COLUMN ONE : The Hidden Devastation of Crack : The epidemic is eating away everyone's quality of life. Violent crime, overtaxed social services and drug-addicted babies are having an impact as great as the recession.

By RICH CONNELL

Dec. 18, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

A decade after crack cocaine first flooded the streets of Los Angeles, its legacy of destruction ranks among the most deadly, costly and socially upending catastrophes to confront the nation’s most populous county.

Since 1984, crack has destroyed one undernourished neighborhood after another, devouring countless souls who have succumbed to its seductively cheap price and powerful high.

But the crisis has not been the sole province of junkies, or the exclusive headache of police and bureaucrats. Like an earthquake radiating damage far beyond the epicenter, crack has sent shock waves through the region’s major public institutions, imposing a vast hidden tax on an unsuspecting populace.

For the sentinels of community safety--police, prosecutors, emergency room doctors and those charged with protecting children--crack was a surprise attack by a strange new enemy, one of unstoppable power and momentum.

As officials scrambled to throw up defenses, the drug’s drain on public agencies became enormous, running into the hundreds of millions of dollars annually and stealing tax money desperately needed for libraries, recreation, schools.

“People don’t even know, (but crack) really eroded the quality of their lives,” says former Los Angeles County Chief Administrative Officer Richard B. Dixon, who for more than two decades oversaw a wide array of government outlays. “(They) think it is Proposition 13 or the recession, but probably at least as great a part of the equation is simply what has happened with crack cocaine.”

Amid signs that crack’s grip on the region has loosened, the full cost and scope of the institutional havoc remain largely untallied and intangible. But this much is clear:

* Children of the crisis have been flooding public agencies--and pushing up costs--on a scale never before seen. The number of abused and neglected children required to live apart from their parents has doubled since crack’s arrival to nearly 40,000. About 20,000 to 30,000 babies in the county have been exposed to crack during pregnancy, and thousands more arrive each year, adding millions to public hospital costs and special care programs. “The child welfare system was turned upside-down by crack cocaine,” says county children’s services chief Peter Digre.

* Crack dramatically changed the cost and character of crime across the county, helping fuel widespread fear about public safety. It has been among the engines driving the outlay of hundreds of millions of dollars for law enforcement and jail expansion. Among other things, the highly addictive stimulant created more street violence and gang warfare, contributing to a sharp jump in shootings, assaults and juvenile homicides. It has permeated the criminal underworld so extensively that about half of the arrestees passing through the jail system test positive for cocaine--most of it crack.

* Because of crack’s powerful side effects, health care costs have soared. Crack users by the thousands have poured into hospitals, often hyper-stimulated, in seizures or having heart attacks. At the county morgue, a trickle of cocaine-related drug deaths swelled more than tenfold as crack’s popularity grew. Cocaine--most of it crack--figures in about 500 fatalities a year in the county and exceeds heroin as the leading substance cited in drug abuse deaths. “From a public health perspective, I don’t think there has been (any drug) that has paralleled crack,” says Caswell Evans, director of the county’s community health programs.

Crack is by no means the only culprit in Los Angeles’ costly plague of crime, addiction and child abuse. Yet there is little disagreement that it is the county’s most prevalent and menacing illegal drug--one invisible to millions of residents because it has not poisoned their own families or cut a slaughterous swath through their neighborhoods.

But, as now-retired county Supervisor Ed Edelman can tell you, crack’s ravages are not confined by ZIP code. As he puts it: “It’s not someone else’s problem.”

The Children of Crack

For Sharron Jean Murray, it all s eemed so innocent, so fun, in those early days when crack came to her Crenshaw district neighborhood. “It was like no other feeling I ever had,” she says of her first taste of the drug. “It made me brave.”

But a decade later, the 40-year-old Murray stands as one small measure of crack’s far-reaching strain on the coffers of public agencies, particularly those charged with protecting children. In 1989, at one of the low point s of her addiction, Murray was emaciated, bingeing on crack and six months pregnant when she went into labor.

After she was rushed by ambulance to County-USC Medical Center, doctors performed an emergency Cesarean. Her 4-pound daughter, immediately taken into county custody, had high levels of cocaine in her system and water on the brain , and was hospitalized for three months. Murray says the child eventually recovered, spending about three years in foster care before being adopted. Her two other children have spent seven years in county-supervised placement, one in foster care and one with a relative.

