I wonder if other well-intentioned surburban liberals would be equally suprised to learn that the epidemic of "crack babies" used as a justification for draconian sentencing policies is actually completely spurious:
"Little black babies born "craving" cocaine and with lifelong defects formed a central, and lasting, image justifying today's drug laws .... but neither powder nor crack cocaine creates a physical dependence—in the way heroin and nicotine do, for instance—because the body metabolizes them so fast ... Nonetheless, news outlets jumped on studies in which pregnant rats got dosages 25 times the size a human would take and ran with them. The supposedly crack-damaged babies that filled the airwaves were more likely hurt by factors we've long known to plague poor black women, and never cared about—poor pre and post-natal care, awful diets, the male violence directed at their bodies, and more."
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