discovered that the crack baby epidemic, like the Nixon heroin scare, was a total fabrication—a blend of distorted data and sloppy journalism. The tiny infants trembling in their incubators were real enough—no question about that—but they were usually the victims of an older more established drug.  What the cameras were capturing were the well documented effects of fetal alcohol syndrome.

A group of Canadian researchers took a second look at the data from twenty previous cocaine studies and learned that many researchers had lumped the use of cocaine in with other drugs, including alcohol. Reviewing all the data in all twenty studies, they found no link between cocaine use and the so-called crack baby syndrome.^[38]  As for the figure of 375,000 crack babies—still gospel to some commentators—it turns out Dr. Chasnoff was simply misquoted. He did not say that ten percent of the pregnant women he surveyed were crack users. He said that ten percent of them had, at some time in their lives, used some kind of drug, which included casual use of marijuana. The jump from there to the crack-baby connection was another leap of pack journalism. The fuzziness of the 375,000 figure itself should have been obvious to any reporter willing to do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation.  If, as the government claimed, one out of ten cocaine users becomes addicted, then every pregnant woman in the country would have to be using cocaine for ten percent of them to give birth to crack babies.^[39]

Nonetheless, the crack baby was such a hit with the media that any expert who got in the way was steamrolled. Claire Coles, a specialist at Emory University Medical School in Atlanta, had been warning reporters all along that a jittery preemie born to a malnourished, abused woman who drinks and smokes could hardly be laid at the feet of cocaine. Women who use cocaine while pregnant also drink more booze, smoke more cigarettes, and dip into more kinds of other drugs. They have poorer nutrition and health and are more often exposed to violence. Rather than cocaine, said Coles, these children were “victims of