Nowhere has the collateral damage of the crack epidemic been more cruel--and the consequences more costly--than among children.

As the drug has claimed more and more parents, unprecedented numbers of tax-supported children have landed in foster homes or with relatives. A new study conducted by the county Department of Children’s Services, in response to a Times request, found at least one parent abusing crack in 44% of a random sample of cases involving 613 children.

Tens of thousands of children affected by the epidemic are moving through the public school system across the county, presenting unique challenges for teachers and adding to high-cost, special education programs.

Crack was even responsible for the creation of an entirely new, and now leading, category of child abuse: exposure of babies to drugs during pregnancy.

From 2,500 to 3,000 drug-exposed newborns are reported to child welfare workers in the county annually, with studies showing that up to 80% of the cases involve cocaine.

“Crack has become explosively the No. 1 illegal drug affecting pregnancy,” said psychiatrist Michael Durfee, a county health official who coordinates child abuse prevention programs. The financial toll is staggering, partly because crack tends to induce labor and premature births. The cost of treating drug-exposed infants--overwhelmingly involving crack--at the county’s public hospitals was estimated at $22 million in 1991, the most recent figures available. Even the least serious cases of prenatal crack exposure can cost $8,000 to $20,000.

The most severe cases are both tragic and astronomically expensive.

One 21-month-old baby girl born prematurely and suffering lung ailments and other complications died this spring at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in Willowbrook after spending her entire life in the hospital--mostly in an intensive care ward--at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a month.

“We tried hard to get this kid (to a foster home),” says Dr. Xylina Bean, the center’s director of neonatology, looking at a bulletin board picture of the round-faced child with thick glasses. “She needed to have parents . . . to live like a child for a while.”

Most children get out alive. But when they do, many pour into an overburdened child welfare system, which has doubled its caseload in the last 10 years and is spending about $200 million more a year to keep up with the crack onslaught.

When it first hit, shellshocked social workers responded--some say overreacted--by scooping up young children from homes where any crack use was detected.

Foster parents were not trained to deal with these children, and the population at MacLaren Children’s Center, the county’s main shelter, ballooned threefold. Day rooms were converted to sleeping quarters. The center’s infirmary was overflowing with crack babies. At one point, “the Fire Code prevented any more children from (entering) that facility,” says Sandra Turner Settles, then a manager at MacLaren. Soon, crack-exposed newborns were backing up in hospitals and private treatment centers, sometimes waiting months for placement.

Although the system has gradually adjusted--more children are being placed with relatives and more families are being held together with closer supervision--crack continues to complicate child welfare work.

Overwhelmingly that is because crack has hooked more women--many of them mothers--than any other hard drug. The effect has been devastating because mothers are traditionally the ones social workers turn to in their efforts to bind families together.

The extent of the emotional and developmental toll crack has exacted on a generation of children remains largely a guessing game, as does the long-term burden for taxpayers. Special education, medical and other services up to age 18 for just one child seriously affected by drug exposure in the womb could total $750,000, the federal government has estimated.

But some of the worst fears of the “crack baby” crisis have not been realized. Dire predictions that networks of special schools would be required to handle legions of disabled, uncontrollable crack children have been discarded. “Many of the children are doing better than we thought,” said Roberta Savage, a drug abuse specialist with the county superintendent of schools.

Nonetheless, children impaired by crack exposure--as well as youngsters raised in the chaotic households of drug-using parents--can have problems relating to others, as well as fears, phobias and poor attention spans.

Deanne Tilton, who heads a countywide panel that monitors child-abuse issues and services, is seeing more young people who “can’t concentrate. They can’t read. They don’t have much of a conscience. They are more violent, more depressed.”

Four years ago--about the time the first children of the crack epidemic were reaching school--teachers and administrators in the small Lennox School District near Los Angeles International Airport began noticing kindergarten and first-grade students with unusual behavioral and learning problems. Some were aggressive. Some isolated themselves. Many had to be taught the same things again and again.

“It’s really frustrating. It takes time away from students really ready to move along,” says teacher Marianne Gilliams, who has taught several of the youngsters, some of them exposed to drugs as infants. “You tend to focus on these children because they have other needs . . . they are very inconsistent.”

