If you look under Wikipedia for “crack baby” you see that it is recognized as a mild problem for babies. It still is a recognizable issue and scales on the amount of abuse. With that, sugar is terribly abused on a much larger scale than cocaine. The damage to sugar babies comes from the prolonged exposure over time.
Both kinds of babies suffer similar health problems. You could simply replace the word, “crack” with, “sugar” in the Wikipedia description. These are symptoms of extracts that pull the health of the body into extreme contortions that have long-term consequences.
There are other factors that lead to health problems for the kid, but no drug is more pervasive than sugar which is found in the majority of foods. Cocaine was declared illegal almost 100 years before the news media coined the word, “crack baby”. So, cocaine didn’t have a chance to be industrialized like the other drugs. At least, cocaine somehow stumbled in it’s progression to be accepted by American culture.
The main reason that crack and sugar cause so many problems is because they are stripped of any nutrients to make them healthy. The body is at a loss with how to process the drugs because it needs the supporting vitamins and minerals that were normally a part of the host plants that the drugs were stripped from.
A young child may have a fairly large reserve of healthy tissue to absorb some malnutrition that drugs cause, but over the course of time, it catches up with them. The resilience they had in their youth can quickly fade due to a diet lacking in whole foods.