High Price

Author’s Note
    I ’m frequently asked why I wrote this book, a book that reveals many deeply personal details about my life. After all, I’m an academic neuropsychopharmacologist who is trained to conduct research and teach a select group of students about drugs, behavior, and the brain. And there are few things that I value as much as my privacy. So, I certainly didn’t write the book because I thought people should know more about my private life—the vast amount of personal information revealed within these pages causes me a great deal of anxiety; nor did I write it to advocate illegal drug use—that would be a colossal waste of my training, skills, and talents. Currently, there are more than 20 million Americans who use illegal drugs regularly. I think it’s clear that I’m not needed as an advocate.
    The primary reason that I wrote this book was to show the public how the emotional hysteria that stems from misinformation related to illegal drugs obfuscates the real problems faced by marginalized people. This also contributes to gross misuses of limited public resources. To shed light on the relevant issues—including maladaptive human behaviors and misguided public policies—I use real-life examples, mainly from my own life. I hope this will help the reader to learn by example and then generalize more broadly. But I also recognize that inaccurate conclusions can be easily made if personal anecdotes alone are used. Thus, in addition to real-life examples, throughout the book I used scientific knowledge of the human mind, brain, and behavior in an effort to decrease the likelihood of the reader drawing inappropriate conclusions.
    In an attempt to be as accurate as possible, I visited relatives and friends and recorded what they had to say. Some of these individuals’ names have been changed in an effort to protect their privacy. After absorbing the information I’d learned from meeting with them, I’d meet with the writer Maia Szalavitz, who helped me to put together a narrative that I thought would be interesting and digestible for a general audience. I gratefully acknowledge her assistance in explaining complex scientific findings and principles to a general readership, but I take full responsibility for any inaccuracy that may have resulted from oversimplification of complicated material.
    It is my hope that after reading this book, you will be less likely to think about drugs in magical or evil terms that have no foundation in real evidence. As you will see in these pages, this has led to a situation where there is an unreasonable goal of eliminating illegal drug use at any cost to marginalized groups. Instead, I hope you, the reader, will come away with the ability to think more objectively and critically about the multitude of issues that come along with illegal drug use, and will understand that by applying what we have learned about human behavior, we can change it.

Prologue
    The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
    — JAMES BALDWIN
    T he straight glass pipe filled with ethereal white smoke. It was thick enough to see that it could be a good hit, but it still had the wispy quality that distinguishes crack cocaine smoke from cigarette or marijuana smoke. The smoker was thirty-nine, a black man who worked as a street bookseller. He closed his eyes and lay back in the battered leather office chair, holding his breath to keep the drug in his lungs as long as possible. Eventually, he exhaled, a serene smile on his face, his eyes closed to savor the bliss.
    About fifteen minutes later, the computer signaled that another hit was available.
    “No, thanks, doc,” he said, raising his left hand slightly. He hit the space bar on the Mac in the way that he’d been trained to press to signal his choice.
    Although I couldn’t know for sure whether he was getting cocaine or placebo, I knew the experiment was going well. Here was a middle-aged brother, someone most people would label a “crackhead,” a guy who smoked rock at least four to five times a week, just saying no to a legal hit of what had a good chance of being 100 percent pure pharmaceutical-grade cocaine. In the movie version, he would have been demanding more within seconds of his first hit, bug-eyed and threatening—or pleading and desperate.
    Nonetheless, he’d just calmly turned it down because he preferred to receive five