Although the causes of these new classroom problems are difficult to define, many educators, including Lennox Administrator Tina Manscilla, are convinced that crack has played a major role.

Now, some of the children of the crack crisis are approaching their teen-age years, traditionally a time for troubled children to strike out with misbehavior or even delinquency. Some see a second generation of misery in the making.

Making the Streets Meaner

Both before and after the birth of her premature daughter, Sharron Murray was no stranger to crime. Back in St. Louis, where she grew up, she had seen family members and friends ravaged by drugs and alcohol. When she was a teen-ager, one of her mother’s boyfriends paid her for sex, and so began her first foray into prostitution. When she came to Los Angeles in 1980, it was for a fresh start.

But like so many other addicts, Murray would soon do whatever it took to get cash for crack. She descended into streetwalking and compiled a string of 17 arrests for prostitution, petty theft, probation violations and narcotics charges. Through the revolving door of the criminal justice system--a few days here, two weeks there, then two months--Murray spent the equivalent of more than a year in County Jail and nine months in state prison. “I had to have . . . some crack,” she says, “no matter what it cost me.”

Crack cocaine gave street crime a new image: capricious, savage, omnipresent. In malevolent synergy, it converged with proliferating gangs and escalating violence to heighten public anxiety, fan police-neighborhood tensions and rearrange government outlays. It made it harder to get a cop when you needed one.

Crack’s rise paralleled the arc of violent crime in Los Angeles: Both climbed steeply in the mid-1980s, peaked a few years ago and then began to taper off.

The coming of crack has meant “much more bizarre behavior and random violence . . . (a) change in the nature of crime,” Sheriff Sherman Block says. “Crack cocaine and the revenue that it produced is a factor in gangs getting greater mobility, getting automobiles and acquiring more sophisticated and deadly weapons. It meant . . . more violence and greater risk to the community and law enforcement . . . creating fear.”

It has meant destruction, corrosion, on almost unimaginable levels. Even the Webster Commission cited it as one factor that made the city “a tinderbox ready to explode” in the 1992 riots.

With the debut of crack, police were saturated by citizens’ complaints about drug dealers crowding corners and front yards. Robberies, homicides and prostitution followed. Gradually, gang members began swirling around the crack trade and violent turf battles intensified.

Young people committed murders at an astonishing rate. Juvenile homicide arrests climbed 187% in Los Angeles County between 1985 and 1990.

Narcotics agents such as Detective Richard Ginelli, a 30-year veteran, who learned the neighborhoods of South-Central Los Angeles young and has spent most of his career there, had watched many drugs join the street bazaar. But nothing like this. “Rock cocaine just took over,” Ginelli says. “It just came on like a wave.”

Open-air crack markets were leapfrogging from corner to corner, neighborhood to neighborhood. Cash--more than narcotics officers had ever seen--was in motion everywhere. “You’d go into (a drug dealer’s) home and get $30,000, $40,000, $50,000. We never saw that with heroin,” Ginelli says.

Police stations, unable to keep up, routinely began running out of officers to handle citizens’ calls for service. Residents regularly began upbraiding police at public forums, accusing them of being in league with the crack dealers. “We lost control,” says former LAPD Assistant Chief Jesse Brewer, the man in charge of police stations in the southern section of the city through much of the 1980s. “The people lost confidence (and) crack cocaine was a major factor.”

Trying to gain the upper hand, federal, state and local agencies threw resources into high-profile--often controversial--law enforcement sweeps and task forces that zeroed in on mid-level dealers and large suppliers. Cocaine seizures increased tenfold.

In the heat of the battle, the district attorney’s central narcotics bureau alone handled as many as 1,000 new crack cases a month. “It was a . . . nightmare,” says Deputy Dist. Atty. John Perlstein, who has spent 10 years plowing through stacks of incoming drug cases.

The frenzy of the early response has subsided somewhat, but crack continues to reach far beyond the world of users. “If you hear about someone shot by a burglar, nine times out of 10 it’s a crack addict,” Perlstein says.

Until he was arrested on possession charges earlier this year, Moshe Yurom Riggs, 19, was living on the streets of Hollywood and feeding a crack habit by stealing car stereos--perhaps 100 in all. “Every night,” says Riggs, who is now in a county-funded recovery program and awaiting trial. “It was easier than panhandling.” Other crackheads in the area favored residential and commercial burglaries, he says. “You don’t care about anything or anybody. You do what you have to do to get that next hit.”

