory University, has been tracking a group of low-income Atlanta children. Her work has found that cocaine exposure does not seem to affect children's overall cognition and school performance, but some evidence suggests that these children are less able to regulate their reactions to stressful stimuli, which could affect learning and emotional health.
Coles said her research had found nothing to back up predictions that cocaine-exposed babies were doomed for life. "As a society we say, 'Cocaine is bad and therefore it must cause damage to babies,' " Coles said. "When you have a myth, it tends to linger for a long time."
You start with a drug apartheid myth rooted in a toxic mix of power, prejudice and ignorance, accept it as fact, then invest in a research team to find evidence to support the myth. Been happening for years in the war between drugs. Eventually ...the truth comes out as it did here. But the damage is done and myths take decades to debunk, and maybe centuries to nullify.