Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

After over a decade of convergence on a number of socioeconomic indicators as a result of the Civil Rights movement, health, education, and crime outcomes between Whites and Blacks in the United States diverged through the 1980s, even as racial gaps in labor market outcomes continued to close. A possible explanation for this departure from historical trends is the emergence of crack-cocaine as a readily affordable, highly addictive, and hotly contested drug, used disproportionately by African-American youths. We build upon prior work by Fryer and Levitt (2013) and Evans, Garthwaite, and Moore (2016; 2018), using reliable measures of the emergence of crack-cocaine in a metropolitan area, a more robust difference-in-differences methodology with additional fixed effects to address concerns about endogeneity of the emergence of crack, and additional educational outcomes to provide new evidence on the deleterious impacts of crack, disproportionately on the Black community. We focus on fetal and infant health and maternal education measures that could be linked both to crack use and adverse long-term outcomes for children. We find that the arrival of crack-cocaine in a metropolitan area is associated with significant increases in low birthweight babies, pre-term births, and teenage pregnancies and reductions in parental education. These effects are robust to specification and persist beyond the introduction of crack-cocaine. These findings have policy implications for responses to the emergence of new drugs with similar properties to crack-cocaine including addictiveness, low cost, and trading on black markets associated with violence and criminal behavior.