Such opportunistic and random crimes escalated public fear, tilting government spending toward criminal justice and away from a range of other services.

One of the most striking examples is the money pumped into the sprawling County Jail system, one of the nation’s largest. Although it is hard to picture now, in the late 1970s county lockups were being mothballed for lack of inmates. But in the early 1980s--in a reversal Sheriff Block traces partly to the advent of crack--the jail count was surging, eventually doubling to more than 20,000. Outlays for personnel and equipment tripled to nearly $400 million before dipping slightly. And a $500-million expansion program was launched, adding thousands of cells from Lynwood to Lancaster.

At the same time jails were being expanded, libraries were being closed and resources squeezed for youth programs, treatment efforts, recreational offerings--services some believe could address the social ailments feeding demand for the drug.

“We have parks in Los Angeles County that have no recreation programs,” Dixon says. “But they still have park police who patrol.”

An Epidemic in Public Health

So relentlessly did Sharron Murray pursue her addiction that nothing--not her arrests, not the loss of her children, not even her deteriorating health--could come between her and her crack pipe. Murray smoked so much for so long while living in alleys and cheap motels that she severely damaged her teeth and gums, further burdening taxpayers who have picked up the bills for her neglect and abuse. Still, Murray sees herself as one of the lucky ones. “I’m glad it was not death for me,” she says.

They arrive in convulsions from overdoses. They are wheeled in with gunshot wounds from drug deals gone bad. Some stumble in after darting in front of a passing car or truck. Others simply are sick from their addiction and wind up in the waiting room.

No single drug has overburdened the county’s public health care system more than crack cocaine. At hospitals across the county, the number of cocaine-related medical emergencies has leaped more than 500% since 1983, with all indications that the largest share of the increase is from crack users.

Dr. Dennis Chan, who has been on the front lines at County-USC Medical Center’s emergency ward for six years, says crack underlies most of the serious and violent cases he sees. Victims of knifings, shootings and serious accidents usually are found to have cocaine in their systems, he says. It is common for the hospital to treat several acute crack overdoses in a single night.

Dr. Margaret McCarron, a drug overdose expert at the hospital, says that because of crack’s great potency, addicts often suffer serious damage to their organs. Some require on-going hemodialysis and expensive treatments. Others require hospital admission and intensive care, boosting costs sky-high. “It was a major medical problem,” McCarron says. One recent national study found that crack and other narcotics abusers typically tie up hospital beds several days longer than other patients because their immune systems tend to be weakened. The study revealed that as much as one in five tax dollars spent in public hospitals is related to substance abuse.

More difficult to quantify, but no less worrisome, is the connection between crack and the transmission of the AIDS virus by the countless female addicts who sell themselves for a hit. Doctors at King/Drew Medical Center say most of the pediatric AIDS cases they treat involve streetwalking mothers who use crack.

Officials say they have not determined how much of the $2.6 billion spent annually on the county’s health care system may be tied to crack. But Walter Gray, who oversees administration of county hospitals, says there is no doubt that the drug has helped clog the arteries of the entire public health system. “It’s the whole continuum of care,” he says.

Many pursue their addiction beyond the reach of medical help. With the rise of crack, cocaine-related drug deaths in the county leaped from 45 in 1982 to a peak of more than 600 in 1989, before dipping slightly. That does not even include the hundreds upon hundreds of murders that authorities have linked to the drug trade.

“Violence is a No. 1 public health issue (and) the No. 1 cause of that is drugs,” Gray says. “Crack is the drug of choice.”

The burdens on hospitals from such mayhem are extraordinary because the resulting injuries often require long-term care. In particularly severe crack-linked cases--such as spinal damage--patients are sent to such county-funded rehabilitation centers as Rancho Los Amigos, where taxpayers foot the bill.

Lessons for Tomorrow

Pregnant again, living in alleyways near MacArthur Park, violating her parole and still chasing crack, Sharron Murray was at an all-time low earlier this year, when a friend persuaded her to seek help.

“My whole face was disfigured from malnutrition. I couldn’t afford no more arrests. . . . And I needed for her to be born drug-free,” says Murray of her 4-month-old daughter, Naderia .

