Children of crack addicts are at extreme risk of neglect and abuse, and child welfare agencies are reeling from crack-related cases.
—A.M.Rosenthal

These women are not monsters. They do not hate their kids, and they do not hit their kids any more than their counterparts who do not use crack. And given the high cost of drugs, they certainly do not share that expensive commodity with their kids.
—Marsha Rosenbaum

Every so often, our elected officials feel the need to blame a whole host of social horrors on the existence of one illegal drug. In recent years cocaine and its derivative, crack, have been chosen as that scapegoat drug. There is no doubt that crack is highly addicting and dangerous to many people. Yet, while we believe that anyone who tries crack is playing with fire, we do not believe the hysterical claims made about the alleged epidemic of deaths and damage caused directly by crack.

It is a testament to the distorting power of drug-war fever that the hype about crack has been spread by leaders of the most respected institutions in American society — and from them to the leaders of other nations. We have already seen that President Bush and Drug Czar Bennett placed a great deal of the blame for our current problems on the advent of crack. Even The New York Times seems to have lost a good deal of its normal moderation and balance when it comes to cocaine and crack.

A.M. Rosenthal and other members of The Times editorial page seemed consumed with the need to report on crack in terms more suitable to tabloids like The National Enquirer. In one editorial on May 28, 1989 the sub-leads included such startling phrases as, "Crime and Blood, in the Streets," "Mothers Turned into Monsters," and "Ripping the Fabric of Society." Aptly, that editorial was entitled, "Crack — A Disaster of Historic Dimensions, Still Growing."

The hysteria affected the news pages as well. The New 170711 Times' distinguished health reporter, Jane E. Brody, helped spread the claim in a September 1988 story that the drug was causing "an epidemic of damaged infants." Prominently quoted in the article was the research of Dr. Ira J. Chasnoff, Director of the National Association for Perinatal Addiction Research and Education. Soon Dr. Chasnoff and the association were being quoted in newspapers around the world as sources for the assertion that perhaps one in ten new babies born in America or 375,000 every year were damaged by crack.