Poverty worse than drugs!

The NY Daily News story has this headline:

‘Crack baby’ study finds poverty is worse for child development than exposure to drug in womb

Quotes:

In 1989, Hallam Hurt, who was then the chair of neonatology at Philadelphia’s Albert Einstein Medical Center, began to study the long term health prospects for children born to mothers who had smoked crack during pregnancy.....This past June, after 25 years of following people born at the height of the city’s crack epidemic, Hurt unveiled the results of her study, which concluded that, in terms of overall negative health effects, a mother’s crack use was not as harmful as whether or not the child grew up in poverty.

“Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine,” Hurt said in a recent lecture.

The nation has a war on drugs, but long ago gave up on the war on poverty.

Aside: the British East India Company followed by its colonial governments helped addict the Chinese to opium and impoverished India.  Now it is difficult to say which was the greater crime.