Thirty years after Ira Chasnoff published his landmark study on the effects of cocaine use in pregnancy, the crack baby myth finally exploded. Hallam Hurt, a neurologist, then chair of neonatology at Philadelphia’s Albert Einstein Medical Center, began researching the effects of prenatal cocaine exposure on developmental outcomes in 1988. When she finally concluded her research in 2015, the results were astounding: there were no significant differences in the development between children exposed to cocaine in utero and those who were not.