Murray has spent eight months in a county-funded treatment program in Long Beach at a cost of more than $15,000. She attends counseling and classes, helps with chores and recently was named an “elder” at the center. She also is coming to grips with an abusive childhood and the pain she has caused as an adult.

“I have amends to make (to my family),” she says. “I have an amend to make to the taxpayers as well . “

Los Angeles, like Sharron Murray, is at a turning point--though it is far from clear where either goes from here. Crack appears to be ebbing in popularity, particularly among young people in poorer neighborhoods, where many have witnessed the wreckage in their families and friends.

Still, crack remains the leading street narcotic in Los Angeles County, and policy-makers continue to struggle with a large, difficult and resilient core of chronic users who are weighing heavily on law enforcement and social welfare agencies. In the central area of the county, narcotics arrests are down about 40% since 1989, but cocaine--most of it crack--still accounts for nearly three out of four cases.

Entrenched pockets of homelessness and street camping are linked in part to crack addiction. Millions of dollars a month continues to be spent caring for children who cannot live with their crack-using parents. And officials report about 2,000 newborns each year with cocaine in their systems.

Some lessons, however, have been learned.

To reduce costs and narrow the trail of human tragedy, state and federal agencies have started to fund more prenatal programs designed to clean up addicted mothers before they give birth.

Social workers, rather than breaking up homes, are placing more emphasis on saving families and rebuilding parental responsibility.

A series of experimental programs is targeting drug-abusing women and their families for intensive recovery services. A new Downtown drug court is trying to curb recidivism among crack users by intensely monitoring their drug treatment.

Most experts say such strategies not only are humane but cost-effective because they attack problems before they become an enormous and continuing drain, affecting multiple generations.

One crucial area that many observers still believe needs rethinking is that treatment programs and their funding have never adjusted to meet the crack challenge. Admissions to the county’s publicly funded treatment programs--typically about 33,000 a year--have varied little since before crack use exploded. The overwhelming majority of admissions continue to be for heroin addiction, even though some recent studies show far more people use cocaine.

“What you see in the statistics of treatment admissions is dumb, dumb, dumb social policy,” says UCLA researcher Douglas Anglin.

Among those who complete programs targeted at crack addicts, usage declines by nearly 50%, and several dollars in crime and health costs are saved for each dollar spent on treatment, according to a recent study funded by Gov. Pete Wilson’s Administration.

Beyond the belief that drug treatment money has been misdirected, officials are also concerned that too much of our drug control efforts are skewed toward law enforcement and prison-building. Sheriff Block, for one, sees that as shortsighted.

“We’ve never approached the total issue,” he says. “We’ve never done an adequate job at the border interdicting drugs. We’ve dragged our feet on spending--and still don’t spend enough--on prevention. We still don’t have meaningful treatment programs (that) attach some strings to it.”

What’s lacking most of all, many experts say, is a full appreciation of what crack has wrought for Los Angeles and any sense of a comprehensive, broad strategy to snap the drug’s costly cycle of destruction. Former LAPD Deputy Chief and anti-drug czar Glenn Levant, who now heads a national drug abuse prevention program, says: “There was never any coordinated approach to this epidemic, and that remains so today.”

So, for now, Los Angeles appears to have settled into a long war of attrition with crack cocaine.

Sharron Murray says she not only owes an apology to taxpayers but her thanks as well for a second chance. In all, during a decade of careening addiction, she cost taxpayers at least $250,000 for incarcerating, prosecuting and defending her in court, feeding and sheltering her children, caring for her premature baby and trying to break her craving for cocaine.

Now clean after years at the ragged front edge of the epidemic, Murray says she is gaining self-confidence and the emotional tools to resist backsliding . “I want to be able to work,” she says. “And take care of my family.”

It’s no small ambition and Murray candidly acknowledges the lure of the drug could catch her again once she leaves the confines of her treatment center. It is a chilling prospect, she says, because “if I fall again, I won’t fight for recovery. I won’t.”

Murray says her publicly financed recovery has rekindled her aspirations and given her some measure of hope: “The county,” she says simply, “saved my life.”

Contributing to this story was Julia Franco of The Times library staff.

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About This Series

Many in Los Angeles will remember 1984 not for the splendor of the Olympic Games but as the year crack cocaine started spreading its wickedness in their neighborhoods. In the beginning, it seemed like no big deal, just another drug--or at least so many people thought. But like an invisible brush fire, it began burning everything it touched. With alarming speed, crack cocaine became urban America’s worst drug problem.

