High Price

toward the study participants at Yale. For instance, Robert’s musings on how cocaine made him more focused and creative were discounted as drug-induced drivel—and yet studies of the impact of cocaine on concentration do show that it can improve alertness and concentration, exactly as he claimed.
    Other experiences led me to see even more similarities. David, a thirty-five-year-old Italian-American construction worker, also participated in the cocaethylene research. He once described his experience to me of the day he was recruited to participate in the study. He’d seen an ad in a local alternative newspaper, seeking frequent cocaine users willing to be in an experiment in which they might be administered cocaine. They had to be otherwise healthy and willing to live in the hospital for two weeks. If accepted and if they stayed the whole time, they’d be paid a thousand dollars upon completion.
    We’d interviewed David and determined that he was an appropriate candidate. Then we arranged for him to get a physical at a clinic at Yale–New Haven Hospital. The building had a strange address—it was 950½ or something like that, which sounds distinctly fishy. As he left our facility and sought this bizarre address, he noticed that there were several police cars parked outside.
    That made him anxious. But he did want to participate in the study and possibly make some money, so he persevered. When he got near to where he thought the address was, however, he saw police outside that building, too. He began thinking that we’d set him up, that when he got inside and asked about the study, he’d be arrested. He walked around the facility a few times, trying to figure out what to do and whether he should even ask someone about the weird address. Maybe asking for that number would be the cue for the police to arrest him?
    From the perspective of a nonuser of illegal drugs, of course, this sounds like sheer paranoia. When I told the story to other people working on the study, they laughed knowingly about how cocaine can make users paranoid. But from David’s perspective, there was nothing irrational about his fears. He was involved in illegal activity. Police actually were engaged in an intense war on drugs. Tens of thousands cocaine users had been arrested. And we had all seen those movies or TV shows where lawbreakers are lured to some building by promises of a prize of some sort, only to be arrested for some earlier crime.
    David had been asked to go into a government building and admit his drug use, which is a crime, in order to supposedly get paid to possibly take an illegal drug. His worries were an understandable response to his experience in the cultural setting in which it took place. While cocaine and marijuana can certainly increase these kinds of fears, anyone engaging in illegal activity does need to be cautious if he wants to avoid getting caught.
    It became increasingly clear to me how our prejudices about drug use and our punitive policies toward users themselves made people who take drugs seem less human and less rational. Drug users’ behavior was always first ascribed to drugs rather than considered in light of other, equally prominent factors in the social world, like drug laws.
    And in reality, virtually all of us sometimes find ourselves in situations where we persist in behavior despite negative consequences, just like addicted people do. Most people can’t stick to a diet, many continue to eat fatty and sweet foods when they are gaining weight, or have had periods of heavy drinking or stayed in bad relationships and ignored the negative results, which is the same pattern of behavior seen in drug addiction. Sure, there are extreme cases where addicted people commit absurd crimes—but there are plenty of equally stupid crimes planned or committed by people who are stone-cold sober.
    I thought about my friends and family back home and where they’d wound up while I was working my way up in academia. I considered behaviors that were impulsive and often seen as associated with alcohol and other drugs. I myself had shoplifted and stolen batteries and sold drugs. But while I had plenty of less than perfect qualities, I had no addictions. Many of my siblings and cousins also engaged in petty theft as teenagers, but again, this was usually unrelated to their alcohol or other drug use or lack thereof.
    In my immediate family, three of my five sisters had had teenage pregnancies. One of my sisters did