'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

Dear Dr. Felitti,

The credit for this post goes to our fabulous ACEsConnection member Loren Taylor who is doing incredible work in Washington State. A very thought-provoking piece indeed.

best,

chris

Thanks, Chris.  Again, I apologize for my delayed response.

What they left out was any thought given to why the mothers were using cocaine.  The life experiences of the mothers that are being self-treated with cocaine might be far more transmissible than are the effects of cocaine.  For instance, one may indeed die of smoke inhalation and therefore decide to treat the smoke in a house fire by bringing big fans instead of treating the fire by bringing big hoses.  This happens because we are drawn to the easily visible, paying no attention to underlying causality.  As an example of uncomfortable things being overlooked, why is there no mention of this girl's father?  Does being fatherless matter?  Might it be treated with food, alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, or sex?  Of course, those coping devices are not curative, and it's hard to get enough of something that almost works, thus needing another dose - which we call addiction.  Indeed, there are demonstrable changes in the brain with all this.  The brain is a neurochemical machine and all the necessary intermediary processes take place there.  But that is different from primary causality.  In the ACE Study, we found that a person having 6 or more categories of adverse life experiences during childhood was 4,600% more likely to become an iv drug user than was a person experiencing none of the ten common categories studied.

Similarly poverty is a simple explanation that does not threaten us much from a distance.  Again, why are people poor?  Of all the poor immigrants who come here, what is the difference between those who do well and those who transmit their poverty to the next generations.  In the ACE Study, we saw poverty as an outcome of other more basic factors, often having occurred decades earlier during childhood.  Perhaps that has something to do with the failure of LBJ's well-intentioned War on Poverty: the smoke was being treated, not the fire.

Best wishes,  Vincent

Interesting that the "crack baby" study provides more support for the ACE Study, and, in this case, the ACE-plus approach that Dr. Nadine Burke Harris took in her study of pediatric clients in the Bay View/Hunters Point area of San Francisco, as did the recent Philadelphia ACEs Study. It might be useful to define poverty, because hearing gunshots and seeing a dead body outside can also be events seen in war, which is also traumatizing. I.e., poverty doesn't necessarily include violence, which can often mask the discussion of solutions for poverty.   

Very sad. Important we know about this, though and the article you added on the economy. The Establishment rich have conquered all possible lands on the planet so there are no more left to exploit. The trend now is they're trying to make slaves out of many of us; hence the reason the middle class is eroding. The historical model is no longer sustainable imo.  Good interviews on change and economics here: http://whatnowsolutions.org/tag/economics/ Highly educated folks trying to tackle these problems.

This article I found today makes the situation look even more dire ... 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/28/poverty-unemployment-rates_n_3666594.html