Word: cracking
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...imagine the pain and horror of Daniel Scott's last hours. The seven-month-old baby was found by police lying in a pool of blood next to his crib in a Bronx tenement. His mother, off on a six-day crack binge, had left him in the care of his father, who abandoned the child in his unlocked apartment without so much as a bottle of water. Emaciated, filthy, desperate, the infant had apparently hoisted himself out of the crib and tumbled onto the wood floor before finally dying of starvation and dehydration. Both parents -- Jane Scott...
Confronted by such tragic chapters in the saga of crack, Americans tend to focus on questions of state intervention: At what point should authorities act to remove a child from the home of drug-abusing parents? At birth? When there is clear evidence of abuse or neglect? How about before birth? -- the position of a growing number of people calling for mandatory birth control for female addicts. For Daniel Scott, intervention never came...
...five years, if they wish to avoid jail. Under the proposed law, the state would pay for the $500 procedure, and also for its removal if the woman stays clean for a year. Says Patrick: "I've gotten a lot of support from nurses who deal with crack babies. Once you see one, you don't care about the rights of the mother...
Testimony from many of the addicts themselves seems to support Durfee's argument. Doreen Flaherty, 27, a recovering crack addict from Garden Grove, Calif., remembers spending a week in jail after being arrested for possession of cocaine. "I kept crying in jail because I wanted to see my little girl," she says. "That's all that mattered to me." After she made bail, Doreen did not return home to her daughter but sought out a drug dealer instead. When a girlfriend tracked her down at the crack house, Doreen told the dealer to say she was not there. "How could...
...cities with the biggest crack problems have backed away from their initial seize-the-kids approach. Until 1986, Los Angeles County automatically took at least temporary custody of drug-exposed newborns. Then the crack epidemic exploded. "If we took every child who came out with a positive tox screen," says Gerhard Moland, a children's services administrator, "it would overwhelm the system." Now social workers consider the child's health and the mother's potential for rehabilitation when making court recommendations. The biggest factor in determining whether or not the county takes custody: the presence of a sober grandmother. Currently...