ABSTRACT
The problems of maternal prenatal drug use and its effects on fetuses and newborn infants have received widespread attention. At birth, meconium is excreted by the neonate several times a day for the first 1 to 3 days postpartum. However, premature infants may not pass any meconium within the first 2 days after birth, so any testing using meconium must be accordingly delayed. Testing of meconium has received interest primarily because it theoretically provides information about drug exposure in the last 20 weeks of pregnancy, whereas a single postpartum urine specimen would provide a window of only a few days. Maternal drug use has profound consequences for society. The tragedies of crack babies, fetal alcohol syndrome infants, and low birth weight infants from maternal smoking, and their corresponding costs to society have been well-publicized. For cocaine metabolite, most sequential specimens remained about the same or declined, but some declined dramatically.
