High Price (2 page)

These questions weighed on me even more heavily later in the year as I continued to conduct these experiments. Sometimes, while I watched the drug users contemplate whether to take another dose, I couldn’t help thinking about some of the choices I’d made during my youth. Marvin Gaye’s lyric from “Trouble Man” would run through my head, especially the lines about growing up under difficult circumstances, but eventually turning the tables to succeed. Usually, I tried to keep my past far behind me. But that part of my life had been called to my attention in an unavoidable and shocking way that spring.

Early one morning in March 2000, I was awakened by a loud banging on the door of my Bronx apartment. It was about 6 a.m.; I was in bed with my wife. We had a young son, Damon, who was about to turn five. Several months earlier, I had been promoted to assistant professor at Columbia. Life was good. As we say back home, I was feeling myself. But I also knew that word of my success had hit the streets of South Florida. Indeed, I’d recently received what I thought was an absurd letter from a Florida court claiming that I was the father of a sixteen-year-old boy. The pounding became more insistent.

When I opened the door, I was met by a thick-necked white guy wearing an undersized suit and displaying a badge. He handed me some official paperwork and instructed me to appear before a judge. As it turned out, the boy’s mother had actually gone ahead and filed a paternity suit. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t even know her last name. But, in the fall of 1982, when I was fifteen and she was sixteen, we’d had a one-night stand. It started to come to me as I thought back; soon I had a vague memory of her signaling me to sneak in through her window to avoid alerting her mother that she had a visitor.

As the DNA test ultimately confirmed, I’d gotten her pregnant that night. For the next two years, prior to joining the U.S. Air Force, I’d lived in and around the Carol City neighborhood of Miami (known to hip-hop fans as the gun- and drug-filled home of rapper Rick Ross and his Carol City Cartel), but she had never even mentioned the possibility to me that I was the father of her baby boy. And I never even thought to ask, because I had engaged in this type of behavior in the past without noticeable consequences.

But that’s the abrupt way I discovered that I had a son I didn’t know—one who was being raised in the place I’d tried so hard to escape; yet another fatherless black child of a teenage mother. At first, I was enraged, horrified, and embarrassed. I thought I had at least avoided making that mistake. Here I was doing the best I could to raise the child I knew I had in a middle-class, two-parent family. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what to do. Once I got over my initial shock, I was appalled to think about what it must have been like for my son to grow up without ever knowing his father. It really got me thinking about how I’d managed to thrive despite lacking those advantages.

I’d wanted to teach my children everything I hadn’t known as I grew up with a struggling single mother, surrounded by people whose lives were limited by their own lack of knowledge. I wanted them to go to good schools, to know how to negotiate the potential pitfalls of being black in the United States, to not have to live and die by whether they were considered “man” enough on the street. I also wanted to illustrate by my own example that bad experiences like those I had as a child aren’t the defining factor in being authentically black.

Now I had learned that one of my own children—a boy, whose name I learned was Tobias—had grown up for sixteen years in the same way I had, but without any of the hard-earned knowledge I could now offer.

Later, I’d discover as well that he’d taken the very path I feared most. He had dropped out of high school and fathered several children with different women. He had sold drugs and allegedly shot someone. What could I tell my sons about how I’d escaped from the streets? Could my experience and knowledge help change Tobias’s downward trajectory? How did I really manage to go from being one of the black kids in the auxiliary trailer for those with “learning difficulties” in elementary school to being an Ivy League professor?

Though I now regret much of this behavior, like my newfound son I’d sold drugs, I’d carried guns. I’d had my share of fun with the ladies. I’d deejayed in the skating rinks and gyms of Miami performing with rappers like Run-DMC and Luther Campbell in their early gigs, ducking when people started shooting. I’d seen the aftermath of what the police call a “drug-related” homicide up close for the first time when I was just twelve years old; I lost my first friend to gun violence as part of the same chain of events. Indeed, my cousins Michael and Anthony had stolen from their own mother, and I had attributed this abhorrent behavior to their “crack cocaine addictions.” I saw what happened as crack first took hold in Miami’s poorest black communities. Falling for media interpretations and street myths about all of these experiences had originally misled and misdirected me. Some of that, as we shall see, may ironically have helped me at certain times. But more often, it was a distraction, one that prevented me and so many others in my community from learning how to think critically.

So how could I now in good conscience study this scourge of a drug, even offer it to my own people in the laboratory? In the grand scheme of things, what was really so different between what I was doing in my research and what was likely to get Tobias arrested on the street?

The answers lie in my story and the science, which reveal the untold truth about the real effects of drugs and the choices we make about them as a society. By exploring how these myths and social forces shaped my childhood and career, we can strip away the misinformation that actually drives so-called drug epidemics and leads us to take actions that harm the people and communities we presumably intend to help.

CHAPTER 1

Where I Come From

This nation has always struggled with how it was going to deal with poor people and people of color. . . . We’ve had the war on poverty that never really got into waging a real war on poverty.

—
MAXINE WATERS

T
he sounds were what got to me: my father shouting, “I’ll kill yo ass”; my mother shrieking; the sickening thump of flesh hitting flesh, hard. I had been playing board games—probably Operation or something like that—with three of my sisters in the bedroom I shared with my youngest brother, Ray. He was three, too young to play, but I was watching him, keeping him out of trouble. The fierce Miami sun was setting and we could tell the fighting was getting worse because my parents had moved from their bedroom, where they tried to keep things private, into the living room, where anything went.

