Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 17, 1990 TAG: 9003172516
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: PHILADELPHIA LENGTH: Long
As a result, some of them say, the United States is giving birth to a new underclass of disadvantaged youth like none seen before.
"The maternal instinct gets blocked out because the only thing that matters is the addiction," said Kate Vandegrift, director of New Image, a residential rehabilitation program here for women and their children.
The program, designed for homeless addicts, tries to reverse personal priorities, providing therapy, lessons on being a parent and plenty of time for 18 women and their 24 children to renew or create a loving bond.
Sharon Hoyle, a resident, wept for joy the other night at her daughter Janine's 10th birthday party - a tangle of balloons, flashing cameras, wriggling children and proud mothers.
Only months ago, because of crack addiction, these same women were letting their children wither and in one case die from neglect. On this night a year ago Hoyle got high on crack instead of giving Janine a party or even a birthday cake.
"I am proud of myself," Hoyle said.
"I love you," Janine told her mother.
Children's advocates blame the crack epidemic, which officials say began in 1986, for more and more of the 2.2 million cases of child abuse and neglect that are reported to child protective services around the country each year.
A surge in the number of children reported to have died of abuse and neglect also is linked to crack.
The deaths rose by 36 percent, from 899 in 1985 to 1,223 in 1988, the most recent year for which statistics are available, according to the National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse. Social service workers say many cases of child abuse never make it into official reports.
Leslie B. Mitchel, the committee's senior research analyst, said: "In the early 1980s, when we talked to child-protective agencies we used to hear that 30 to 40 percent of the reported child abuse and neglect cases involved substance abuse, and much of that was alcohol abuse.
"Now we are hearing anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of the cases involve substance abuse and much of that is crack cocaine."
Some authorities on child abuse say that crack, like any addictive drug including alcohol, is just one symptom of a bigger social problems.
"There is no place for children in the crack world," said Dr. Marsha Rosenbaum, a sociologist, "but it's not crack so much as the other circumstances of poverty that lead to neglect and sometimes abuse."
Rosenbaum and an associate, Sheigla Murphy, have begun interviews with 125 women who use crack in San Francisco.
Other specialists in treating addiction say crack threatens families more than other drugs do because it is widely available and has a stronger appeal to women than other drugs such as heroin. It does not have to be injected and a single dose is inexpensive.
Dr. Elizabeth Rahdert, a research psychologist in the division of clinical research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said: "We know that it chemically impairs people's functioning so they can't make decisions, can't take responsibility for paying the rent or seeing that there is food on the table for their children.
"We know that the drug is a powerful stimulant that creates high volatility, makes people lose control, become very tense and jumpy. All of these things can lead to not thinking before you act, striking out, more rapid abuse."
Addicted mothers often are single parents, and this can add to the stress of the family situation. Nine out of 10 men leave women who are addicted to drugs, said Vandegrift, New Image's director. Conversely, only one out of 10 women leave addicted men, she said.
An estimated 1.9 million men and 1 million women, almost all of childbearing age, use cocaine, according to the 1988 National Household Survey of Drug Abuse.
Those figures, based on interviews by the National Institute on Drug Abuse with 8,814 people over 12 years of age, include 282,000 men and 203,000 women who use crack.
Crack use among women seems to be cutting across economic lines and in some cases dashing stereotypes. Surveys in Pinellas County, Fla., by Dr. Ira J. Chasnoff, president of the National Association for Perinatal Addiction Research and Education in Chicago, indicate that slightly more pregnant white women in private clinics than pregnant black women in public clinics test positive for cocaine in urine samples.
Nationwide, Chasnoff estimated, as many as one baby in 10, or up to 375,000 a year, are born with some illicit drug in the blood. And particularly because of what crack does to these children and their parents, experts say, there is greater risk of abuse and neglect.
"Crack addicts are more susceptible to all stresses in the environment, and children become stressors," said Dr. Rahdert. "When you have infants and children fetally exposed to crack, they may be easily excitable, hyper-arousable and do more crying. So if the child is impaired and the mother or care giver is impaired, the situation is even more explosive and dangerous."
As for the scope of the problem, researchers are just beginning to study families damaged by crack use and to follow the development of hundreds of thousands of babies neurologically impaired by the drug in the womb who are growing up in dysfunctional families with addicted parents.
But few researchers doubt that most of these children will have mental, emotional and social deficits that will harden their lives and threaten society.
"What it boils down to is that some kids will make it and some won't," said Nancy C. McDaniel, a spokeswoman for the American Humane Association, a 114-year-old non-profit organization in Denver concerned with child abuse.
If social service agencies do not intervene, families with addiction simply slip out of sight, said Dr. Judy Howard, a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of California at Los Angeles.
New Image is one of only about 21 such residential programs for women and children. Many of them started just in the past two years, and they can help only 500 to 1,000 families a year. The cost to public agencies, in the case of New Image, is $75 a day per family.
Hoyle, 31, among the first group of women to complete New Image's rehabilitation program, speaks of her past addiction with detached horror.
The mother, who is separated from her husband, wound up in a city shelter in April 1989 with her three children after being evicted from a house in North Philadelphia for not paying rent. For two years she used the family's entire public assistance grant, about $600 a month, to buy crack.
"I sold the food out of my refrigerator to get high," Hoyle said. "I sold my clothes, the TV, the washing machine and all our furniture to get high. The house was a mess, and after a while the only thing that worked was the bathtub."
"The kids hardly ate," she continued. "They didn't clean their rooms or go to school much. Their mom didn't care about them, and they just started not caring about nothing and fighting with each other a lot. I saw what I was doing to my kids, but getting high was more important than taking care of my family."
Crack is having the same effect on all kinds of people, said Dr. Lorraine E. Hale, president of Hale House in Harlem, which cares for addicts' babies and tries to find homes for them.
"We see all racial groups, including 8 to 10 percent who come from nice middle-class homes," she said. "Of course, everybody's become poor by the time we see them."
The one thing crack addicts have in common, she said, is utter disregard for their children: "I've been working with female drug addicts and their children for 21 years, and I've never seen anything like it."
by CNB