and any lingering doubts America had about the drug war evaporated.^[34]  Congress, equal to the occasion, added another 26 mandatory minimum sentences to the books.  Now even first time small-scale street dealers faced ten years without parole.^[35]

Thus, the nation’s moral searchlight had come to focus squarely on the failings of the inner city.  Now it would highlight those failings with a startling new discovery—crack babies—an image so horrifying it seemed to clinch the argument that addicts are indeed vampires. News footage of emaciated preemies—sustained by tubes and electronics at staggering cost—sickened viewers all over the country. Here were the fruits of indulgence, the horrifying issue of women who’s moral compasses were so screwed up they had essentially abandoned their babies in the womb.  Their pathetic offspring, trembling in the glare of the incubator lights, so grievously damaged by their mothers’ weakness, fueled a storm of outrage. Experts said these children were probably beyond salvation.  Their IQs would range in the low 50s—barely able to dress themselves—dependent on the taxpayers for life—“a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority.”^[36]  Informed that the bill for a single child might run to a quarter of a million dollars, the president of Boston University questioned spending this kind of money on “crack babies who won’t ever achieve the intellectual development to have consciousness of God.”^[37] Then, in 1987, Chicago pediatrician Ira Chasnoff surveyed the pregnant women in 36 hospitals and his startling discovery created a media frenzy. According to press reports, ten percent of the women in the survey were on cocaine.  Nationwide, that would translate into 375,000 potential cocaine babies, a year.  People began bracing for the arrival of a permanent sub-human biologic underclass.

But when the expected tidal wave of brain-damaged, unteachable monsters failed to materialize, a handful of thoughtful people started looking into some of the original assumptions.  They