Although most of us have not endured the despondency of addiction or experienced the terror of a neighborhood under siege by crack pushers and users, everyone has been touched by this epidemic. As the spotlight shined on Los Angeles’ famous disasters--the riots, the fires, the earthquakes--crack cocaine was insidiously undermining our quality of life.

Today, The Times begins a four-part series examining 10 years in which a seemingly cheap drug has exacted an unimaginably high price for the people and institutions of Los Angeles--the real cost of crack cocaine.

* Today: Crack drains funds from vital public agencies, imposing a hidden tax on everyone.

* Monday: Crack creates a new wave of homelessness, bringing more crime and despair to the streets.

* Tuesday: Crack forges an underground economy, luring a generation with false promises.

* Wednesday: Crack takes down a neighborhood--but the resiliency of its residents brings it back.

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The Public Burden

In the 10 years since its popularity exploded, crack cocaine has had a profound effect on Los Angeles County. While there are indications that the worst of the “rock” epidemic may be past, cocaine--mostly crack--remains the county’s most prevalent and tax-draining illicit drug.

DEATHS

Drug overdose- and drug abuse-related deaths in Los Angeles County in which cocaine was cited as a factor. Researchers say most of the cocaine-related cases in recent years involved crack. ‘84: 163 ‘85: 131 ‘86: 317 ‘87: 447 ‘88: 450 ‘89: 630 ‘90: 422 ‘91: 404 ‘92: 558 ***

MEDICAL EMERGENCIES

Estimates of drug abuse medical emergencies in Los Angeles County, involved smoked cocaine, based on an annual survey of hospitals. Statistics probably understate the problem because medical records do not always indicate how a drug was taken. ‘83: 40 ‘84: 603 ‘85: 738 ‘86: 885 ‘87: 1,127 ‘88: 1,982 ‘89: 2,453 ‘90: 1,667 ‘91: 2,243 ‘92: 2,284 ***

DRUG ARRESTS

Narcotics arrest in Los Angeles County. Much of the increase in the 1980s is tied to the widespread sale and use of crack cocaine, law enforcement and court officials say. The county’s narcotics arrest trend parallels crack popularity, although separate arrest figures are not kept for crack. ‘83: 13,453 ‘84: 20,192 ‘85: 27,852 ‘86: 42,198 ‘87: 43,480 ‘88: 52,943 ‘89: 54,497 ‘90: 40,742 ‘91: 31,995 ‘92: 31,887 Source: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services; Times interviews; California Department of Justice; UCLA Drug Abuse Research Center, Drug Use Forecasting project.

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What Is Crack?

Crack is a highly addictive form of cocaine. Kitchen chemists make it by mixing cocaine with ammonia or sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), adding water and heating to remove the hydrochloride. The final product is a cocaine that can be smoked. Crack got its name from the cracking sound the drug makes when burned.

The fact that the drug is smoked, rather than injected or snorted, gives it its awesome power. It travels much more quickly to the brain, creating a greater rush--and a stronger appeal.

In essence, crack creates its addiction by interfering with a chemical, called a neurotransmitter, that the brain releases to carry a message across the gap between cells. Nerves that send a pleasure message to the brain stay on, rather than quickly turning off, causing the “high.” But eventually the nerve cell that makes the chemical stops making more. That is part of the reason that after the high, a crack user quickly loses the sense of exhilaration and mental clarity, and needs more crack.

The heart rate goes through wild fluctuations, sometimes failing altogether. Blood pressure goes up, blood vessels constrict, increasing the possibility of strokes. Addicts suffer from an increased sense of paranoia, aggressive behavior and depression.

The long-term consequences are uncertain because the drug has only been in the mass market for a decade.

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A Costly Trail of Destruction

Recovering addict Sharron Jean Murray, whose involvement with crack has spanned the 10 years of the drug’s popularity, provides one measure of the drug’s immense toll on taxpayers. Here is a look at one crack addict’s costly trail:

THE COSTP

$250,000 to $300,000 total for public agencies

$150,000 Foster care for three children

$75,000 to $100,000 Medical expenses for a premature crack baby

$25,000 Jail and prison costs

$15,000 Live-in drug treatment.

