High Price

that was at the transfer point for the bus home. I never shoplifted there: too many cameras and security guards.
    In my own life, then, it was very clear that crime wasn’t always, or even very often, driven by or even related to drugs. Most of my peers shoplifted, whether or not they took drugs. Guns, similarly, had little connection to drug use or dealing in our lives. For us, shoplifting was not a matter of “stealing to support a habit” and we didn’t carry guns to “protect dealing turf.” We stole because we didn’t have what we needed or wanted; we stole to resist, to not be suckers. We kept guns to be cool. It was much more about necessity and poverty, about power, not just pleasure.
    At the time, I didn’t think critically about any of this. And so, when crack cocaine came along, I completely bought the party line about its connection to violence and disorder. I had similarly accepted without thinking the idea that drugs like heroin and even marijuana caused violence. I was soon seeing crack the way everyone around me did: as a scourge, the source of all our problems. I thought the drug itself was what made our neighborhood into a war zone.
    But evidence from research tells a different story. It is true that addiction and crime are correlated. People involved in crimes like burglary, larceny, and robbery are more likely to be addicted to drugs than those who don’t commit such crimes, and vice versa. However, around half of all people with drug addictions are employed full-time 1 and many never commit crimes that aren’t related to the fact that their preferred drugs are illegal.
    The U.S. Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics examined the connections between drugs and crime in prisoners, analyzing data from 1997 to 2004. It found that only a third of state prisoners committed their crimes under the influence of drugs and only around the same proportion were addicted. 2 That means the overwhelming majority were not intoxicated or addicted during their crime—and only 17 percent of prisoners reported committing their crimes to get money to buy drugs. Violent offenders were actually less likely than others to have used drugs in the month prior to incarceration. 3
    The real connection between drugs and violent crime lies in the profits to be made in the drug trade. The stereotype is that crack typically causes crime by turning people into violent predators. But evidence from research shattered this misconception. A key study examined all the homicides in New York City in 1988, a year when 76 percent of arrestees tested positive for cocaine. Nearly two thousand killings were studied. 4
    Nearly half of these homicides were not related to drugs at all. Of the rest, only 2 percent involved addicts killing people while seeking to buy crack cocaine and just 1 percent of murders involved people who had recently used the drug. Keep in mind that this study was conducted in a year when the media was filled with stories warning about “crack-crazed” addicts.
    Thirty-nine percent of New York City’s murders that year did involve the drug trade, however, and most of these were related to crack selling. But these killings were primarily disputes over sales territories or robberies of dealers by other dealers. In other words, they were as “crack-related” as the shoot-outs between gangsters during Prohibition were “alcohol-related.” The idea that crack cocaine turns previously nonviolent users into maniacal murderers is simply not supported by the data. When it comes to drugs, most people have beliefs that have no foundation in evidence.
    M y own drug use was completely dissociated from my other criminal behavior. I didn’t slow my car to let Richard point the gun at that white guy because I was crazy from being high or wanted money to get high. And we didn’t keep the gun on hand because of drugs, either. I never shoplifted or sold marijuana because I needed money to smoke it. In fact, I actually didn’t like marijuana much. By sixteen, I’d tried cigarettes, reefer, and drinking but, as always, my main goal was staying cool. That meant low to moderate use: I didn’t want to feel out of control, ever, and I could see how getting drunk or really high could interfere with this desire.
    My priority was athletics. I wasn’t going to do anything that might impair my performance on the basketball court. Switching my primary sport from football to basketball in high school because of my