High Price (11 page)

Soon, however, certain research findings began to make me skeptical of this idea. These included some of my own. For example, my master’s research involved studying how dopamine was removed from the pleasure-linked nucleus accumbens after nicotine was administered. At the time, some researchers were claiming that cocaine and nicotine acted similarly on dopamine in this area, even though data also suggested that rats pressed levers far more times and would work much harder for cocaine than they would to get nicotine.

Indeed, trying to get rats to press levers for nicotine was one of the most difficult experiments I ever tried. I didn’t succeed and I’m not alone. Plenty of researchers also failed at this task. (Incidentally, trying to get rats to press for THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, is even more difficult.)

In my master’s work, I looked at how nicotine affected dopamine’s action in the nucleus accumbens. But what I was seeing was unexpected: nicotine wasn’t acting at all like cocaine. Some of the behavioral effects might be similar in some situations, but in this brain region, the two drugs actually had opposite effects.

The oscilloscope that I monitored displayed a line representing how quickly the dopamine activity rose or fell after a drug or saline solution was given. And those lines looked very different when you compared what happened with cocaine to what was seen with nicotine. With nicotine, the line would go up and then fall off more quickly than with saline.
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But with cocaine, it would go up and stay up much longer than with saline.
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This meant that nicotine was increasing the rate at which this brain region “mopped up” dopamine—in other words, nicotine was taking dopamine out of the connection between brain cells (the synapse) where it has its effect, faster than would occur naturally. But cocaine was acting in the opposite way. It was keeping dopamine active in the synapse for longer.

Because this finding contradicted the conventional wisdom and threw a bit of a monkey wrench into the neat story that was being told about dopamine and drugs, there was some resistance to it at first. Charlie Ksir, my PhD preceptor, and I published the first two papers detailing this research in 1995 and 1996. Some researchers did not want to believe that we were correct. Antismoking activists didn’t like it, either, because it got in the way of the useful rhetorical claim that cocaine acted similarly to nicotine in the brain, which claim had allowed them to amplify arguments about nicotine addiction by implying that it was just like the nefarious crack.

Soon, however, our findings were replicated and expanded on by other researchers.
⁵
Years later, in fact, I was approached by tobacco companies, whom I turned down on more than one occasion. They, of course, wanted to enlist me in their efforts to stress the differences between their drug and cocaine. The distinction that we found, however, didn’t mean that nicotine wasn’t addictive or even that it wasn’t ultimately increasing dopamine’s activity.

But it was one clue that the dopamine story wasn’t as simple as it first appeared. Although both nicotine and cocaine eventually have the effect of increasing dopamine activity in the brain, they do this via quite different mechanisms. Cocaine delays the termination of dopamine’s actions, while nicotine causes neurons to release more dopamine in the synapse. Moreover, each drug also has differential actions on a range of other neurotransmitters, all of which actions can result in very different subjective experiences. Smoking cigarettes and smoking cocaine don’t feel identical to most people, after all.

And there were further complications. Researchers began to find that dopamine was released not just in pleasant situations; such releases also occurred during stressful or aversive experiences that were not at all enjoyable. For example, some studies show that dopamine levels rise when animals are stressed by electric shocks or cues that predict painful or negative experiences. Moreover, while animals stop self-administering drugs like cocaine if dopamine is blocked, the same isn’t true for heroin.
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If dopamine were the only brain source of pleasure, heroin administration—indeed, administration of any pleasurable drug—should also cease.

In addition, drugs that release dopamine, such as amphetamine (Adderall), methamphetamine (Desoxyn), and methylphenidate (Ritalin), are used therapeutically, not just on the street. These medications are often prescribed for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), both in adults and in children. They’re also utilized for treating obesity and narcolepsy.

But although there are some cases of abuse, the vast majority of therapeutic users do not become addicted. Indeed, there’s some evidence that children given these drugs to treat attention problems are actually at lower risk of addiction later in life than those whose ADHD is not treated with medication.
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These drugs always cause increased dopamine release: if elevated dopamine-related pleasure alone produces addiction, why don’t these patients become addicts, always driven to get more?

The problem is that when we study things like addiction, we’re focusing on pathological behavior and ignoring what occurs under the most common, normal conditions. In reality, most drug use doesn’t result in addiction. Very little research has been reported about drug users who haven’t lost control over their behavior or animals who won’t press levers for nicotine or THC. Even less is understood about the activity of the brain’s reward system when people engage in the most naturally rewarding behavior of all: sex. We don’t know much about how sexual behavior is encoded in the brain and regulated, and it’s hard to tell what’s wrong with a brain system when you don’t know what happens when it works properly.

For me, even in my teenage years, when I was certainly as driven by sex as any adolescent male, it wasn’t something that controlled me. I wanted it, for sure, and I was certainly proud of my reputation as a player. But staying in control was paramount. That was far more important to me than any particular girl or experience of sex. In fact, I remember going to basketball practice one day, immediately after having sex with Monica, the girl with whom I’d earlier had that embarrassing first orgasm. I’d been out all night—and was definitely tired when I hit the court. My friend Jimmy Lopez, who was a guard on a rival team, was watching.

“Damn you moving slow; that pussy must’ve gotten to you,” he said. I was horrified by the idea that he might gain confidence and think that he could dominate me on the court. So I never did that again. After that, I’d abstain before games like a boxer: I didn’t want to take the chance that sex could make me less agile. I certainly liked sex and spent a great deal of time chasing it but I always stayed in control.

