High Price

travel and see a world different from the one he knew in South Florida. He hadn’t found mentors who could teach him about black history and consciousness, real men who could show him the way to find different values than getting the most pussy (and seeing women in that demeaning fashion) and having a name on the street. The gap between us felt even more vast than the one between me and my family in Miami. At least I had a shared history with them.
    When I met him, Tobias had so little mainstream cultural capital that he described me to his friends as a “teacher.” He didn’t understand the difference in status between a high school teacher and a college professor, let alone the differences between being a tenured professor or non-tenure-track lecturer, or between being at an Ivy League or a less prestigious school. Just as I’d been as a teenager, he was completely isolated from the mainstream.
    I didn’t know how to reach him or provide him with appropriate and helpful alternative reinforcers. He isn’t a drug addict; he’s a young black man with no high school diploma and limited employable skills in a country that sees him as a problem, not a resource. The unemployment rate for black men at the end of 2012 was about 14 percent, twice the number for white men. 1 Those problems don’t have answers in the neuropsychopharmacology that I study.
    I began to realize that I would need to speak out if I was to ensure that my work didn’t lead people to the wrong conclusions about drugs and the causes of social problems.

CHAPTER 15
    The New Crack
    There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.
    — HIPPOCRATES
    O ne afternoon in mid-2005 I received a phone call from the U.S. drug czar’s office, the ONDCP, a component of the Executive Office of the President. Initially, I thought, Oh shit, I must be in trouble! But that wasn’t it. They were phoning to request my participation in a roundtable discussion about the drug methamphetamine. The purpose of this roundtable, the caller explained, was to educate writers about the real effects of methamphetamine so that stories written about the drug would be more authentic. The writer participants would consist of individuals who wrote for a variety of magazines and television shows. I happily agreed to take part because this seemed to be a departure from previous “educational” efforts by ONDCP. These were the same folks who in the late 1980s brought us the public service announcement (PSA), “This is your brain on drugs.” During the spot, a man holds up an egg and says, “This is your brain.” Then he picks up a frying pan and says, “This is drugs.” Then he cracks open the egg, fries the contents, and says, “This is your brain on drugs.” Finally, he asks, “Any questions?” This PSA is one of the most ridiculed antidrug advertisements of all time because of its simplistic and inaccurate portrayal of drug effects. 1
    Today, ONDCP’s slogan is “Relying on science, research and evidence to improve public health and safety in America.” So, perhaps one of the goals of the roundtable, I figured, was to provide the writers with information with foundations in evidence rather than fear-based anecdotes. In addition to me, the panelists were an assistant U.S. attorney, an undercover narcotics agent, and a methamphetamine “addict.” Because I was one of the few scientists studying the effects of methamphetamine in people, my role was to summarize the current state of our scientific knowledge about the drug. I began by saying that methamphetamine is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat ADHD and narcolepsy. The attendees were surprised. How could this awful drug that they had heard about be sanctioned for anything? Then I presented data from my studies showing that methamphetamine produced the same effects as the better-known prescription medication Adderall (generic name: a mixture of amphetamine salts). The chemical structure of the two drugs is nearly identical (see figure 2).
    This too was surprising to most in the room. Like amphetamine, methamphetamine increases energy and enhances one’s ability to focus and concentrate; it also reduces subjective feelings of tiredness and cognitive disruptions brought about by fatigue and/or sleep deprivation. Both drugs can increase blood pressure and the rate at which the heart beats. I explained that several nations’ militaries,