High Price (3 page)

So why is our image of the illegal drug user so negative? Why do we think that drug use is addiction and that degradation is the primary result of taking drugs? Why do we so readily blame illicit drugs for social problems like crime and domestic violence?

Part of what I want to do here is look critically at why we see drugs and their users the way we do, the role racial politics has played in this perception, and how that has led to drug-fighting tactics that have been especially counterproductive in poor communities. I want to examine the way we ascribe causes to people’s actions and fail to acknowledge the complexity of the influences that guide us on the paths we take through life. I want to explore the research data that is often used to back the claims that people make about drugs, addiction, and racism and reveal what it can and cannot tell us about these issues. By looking at how these issues affected my own life, I hope to help you see how mistaken ideas impede attempts to improve drug education and policy.

However, before proceeding I also need to clearly define one more term:
racism
. So many people have misused and diluted the term that its perniciousness gets lost. Racism is the belief that social and cultural differences between groups are inherited and immutable, making some groups inalterably superior to others. While these ideas are bad enough when lodged in the minds of individuals, the most harm is done when they shape institutional behavior, for example, that of schools, the criminal justice system, and media. Institutionalized racism is often much more insidious and difficult to address than the racism of lone individuals, because there’s no specific villain to blame and institutional leaders can easily point to token responses or delay meaningful action indefinitely. I hope to shed some light on how that works here—but I never want to give the impression that I am overemphasizing its force or exaggerating when I use that word. I mean precisely the role that the belief in innate racial inferiority plays in shaping group behavior.

By looking closely at all these factors, I hope to understand what forces held me back in my early educational experiences and what pushed me forward; what early influences were positive and which were negative; what happened by chance and what happened by choice; and what helps and harms children who face the same kind of chaos that I did. What allowed me—but not many of my family members and friends—to escape chronic unemployment and poverty, and to avoid prison? Can I give my own children the tools that worked for me? How do drugs and other sources of pleasure interact with cultural and environmental factors like institutional racism and economic deprivation?

It became clear to me quite early in life that things are often very different from the way they seem on the surface; that people present very different faces to the world at work, in church, at home, and with those they love most. That complexity is also found in some interpretations of research data. As citizens in a society where there are many people with varying agendas trying to wrap themselves in the cloak of science, it’s important to know how to think critically about information that is presented as scientific, because sometimes even the most thoughtful people can be duped.

I want to explore with you what I’ve learned, especially the importance of empirical evidence—that is, evidence that comes directly from experiments or measurable observations—in understanding issues like drugs and addiction. Importantly, such evidence is reliable and experiments are designed to avoid the bias that can come from looking at one or two cases that may not be typical. The opposite of empirical evidence is anecdotal information, which cannot tell us whether the stories told are outliers or are ordinary cases. Many people rely on personal anecdotes about drug experiences to try to understand what drugs do or don’t do, as if they are representative cases or scientific data. They are not. It is easy to get bamboozled if you do not have specific tools for critical thinking, such as understanding different types of evidence and argument. I’ll share these tools throughout this book.

All that said, what I do know for sure is that in my neighborhood, long before crack cocaine was introduced, many families were already being torn apart by institutional racism, poverty, and other forces. In his classic book
World of Our Fathers
, Irving Howe reminded us that the pathology seen in neighborhoods like mine was not unique to black communities. Many early immigrant Jewish families from Eastern Europe were disrupted by hostilities faced from other groups and poverty, which required family members to work different schedules and made it impossible for them to spend time together. Some were required to conceal or abandon their religious beliefs and customs in order to obtain marginal employment. As a result, it’s not surprising that many early Jewish immigrant communities were plagued by crime, men abandoning their wives, prostitution, juvenile delinquency, and so forth. When these things happened in my neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s, crack was blamed. For example, although crack is often blamed for child abandonment and neglect and for grandmothers being forced to raise a second generation of children, all those things happened in my family well before crack hit the streets.

My own mother, who was never an alcoholic or addict of any type, left me and the rest of her children to be raised by her relatives for more than two years during my early childhood. Some of my siblings were not raised by her at all. My maternal aunts also frequently relied on my grandmother for long-term child care. But none of these relatives ever touched cocaine or had any other addictions.

Although Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty had helped bring the percentage of black families living in poverty down from 55 percent to 34 percent between 1959 and 1969,
²
that progress began to be reversed during my childhood. Unemployment among urban black men rose throughout the 1970s, reaching 20 percent by 1980.
³
The rate for blacks has always been at least double that for whites—and studies find that this bias tends to persist, even when blacks are equally or even more qualified than whites.

And so, atop this clear example of institutionalized racism, job losses driven by industrial contraction and cuts in social services under President Ronald Reagan created vulnerable communities. High unemployment rates were indeed correlated with increases in crack cocaine use, it’s true: but what’s not well known is that they preceded cocaine use, rather than followed it. While crack cocaine use has been blamed for so many problems, the causal chain involved has been deeply misunderstood.

Indeed, much of what has gone wrong in the way we deal with drugs is related to confusing cause and effect, to blaming drugs for the effects of drug policy, poverty, institutional racism, and many other less immediately obvious factors. One of the most fundamental lessons of science is that a correlation or link between factors does not necessarily mean that one factor is the cause of another. This important principle, sadly, has rarely informed drug policy. In fact, empirical evidence is frequently ignored when drug policy is formulated.

