High Price

starring Benjie the Bomber; South Miami DJs, with Tiny Head; and Party Down DJs, with Pretty Tony. Pretty Tony would go on to produce club-banging hits like Debbie Deb’s “When I Hear Music.”
    And Luther Campbell honed the flow that would come out in 2 Live hits like “Me So Horny,” during the DJ battles we’d hold about once a month. They’d play on one end of the venue and we’d play on the other. No one really wound up winning, though: both of our groups had large followings that came to hear one crew or the other. Our sound personified what eventually became known as “Miami bass” or “booty bass,” which influenced many early hip-hop artists.
    Early on, Cecil was the one who really tucked me under his wing. After the dances, everyone would want to celebrate, by cashing in on their stardom and power. When the night had gone especially well, there would be dozens of girls waiting in the wings to see if they could catch the eye of one of the DJs. The older guys usually sent me home at that time because I was so young. They wanted to be alone with the ladies. I knew the rules: if you didn’t have the skills or game to get girls out of their clothing, you were a liability and had to go. So at first, I couldn’t roll with the older cats when they were on the prowl.
    But Cecil took me in, even then. I’d go with him and his groupies to get some food or just back to his house. I was their mascot; their little pet. Watching Cecil, I learned how to talk to girls in ways that were subtle but clearly indicated your intentions.
    A lthough I probably couldn’t have described it well at the time, relationships like those I had with Cecil and my brothers-in-law, with my older sisters, girlfriends, and Big Mama, probably protected me from a great deal of harm. Researchers studying resilience to stress repeatedly find that social support is one of the biggest protective factors. And I needed it. My parents had been absent for much of my early life. Even when my mother was physically present, she worked such long hours and had so much else to take care of that I got very little mothering from her.
    But with five older sisters—and at least one grandmother who doted on me—I had some strong sources of maternal nurturing, although my sisters were quite young themselves.
    People often consider social relationships only as negative forces in drug use. However, what they fail to understand is the complexity of group behavior. Human beings have always devised means of determining who is “us” and who is “them,” and the consumption of specific foods or drugs is typically one way of doing so. Teens are especially sensitive to these cues of belongingness, and so if drug use is the price of group membership, it’s one that many are willing to pay.
    Some groups, however, mark their boundaries by avoiding certain types of drug use—for example, athletes rejecting smoking, 1960s hippies rejecting hard liquor in favor of marijuana and LSD, and blacks avoiding methamphetamine because it is seen as a white drug. From the level of the clique to the level of the national culture, behavior related to drugs isn’t only about getting high; it’s often used to delineate group membership and social standing.
    The social aspects of drug use also change with age. For example, having children and getting married are both associated with reductions in drug use; one of many studies with similar findings in this literature found that people who are married are three times more likely to quit using cocaine and those who have children are more than twice as likely to stop. 1 Similar data shows that people with close family and romantic relationships tend to have better outcomes in treatment 2 —and students’ feelings of social warmth and connectedness to school and parents are linked with reductions in drug problems. 3
    The role of social factors is an important part of why the “dopamine hypothesis” (or any other purely biological explanation) of addiction like those that I first espoused in my early work falls well short of providing a meaningful explanation of such problems. It’s certainly true that many people initiate drug use by copying others and that having a social circle that revolves around drugs can support continued use. But the vast majority of drug users never become addicted. And, in fact, social support itself is actually protective against many health problems and multiple types of risky behavior,