HOW DRUGS HARM THE FAMILY TREE

IN A CITY clogged with angry thugs quick to quell disagreements with a fist or a bullet, the roots of James Footman's rage run deeper than most, his lawyer has said.

They sprouted in his mother's womb.

Footman, the 15-year-old Germantown High student who pleaded guilty to punching teacher Frank Burd in a February attack that broke his neck, was a "crack baby" whose parents were chronic drug addicts, attorney William Bachmann said at a court hearing in April.

Raised in a home infected by addiction, Footman became a troublemaker with a mean temper and a slippery grasp on his impulses, said Bachmann, who pleaded for mercy during Footman's sentencing hearing.

That defense strategy is likely to grow familiar to many judges' and jurors' ears as city officials scramble to pinpoint reasons for Philadelphia's skyrocketing rates of murder and violence.

Infants born to drug-addicted moms in the 1980s and early '90s are coming of age, a demographic that many like to blame for bloodying up inner-city streets with alarmingly increasing frequency.

But understanding these young people isn't as simple as blaming bad behavior on exposure to drugs in utero.

A growing number of experts say the effects of early drug exposure - including aggression and other behavioral and learning problems - can be overcome with good parenting and social-service intervention.

The real problem is that good parenting can be hard to find in families wracked by drug addiction.

Drugged-out parenting does far more to doom a child to a life of crime - as a perpetrator or a victim - than does a baby's drug exposure during pregnancy, experts are discovering.

That connection has grabbed the attention of city social-services officials, who recently launched a study of the nearly 500 people arrested for murder in 2005 and 2006.

They will examine what factors may have driven the accused perpetrators to kill, including whether they were drug-exposed newborns, grew up in drug-infested homes and used or sold drugs. Study results are expected this summer.

But some already have their suspicions.

"Nothing has devastated our children more than being raised in a drug-addicted household in which they fail to receive the basic benefits of love," said Julia Danzy, who heads the city's Department of Social Services.

"Imagine being left alone in a crib, hungry and frightened, all day and night, because your parent went to get a fix," Danzy added. "Drugs totally sever the parents' ability to nurture. A child who is not nurtured does not develop basic social skills. It's almost like we're raising feral children."

James Footman was cutting class, roaming the halls of Germantown High School, when teacher Frank Burd stumbled into his path.

The testy truant didn't know the algebra teacher and had no quarrel with him. Still, without hesitating, he threw three punches at Burd's head, sending the educator flying to the floor. The Feb. 23 altercation left Burd with a broken neck and the ninth-grader behind bars.

The incident capped a troubled childhood.

After the Department of Human Services removed him from his mother's care at age 2, Footman bounced around the foster-care system for four years.

His father agreed to take him at age 6. But the family moved so often that the boy attended seven elementaries in two years and flunked the first grade.

Further, Footman's father didn't take drugs prescribed to him for a mental disorder, court testimony revealed, but did have a blunt-a-day habit.

Like Footman, some babies born since the mid 1980s - when crack cocaine became the first in a series of harder, synthetic drugs to ensnare a generation of young people, including mothers-to-be - endured childhoods riddled with poverty and other social problems that molded the teenagers and adults they became, experts say.

"The story that the kid is forever doomed because the mom took drugs when he was a fetus is an oversimplification of the problem. Any [drug-induced, prenatal] 'brain rewiring' or genetic transcription can be altered by upbringing and environment," said Michael Lewis, a psychology professor at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., who leads a long-term study on drug-exposed babies.

"But children who are raised in poor environments are more susceptible to bad outcomes" whether they were prenatally exposed to drugs or not, Lewis said.

When the so-called crack-baby epidemic first grabbed headlines in the mid-1980s, scientists and politicians declared the tots a biological underclass. They were deemed a lost generation, permanently brain-damaged by prenatal drug exposure to become emotionless, mentally stunted deviants who would menace society for life.

But researchers later found that too many other variables had skewed those early studies on fetal exposure to drugs. For example, most women who gave birth to drug-exposed newborns got little to no prenatal care and had poor nutrition, and many indulged in other pregnancy no-nos, like cigarette smoking and drinking alcohol.

"The real way to study the effects of prenatal exposure to drugs would be to get middle-class moms who don't have all these other problems," Lewis said. "It's not that we couldn't find middle-class moms who gave birth to drug-exposed babies. It's that they wouldn't participate in studies."

