Two decades later, we're still learning about how drug and alcohol exposure by pregnant affects their children. But it turns out that children who are exposed to crack cocaine before birth are proving these worst case scenarios were all wrong. And we're joined now by several people who know about this. Joining us are Mary Barr and her daughter Nisa Beceriklisoy. Mary is an activist who discusses her past crack cocaine use while pregnant with Nisa. Nisa is about to go off to college.
Ms. BARR: Well, the crack baby myth hadn't been, you know, advertised as much as it was later on. You know, I didn't want to drink, I didn't want to smoke cigarettes, I didn't want to really do anything while I was pregnant. But one of the reasons I kept using during my first pregnancy was because, well, like, I always like to say if pregnancy was a cure for addiction, we could just go out and get all the female addicts pregnant, and, hey, no more addiction. But it's not a cure for addiction. So, even though I thought about stopping, it wasn't that easy.
movies mothers with crack addiction
MARTIN: Did you grow up hearing what was being described around kids who had been exposed to crack in utero? Were you ever exposed to any of that? Because, you know, kids can be mean. And, you know, sometimes when kids find out something about another kid, they just use it to kind of hammer them with. And I just wondered if you had ever had heard any of that kind of conversation and if it affected any sense of who you were or what you wanted for yourself.
Dr. BELL: The fear was that women who were pregnant who were using crack cocaine would cause some brain changes in their infants. The concern since crack is a stimulant - cocaine is a stimulant - was that these areas in the brain that dealt with the issue of stimulation like attention deficit disorder or even bipolar disorder might be overly activated or somehow distorted while the baby's brain was developing. So there were all these really silly ideas about hyper aggressiveness, attention deficit disorder, manic depressive disorder in these children.
MARTIN: If you're just joining us, this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. Back in the '80s and the '90s there was a panic about children being exposed to crack cocaine in utero. Now some of those kids are all grown up and doing amazing things. And we are joined by one of them, Nisa Beceriklisoy, along with her mother Mary Barr and Dr. Carl Bell, who joins us from time to time to talk about medical issues and issues around mental health.
Dr. BELL: Well, no. I mean, the manner in which this country treats pregnant women is reprehensible. We do not do a good job of taking care of women who have problems with addiction, who have problems with domestic violence who have children. And it's, you know, I mean, it's a public disgrace. Part of the hope is that the health care reform bill is going to do some nurse home visitation which might correct some of that.
While craving her next hit, Khaila Richards (Halle Berry), an African-American crack cocaine addict, abandons her infant illegitimate son, Isaiah, in the dumpster. She promises to "come back later", but then passes out from the drugs. The next day, the infant narrowly escapes death in the garbage truck. Baby Isaiah is sent to the hospital, where they discover he is also addicted to crack through his mother's addiction. While caring for Isaiah, a social worker named Margaret Lewin (Jessica Lange) grows increasingly fond of him and eventually adopts him to live with her and her husband, Charles (David Strathairn) and daughter, Hannah. Meanwhile, Khaila is caught shoplifting and is sent to rehab, unaware Isaiah is alive.
Even after weeks pass, a distraught Isaiah does not consider Khaila his mother. Although he becomes increasingly withdrawn, he is also prone to violent public outbursts. Eventually, Khaila is desperate for Isaiah's happiness, and asks Margaret to step back in "for a little while... until he can understand." However, she insists she will also continue to be involved. The two mothers embrace each other, both proclaiming their equally strong motherly love for Isaiah. The two mothers then begin together playing building blocks with their beloved boy in a classroom.
The award-winning Foo-Foo Dust explores the relationship between a crack-addicted prostitute and her junkie son living together in one room in San Francisco's Tenderloin District. The film invites the audience to witness a disturbing and intimate portrait of the destructive power of drug addiction, including a crack-induced fit and near-fatal heroin overdose. But what makes the film so powerful is its moving, poignant look at the intense love between a mother and her son living on the edge of society.
As an important note, we recommend that you watch these movies before recommending them before. Many of these films portray recreational drug use with graphic reality and could be triggering to people in early recovery. A movie that could be illuminating to one patient, revealing the dangers of drug abuse, could prove to be dangerous to another.
If you want to provide certain patients with movies that will open their eyes about the cost of addiction, or if you want to know more about substance use disorder, here is a good place to start with easy access.