It was a Friday or Saturday night and I was six years old.

Soon we could hear large objects being thrown against the walls, glass shattering, long, piercing screams. I had known it was going to be a bad night when my oldest sister, Jackie, left to go home. Then thirteen, Jackie was the child of my mother’s previous partner, born when my mother was eighteen, before my parents had met and gotten married. She lived with Grandmama, as we called our maternal grandmother, but during her frequent visits with us, she was sometimes able to prevent my parents from attacking each other.

Not this time. Maybe she had sensed what was coming. It was worse than ever—even worse than some of the other times when the neighbors had called the police. In 1972—long before Farrah Fawcett’s
The Burning Bed
and O.J. and Nicole—the courts were reluctant to prosecute domestic violence cases, in part because they didn’t want to incarcerate the family’s primary wage earner, which might have left the wife and children destitute. As a result, domestic violence was a tolerated behavior and was not limited to black families. The police would eventually come and they would talk to my father. Sometimes they would tell him to go away for a bit to cool off, but they never arrested him. They saw it as private, something between a man and his woman. I felt relieved when they broke things up, but I didn’t understand why the fights never stopped.

My sisters whispered to each other for a split second, then took the youngest ones by the hand and pulled us through the living room into the yard. Patricia, then nine years old, stayed behind. She often tried to play peacemaker like her big sister Jackie. The terrifying screams and crashes continued. Ten-year-old Beverly and seven-year-old Joyce tried to get me out as quickly as possible but I still saw my father hit my mother with a hammer. The glass coffee table that was usually in front of the couch was shattered. Shards of glass were everywhere. The ceramic lion that I once got grounded for accidentally dropping wielded its claws in empty menace by the front door.

I froze but my sisters dragged me along. The poster-sized photos of Martin Luther King and JFK on the living room wall looked dead in their frames. As we ran out, I looked back to see my mother collapse, bleeding, at the door that opened from the living room into the yard. What I remember most is horror. The memories themselves are disjointed, as if reflected in the splintered glass.

“My mama’s dead!” one of the girls screamed. “My mama’s dead!”

“Carl done killed my mama,” another sister said. In my family, we never called our father Dad or Daddy, just used his first name, for reasons now lost to family history.

“Carl done caught her in the head with a hammer!” Beverly, my third-oldest sister, shrieked.

Someone, probably our next-door neighbor who’d made these types of calls before, dialed 911. An ambulance arrived and took my mother away to the hospital. At some point, her father, whom we called Pop, came to collect us and took us to our maternal grandmother’s house. But no one told me how my mother was or anything about what was going on. And it didn’t occur to me to ask: in our family, you didn’t really raise those kinds of questions. I learned that she was alive only when she turned up a few days later, with blackened eyes and a bandage on one arm.

No crack cocaine was involved in my family life. That drug would not appear on the scene until the 1980s and I was born in 1966. There wasn’t any powder cocaine or heroin, either. Alcohol, however, was definitely part of the chaos. My father never drank during the week. But weekends were his time to let go, to make up for the social and cultural isolation of his work as a warehouse manager. At the time, he was one of two black employees at his company and the only one in management. His whiskey with Coke chasers were his reward—and Friday nights were his time to hang out on the corner with his friends.

My brother Ray (right) and me on Easter Sunday 1972.

All of my parents’ worst fights took place on weekends. Most were either Friday or Saturday night when he was drunk, or Sunday when he was hung over. As a result, unlike typical school-age children, my siblings and I dreaded weekends. My mom, Mary, would drink when people around her drank, but drinking wasn’t a specific pursuit for her the way it was for my father. She imbibed for social reasons while he drank to get intoxicated and experience the disinhibiting effects of alcohol.

But although alcohol was involved, I now know it wasn’t the real root of our problems. As a scientist, I have learned to be skeptical about the causes attributed to the difficulties that my family faced, living first in a working-class and later in a poor community. Simple factors like drinking or drugs are rarely the whole story. Indeed, as we know from experience with alcohol, drinking itself isn’t a problem for most people who do it. As we will see, the same is true for illegal drugs, even those we have learned to fear, like crack cocaine and heroin.

While I could tell my story without highlighting what I’ve learned about these issues, that would merely perpetuate the misinterpretations that misguide our current thinking. To truly understand where I came from, you have to understand where I wound up—and how mistaken ideas about drugs, addiction, and race distort the way we see lives like mine and therefore, how society addresses these questions.

First, in order to understand the nature of influences like alcohol and illegal drugs, we need to carefully define the real nature of the problems related to them. Knowing that someone uses a drug, even regularly, does not tell us that he or she is “addicted.” It doesn’t even mean that the person has a drug problem.

To meet the most widely accepted definition of addiction—the one in psychiatry’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, or
DSM
—a person’s drug use must interfere with important life functions like parenting, work, and intimate relationships. The use must continue despite ongoing negative consequences, take up a great deal of time and mental energy, and persist in the face of repeated attempts to stop or cut back. It may also include the experience of needing more of the drug to get the same effect (tolerance) and suffering withdrawal symptoms if use suddenly ceases.

But more than 75 percent of drug users—whether they use alcohol, prescription medications, or illegal drugs—do not have this problem.
¹
Indeed, research shows repeatedly that such issues affect only 10–25 percent of those who try even the most stigmatized drugs, like heroin and crack. When I talk about addiction in this book, I always mean problematic use of this sort that interferes with functioning—not just ingesting a substance regularly.