So in existing studies involving primarily inner-city youth, "you have this big pile of problems [besides prenatal drug exposure] that contributes to how a child turns out," Lewis added.

Scientists now know that drug-exposed babies didn't grow into intellectually inferior children.

Instead, they tended to suffer subtle developmental delays, such as an inability to bond, distractibility, poor impulse control and aggression.

Importantly, such deficiencies typically arose no matter the intoxicant; from crack cocaine to alcohol and cigarettes, illicit substances did plenty of damage in utero.

Far from being a lost generation, drug-exposed babies could overcome such birth defects with intervention and a supportive environment, researchers also found.

Yet when their home wasn't a haven, trouble abounded for study subjects - the drug-exposed babies and untainted control subjects alike.

"Whether a newborn has been exposed to drugs prenatally or not, we have found that the environment in the home and the responsiveness of the family to the child are the things that trump everything else," said Dr. Hallam Hurt, a Children's Hospital of Philadelphia pediatrician leading a 15-year study of crack babies. "How they grow up is more influential than how they were born."

Now, Danzy's study is focusing attention on how the presence of drugs before or after birth affected the people accused of murder in Philadelphia. She suspects she will find a strong connection.

Almost half of the 484 people arrested for murder in 2005 and 2006 were age 22 or younger, according to police statistics. That's young enough to have been either born addicted to crack or raised in a drug-plagued home, or both.

Danzy's murder-suspect study will be the first test of the Cross-Agency Response for Effective Services, a new "analytical-mining" software that allows city agencies - from the school district and the Department of Human Services to the Police Department and the prisons - to compare data.

Besides drugs, the software will also ferret out other commonalities, such as whether the suspects had extensive foster-care experience, parents in prison or problems in school.

"If we had this tool 20 years ago, we would have seen that we were getting more women coming in with substance-abuse problems who were of child-bearing age," Danzy said. "Instead, we had workers who didn't recognize the symptoms [of crack addiction] and a problem that was allowed to fester."

She added that the tool may allow DSS to find the next problem before it mushrooms. "If we don't find a way to break this, it becomes an increasingly vicious cycle," she said. Young people raised in drug-infested homes, after all, are now having children.

Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University psychology professor who studies juvenile crime, agreed that juveniles who use drugs are more likely to commit crimes. And kids are more likely to become users if they're exposed to drugs in the home and neighborhood, he added.

"The first issue is that drugs impair a parent's ability to parent," Steinberg said. "The second issue is that a parent who is addicted to drugs exposes the child to a lifestyle and a social network that involves anti-social individuals."

"As a general rule," he added, "healthy social developments begin with a healthy parent-child relationship."

For daring to argue with her boyfriend's cousin, Apollonia Tucker got a bullet in her head.

But it wasn't a short-tempered thug with an illegal gun that Mary Tucker blamed for her 16-year-old cousin's death.

"It's drugs," she said simply.

Raised in what Tucker called a "crack soiree," the girl relatives called "Apples" was destined for a life of hardship and a death delivered early, Tucker said. The man police charged in an arrest warrant with killing her, Gerald Camp, was brought up around drugs and bound for trouble as well, she added.

Their paths collided April 24, when Camp allegedly shot Apollonia to death - in front of her 11-month-old daughter Jamira - after an argument. Camp has been wanted by police and on the run since.

"Drugs are the problem. It's like a domino effect. Just about anything that's destructive - including illegal guns - drugs are at the helm," Tucker said.

Many of Apollonia's relatives struggled with one addiction or another, Mary Tucker said. Apollonia's mother was addicted to crack, and drug addiction meant Apollonia mostly raised herself, she said.

Apollonia's mother, who's now trying to get custody of Jamira, declined to comment about her addiction.

Camp, 19, also had a family history of drug problems, according to Department of Human Services files.

Although Camp's aunt denied he was raised around drugs, his parents are dead and no other relatives could be reached. Court records show Camp has been arrested twice as an adult on drug charges.

DHS spokesman Frank Keel declined to divulge details of the case files of Tucker, Camp and Footman. But he confirmed all three grew up deluged by drugs - the very scourge that the ongoing studies are designed to document and understand.

"It appears that the one constant with all three children [Footman, Tucker and Camp] was the existence of drugs in their respective households," Keel said.

"It's clear in these cases that the scourge of drugs, in large part, caused these young people to become perpetrators or, in Apollonia's case – a victim of - violence." *

Staff writers Simone Weichselbaum and Jill Porter contributed to this report.