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"There is no specific 'Crack Baby' syndrome….Exposing fetuses to cocaine may or may not have lasting consequences, but current research demonstrates that by the time the child reaches age five, the effect of the disastrous social situation that [the children of] many crack cocaine users share with other economically deprived children washes out any measurable effect of the cocaine itself on [his] school performance."
—"What Happened to the 'Crack Babies'?," by Gary A. Emmett, in the February 1998 Drug Policy Analysis Bulletin. Edited by UCLA's Mark A.R. Kleiman, the newsletter features moderate drug policy scholars who are willing to go where the data lead. The February issue also includes articles distinguishing seven different versions of the "gateway drug" hypothesis and discussing prohibition's disproportionate impact on the poor. Back issues of the bulletin, published by the Federation of American Scientists, are available at www.fas.org/drugs.
Fedstats at www.fedstats.gov offers one-stop shopping for government statistics; includes links and compilations to dozens of federal sites and databases.
Order without design marks not only the economic and cultural marketplace but also many other real-life phenomena, to the increasing fascination of natural and social scientists. The StarLogo programmable modeling environment, based on the Logo programming language, is an MIT product "for exploring the workings of decentralized systems–systems that are organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator," including "bird flocks, traffic jams, ant colonies, and market economies." It runs on Macintosh computers and can be downloaded at www.media.mit.edu/~starlogo.