LIFE ON CRACK

Late 1983: Murray, collecting welfare and doing occasional work at beauty salons, lives in the Crenshaw area with a daughter when she first tries a marijuana cigarette sprinkled with crack cocaine. She sinks quickly into addiction, and begins selling possessions to buy more drugs.

1984: Murray turns to street prostitution to fund her habit.

January, 1986: Living in a Western Avenue motel, Murray is arrested for prostitution and spends seven days in jail.

October, 1987: Arrested on petty theft charge. Two days in jail.

November, 1987: County Department of Children’s Services takes Murray’s two children, including one born in 1986, after a neighbor complains about neglect. The two children remain in protective placement, one with a relative, seven years later.

February, 1988: Arrested on prostitution charge. One day in jail.

April, 1988: Arrested for prostitution. Spends 62 days in jail.

April, 1989: Cited for prostitution, Murray fails to appear in court and an arrest warrant is issued.

April, 1989: She gives birth prematurely to a crack baby during an emergency Cesarean at County-USC Medical Center. The baby is found to have cocaine in its system and water on the brain. Child welfare officials take custody. The infant spends about three months in the hospital and three years in foster care before being adopted.

October, 1989: Arrested on warrant and serves about seven weeks in jail.

November, 1990: Arrested for violating probation. Spends 78 days in jail.

June, 1991: Arrested for crack sales near MacArthur Park. Charge reduced to possession of narcotics. Serves 80 days in county jail and is placed on three years probation.

November, 1991: Arrested for probation violation. Serves 18 days.

October, 1992: Arrested for violation of probation on narcotics charge. Serves 32 days in jail and nine months in state prison.

June, 1993: Cited for prostitution.

September, 1993: Arrested for prostitution. Serves 12 days in jail.

November, 1993: Arrested for prostitution. Serves four days in jail.

March, 1994: Pregnant again and living on the streets near MacArthur Park, Murray enters a county funded live-in drug treatment program.

December, 1994: She remains in the treatment program, where her young child is also allowed.

* Additional unknown expenses include law enforcement, prosecutors, public defense lawyers and courts.

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Crack and Fractured Families

A county Department of Children’s Services study, conducted in response to Times inquiries, has documented a strong connection between crack cocaine use and cases of child abuse and neglect, which have doubled since the drug’s popularity exploded.

Officials have long believed that crack has a profound impact on the county’s $800-million-a-year child welfare system. But the study of 300 cases involving 613 children is the first to specifically correlate crack with child welfare caseloads. Among the findings:

* 44% of all cases reviewed involved one or more parents who abused crack cocaine. Only 25% abused other drugs.

* More than one in four of the cases included a drug-exposed newborn, and 81% of those involved crack cocaine.

* Crack-exposed infants require more ongoing specialized services, primarily medical care, than newborns exposed to other drugs.

* Crack-related cases consumed more social worker time than other cases reviewed in the survey, although accurate cost comparisons of services and staff time could not be made.

* Families with parents who used crack had on average more than two children in protective placement--13% more than parents abusing other drugs.

* Children of crack users remain in foster placement two years and four months on average, about the same as cases involving other drug abuse or no drug abuse.

* Proportionally more attempts are made to reunify families where crack was used and a slightly greater share are successful, compared to other types of cases. The reasons are unclear, but analysts speculated that the larger number of crack cases involving drug-exposed newborns and attempts to reunite them with mothers may be a factor.

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Where to Get Help

There are hundreds of drug programs and rehabilitation centers around Los Angeles County. The numbers below are for county-funded programs in various areas that will refer callers to additional agencies.

If your area is not listed, call the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services hot line, (800) 564-6600.

His Sheltering Arms, Los Angeles (213) 755-6646

El Proyecto del Barrio, Arleta (818) 830-7090.

Peoples Coordinated Services, Los Angeles (213) 732-9124

Behavioral Health Services, Gardena (310) 679-9031.

Harbor Light Center, Los Angeles (213) 626-4786

Family Service of Long Beach (310) 570-4400.

Community Coalition, Los Angeles (213) 750-9087

Joint Efforts, San Pedro (310) 831-2358.

Southern California Alcohol and Drug Programs, Downey (310) 923-0969.

Verdugo Mental Health Center, Glendale (818) 244-7257.

Asian American Drug Abuse Program, Los Angeles (213) 295-0262.