A brief history of the fighting Mayweather boys has to start with crack, shotguns and strippers in tears before ending in the prize ring. Little Floyd is the son of Big Floyd and the nephew of Roger and Jeff and between the quartet of misfits they have been making the boxing news in America and especially in Las Vegas for about 25 years.
At the time Floyd Jnr was living in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and often sharing bedrooms with six or seven members of his extended family. His mother was a serious crack addict at the time but she is now back in his life and he often refers to her as his wife.
The initial decision to take drugs is typically voluntary. But with continued use, a person's ability to exert self-control can become seriously impaired. This impairment in self-control is the hallmark of addiction.
Brain imaging studies of people with addiction show physical changes in areas of the brain that are critical to judgment, decision-making, learning and memory, and behavior control.12 These changes help explain the compulsive nature of addiction.
As with other diseases and disorders, the likelihood of developing an addiction differs from person to person, and no single factor determines whether a person will become addicted to drugs. In general, the more risk factors a person has, the greater the chance that taking drugs will lead to drug use and addiction. Protective factors, on the other hand, reduce a person's risk. Risk and protective factors may be either environmental or biological.
Biological factors that can affect a person's risk of addiction include their genes, stage of development, and even gender or ethnicity. Scientists estimate that genes, including the effects environmental factors have on a person's gene expression, called epigenetics, account for between 40 and 60 percent of a person's risk of addiction.27 Also, teens and people with mental disorders are at greater risk of drug use and addiction than others.28
Aronofsky uses extreme, tight close-ups and split screens that often have interfering movements that are present in each half. Both of these together with his signature long tracking shots emphasize that even when the characters are together in the same room, in the same bed, they are still ultimately alone. They may share the same addiction, the same desperate need, but each must deal with it single handedly.
Soderbergh traces the supply chain from a trafficker to an enforcer until it reaches a user, along with all the contributing inputs from the DEA, the police and the politicians. The characters illustrate how the cooperation between Mexico and the U.S is crumbling due to lies and greed. However, besides the political value of this movie, of which it has plenty, it does not fail to depict the consequences of addiction first-hand.
Beautiful Boy is also about a son and a parent. Timothée Chalamet is Nic, and Steve Carell is his father David. Where Ben Is Back is set in cold New York state, Beautiful Boy is a story of sunny, Californian addiction. One features a mom, the other a dad. But the movies follow the same basic arc: white son wrenches away from a loving family and into serious addiction. What can a parent do in the face of this affliction? And where do they draw the painful lines in the sand when the children go too far? The sons just keep screwing up, and nobody knows what to do.
In 1994 the United States Sentencing Commission began studying the effects ofthese differing penalties, and found that the harsher sentences for crackcocaine were imposed primarily on black citizens. A study revealed that whilealmost 2/3 of crack users in the US were white or Hispanic, 84.5% of thoseconvicted for crack possession were black, while 10.3% were white and 5.2%were Hispanic. Similarly, of those convicted for crack trafficking in 1994,88.3% were black, while 4.1% were white and 7.1% were Hispanic. The statisticsfor those convicted of powder cocaine offenses were much more racially mixed.The Sentencing Commission concluded that the dramatic difference in penalties,combined with the racial disparity in enforcement, resulted in black men andwomen serving longer prison sentences than those of other ethnicities. In 1995the US Sentencing Commission recommended eliminating this disparity in a reportto Congress; however both Congress and the Clinton administration rejected therecommendation.
In the second major wave of American opiate addiction, heroin was integratedinto the new cultural identity of the "hipster"(20), first through the Harlem jazz scene in the 1930s and1940s and then through the Beatnik subculture of the 1950s. During this periodthe major supply of heroin entering the U.S. came through the "FrenchConnection"--a collaboration between Corsican gangsters in Marseille and theSicilian Mafia. In April 1971, Congressman Robert Steele (R-CT) investigated reports of rampantheroin abuse among U.S. servicemen in Vietnam. His fact-finding missionestimated an addiction rate of 10 to 15%. This alarming statistic, combinedwith emerging evidence linking heroin addiction to crime, pushed the heroinproblem to the front of Nixon's drug policy agenda. 2ff7e9595c
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