Also, like most of my friends, I wouldn’t deign to fight over a girl. We saw that as uncool; it meant that you cared too much. A player didn’t act impulsively out of jealousy. He couldn’t be seen as dependent on any one woman’s love. Of course, you’d step up if someone insulted your lady or disrespected you by flirting with her in front of you, but that was about your own status on the street, not about her. Desire, compulsion, and control had to be more complicated. It just seemed impossible that this one neurotransmitter, dopamine—one found in only about 1 percent of all brain cells—could, by itself, produce uncontrollable behavior when its levels rose and you felt good.

CHAPTER 5

Rap and Rewards

Social support helps to lessen the negative consequences of stress.

—
ELIZABETH GOULD

T
he cavernous indoor basketball court at Washington Park Gym was almost unrecognizable at night. The slippery concretelike floor, which I’d cursed as I’d played on it with the City Park team because it was so hard on the knees, almost seemed to thump along with the bass line. The crowd moved in pulsing rhythm, the girls all dressed in their tightest Jordache, Sassoon, or Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, with belly-skimming tops that highlighted their curves. Lights flashed across the packed-in bodies, revealing different scenes and groups as the colors changed. I’d never seen a party like it before—nor had I ever wanted more to be a part of something.

At the center of it all were the DJs, controlling the sound from behind a wooden Formica-covered stand. One of them was dating my sister Brenda. He would eventually become her husband and they are still married to this day. Brenda met Kenneth Bowe when I was in seventh grade. It was Kenneth, his brothers, and some of my other sisters’ boyfriends who would become the closest thing I had in my life to an active father. These men got me into deejaying, at which I soon aspired to shine with the same competitive spirit I brought to athletics. During our weekly dances, they also schooled me on how to be a man.

Brenda had Kenneth take me along to my first dance when I was eleven or twelve. As in much of my social world, the crowd was exclusively black. There were no bleachers at Washington Park Gym, just a regulation basketball court surrounded by open space that could hold several thousand people. When the party started, it seemed like the center of the universe.

I remember the excitement, the scintillating energy, the pounding bass, the sheer joy of being in a crowd merged in music and amped up by surging teenage hormones. That first night, I was tentative because it was all so new to me. In fact, that was one of the only times I ever danced in public, trying not to look like a fool and moving with the crowd. That was before I knew that the cool people were on the DJ platform or behind the booth, just hanging.

Dancing wasn’t cool if you had a better way to strut your stuff, like making the scene itself by playing the music or being involved with the guys who did. I felt insecure and unsure initially, but I soon sized up the situation, recognized where everyone ranked in the social hierarchy, and figured out where I wanted to be.

Before I hit high school, I mainly just watched from behind the DJ stand. Observing Kenneth’s brother Richard, who was probably the top DJ in all of South Florida then, I learned how to mix and spin, how to work the mic, and the basic mechanics of operating all the sound equipment. We had Technics turntables and QSC amplifiers. JBL and Electro-Voice speakers provided that booming Miami bass. There were enough electronics to fill a room in Kenneth’s mother’s house, with literally thousands of records squeezed into his shelves.

Soon I could hear what flowed, what kept the party rocking, and how to blend one beat seamlessly into another. From Richard—who went by the DJ name Silky Slim—I learned how to build the crowd up and feed into its growing energy. I could tell what beats were slamming, when to play a slow jam, and how to bring an evening to a climax, to build bumping backbeat onto bumping backbeat until it seemed like the room itself would explode.

Early on, of course, I didn’t get much play: the older guys would let me spin a few songs and say a few words, just to see if I could do it. I was still a little kid to them. But when I showed that I was more than a cute novelty, that I was really able to move the crowd, I began to get longer sets, and by the time I was fourteen, I was part of the group itself.

Deejaying at a dance circa 1983.

We were called the Bionic DJs, after the Steve Austin character played by Lee Majors in the hit TV series
The Six Million Dollar Man
. Kenneth had come up with the name, wanting to illustrate the idea that our sound would be thunderous and powerful. Like Steve Austin, we wanted our sound to be amped up, superhuman. Our names were our alter egos, our aspirations.

Mine was Cool Carl. Kenneth, who was about five foot eight and muscular, went by Mr. Magic. He was the serious one in terms of taking responsibility; he arranged venues and coordinated transportation. But in his manner, he was actually a jokester who could do wicked impressions when he let loose. In contrast, his brother Richard was the star performer. Richard was six foot one. He had long eyelashes framing big almond-shaped eyes that made the girls wild. Silky Slim rocked the mic. He was so smooth that all the girls wanted to be with him and all the guys wanted to be him.

Their older brother Cecil—who didn’t deejay but along with Kenneth managed the logistics and the money—was known as Dr. Love. He had twinkly hazel brown eyes and a great smile that women loved. Their friend Adolph was called After Death for his initials and he was the fourth man in our group, although he did not emcee. Another Kenneth—a cousin of Kenneth Bowe, in fact, named Kenneth Good—took the nom de rap Captain Good. He did our lighting with strobes, disco balls, and police siren lights. There were also about a half-dozen honorary members, guys who’d be given black Adidas T-shirts with white lettering, identifying them as part of our crew. In exchange for helping us set up and break down the equipment, they got shirts that essentially told the girls that they were “with the band” and carried that kind of currency.