Slog tipper Nafun lets us know that Hallam Hurt, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, recently completed the longest-running study of people exposed to cocaine in utero. In explaining her research, backed by $7.9 million from the federal government, she began with a PowerPoint presentation on the crack-baby hysteria of the 1980s and '90s:

A social worker on TV predicted that a crack baby would grow up to "have an IQ of perhaps 50." A print article quoted a psychologist as saying "crack was interfering with the central core of what it is to be human," and yet another article predicted that crack babies were "doomed to a life of uncertain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority."

After 25 years of tracking, that's not what she found:

The researchers consistently found no significant differences between the cocaine-exposed children and the controls. At age 4, for instance, the average IQ of the cocaine-exposed children was 79.0 and the average IQ for the nonexposed children was 81.9. Both numbers are well below the average of 90 to 109 for U.S. children in the same age group. When it came to school readiness at age 6, about 25 percent of children in each group scored in the abnormal range on tests for math and letter and word recognition.

And her research isn't alone:

Other researchers also couldn't find any devastating effects from cocaine exposure in the womb. Claire Coles, a psychiatry professor at Emory University, has been tracking a group of low-income Atlanta children. Her work has found that cocaine exposure does not seem to affect children's overall cognition and school performance, but some evidence suggests that these children are less able to regulate their reactions to stressful stimuli, which could affect learning and emotional health.

Coles said her research had found nothing to back up predictions that cocaine-exposed babies were doomed for life. "As a society we say, 'Cocaine is bad and therefore it must cause damage to babies,' " Coles said. "When you have a myth, it tends to linger for a long time."

All of these scientists know full well that cocaine is harmful to fetuses, mothers, everyone. But what was really going on—what other factor was causing these babies to have lower IQs, worse outcomes than the general public at large? Poverty.