We will see this most clearly when we examine the penalties for crack and powder cocaine and explore the disconnect between spending on law enforcement and prisons and drug use and addiction rates. Crack cocaine, for example, was never used by more than 5 percent of teenagers, the group at highest risk of becoming addicted. Risk for addiction is far greater when drug use is initiated in early adolescence versus adulthood. Daily use of crack—the pattern showing the highest risk for addiction—never affected more than 0.2 percent of high school seniors. A 3,500 percent increase in spending to fight drugs between 1970 and 2011 had no effect on daily use of marijuana, heroin, or any type of cocaine. And while crack has been seen as a largely black problem, whites are actually more likely to use the drug, according to national statistics.
⁴

Indeed, when I first learned about actual crack cocaine use rates and the race of most crack cocaine users—among the many other false claims made about the drug—I felt betrayed. I felt like the victim of a colossal fraud, one that had been perpetrated not only against me but also against the entire American people. To understand my story, we need not just to understand the results of one policy but also to explore some of the ways drug strategies have been used for political ends.

As Michelle Alexander brilliantly explains in her magisterial analysis,
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
, American drug policy has often intentionally masked a political agenda. The use of drug policy to “send a message” about race was a key part of Richard Nixon’s infamous Republican “southern strategy.” That strategy was aimed at winning the South for Republicans by exploiting white fear and hatred of blacks in the aftermath of Democratic support for the civil rights movement. It made words like
crime
,
drugs
, and
urban
code for black in the eyes of many white people. Consequently, it gave legitimacy to policies that appeared to be color-blind on the surface but in reality inevitably resulted in increased black incarceration and disenfranchisement. Even as later administrations continued this so-called war on drugs without necessarily having the same goals, the biased results remained the same.

Indeed, all of the outcomes of these policies—the wasted potential of people behind bars, the shattered families, the missing fathers, the violence seen in the drug trade, even high unemployment rates for black men—were soon being blamed on the nature of crack cocaine itself. I myself agreed with this view in my twenties, even though, as we’ll see, my own experience should have made me question it. But in fact, these problems were either worsened or actually created by political choices in economic and criminal justice policy. The policy decisions and misconceptions about the dangers of drugs devastated my generation while we ourselves were blamed for their outcomes. Before I became a scientist, I bought right in.

Meanwhile, the real problems that had made our communities vulnerable to many social ills remained absent from public debate and unaddressed. They are visible in stories like mine, but only if you know where to look and how to think carefully about the problem. It took me many years to understand it. Unfortunately, many people—both blacks and whites—fell for the idea that crack cocaine was
the
key cause of our problems and that more prisons and longer sentences would help solve them.

And now, even though crack cocaine is no longer a major political or media concern, one in three black males born after 2000 will spend time in prison if we don’t shift course drastically.
⁵
My youngest son, Malakai, is in this age group and I am doing my damnedest to protect him by exposing the injustice of this situation.

Of course, children have no understanding of the larger forces that shape their lives—and I certainly didn’t know what was going on as the 1970s turned into the 1980s and the maelstrom of economic, political, and criminal justice upheavals of the era began to shred the lives of everyone around me. In fact, I was about to be miseducated on virtually everything about drugs, crime, and the causes of neighborhood strife, including the ongoing domestic violence that would soon shatter my own family.

CHAPTER 2

Before and After

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

—PHILIP LARKIN

W
hen my mother returned from the hospital after the fight with my father, she seemed to recover rapidly. We saw her bandages and knew not to say anything. We hoped that was the end of it. But although the hammer fight was not their last one, my parents would separate and divorce not long afterward. Oddly, however, even when I thought that my mother had been murdered by my father, before she came back from the hospital, I don’t remember missing her or worrying about her.

Maybe I’ve just blocked it out because it was too painful; maybe it just came out in other ways. For example, in my family after my parents’ split, we gradually stopped calling her “Mom” or “mama.” In my teens, we started calling her “MH,” an appellation I’d given her after noting the way George Jetson of cartoon fame referred to his boss by using his initials.

Looking back, I think this was a sort of distancing, a wish to deny her the affectionate names others used for their mothers. Because in many ways, for much of my childhood, despite her best efforts, she just wasn’t there. After my parents broke up, my mother spent two and a half years in New York, away from all of her children. I now know that she left in search of higher-paying employment so that she could give us a better life. But back then, all I saw was that we were scattered among various relatives.

I’m sure I must have been upset that she was gone but it wasn’t something I verbalized. We never knew when she was going away and when she would come back. My sisters now say they felt like orphans. I realize that I did, too. But we didn’t share our feelings with each other then. I think I resented my mother for years because I couldn’t admit, even to myself, how hurt I’d been.

Already by age six, I had learned to hide my feelings as well as any vulnerability or need. I thought then that this was the only way to protect myself from further hurt, the only way I could properly be the man of the house. I’d begun compartmentalizing. That would turn out to be a critical skill for my emotional survival. To make it work, I wouldn’t even show most of my feelings to myself. I’m still struggling with the detrimental “side effects” of this response to my childhood in my relationships today.