High Price

Drugs, however—and sometimes women—could offer some common ground.
    Jamaican Mike wanted to be down with me (meaning, considered cool by me) so he always shared his weed. And although I didn’t myself particularly enjoy the product, there were people around me whose love for it affected me.
    Because I was captain of the basketball team, part of my job was to inspire the other players and ensure that they did their best. Bruce Roy, who was a sophomore at that time, was one of the most talented ballers I’d ever seen. He loved reefer at least as much as he did basketball, maybe more. If we were going to succeed on the court, he was essential. But sometimes he’d miss practice, either because he was off getting high or because of some other drama. I realized that Jamaican Mike’s marijuana offered at least a partial solution. Since Bruce was going to smoke anyway, I could supply him myself. That meant he’d have to come to practice if he wanted the best weed.
    And that’s how I started selling. Again, it was not because of any addiction or even any liking for the drug itself on my part. I did it because of reefer’s role in my social world. Weed could get Bruce to practice; I used his desire for the drug to give me more control over my life, ensuring that one of my star players showed up. And although it didn’t open my mind in terms of its effects on my own consciousness, it did expand my circle of friends as my access to it put me in touch with more of the school’s so-called stoners or burnouts. Before, as a jock, I’d looked down on them. Now I began to see that such people could be cool. Indeed, they turned out to be some of the most open-minded, intelligent, and intriguing kids I hung out with in high school.
    I began spending my lunch hour with the school janitor, a brother named Bobby whom I knew from the neighborhood. He reminded me of “Carl the Janitor” from The Breakfast Club . We hung with these two white girls, one of whom was a really cool girl named Jana. I’d known her since middle school. She would sometimes get so wasted, taking only God knows what mixture of drugs, that she’d be virtually unconscious in class. Jana had Marcia Brady straight blond hair and wore dark eyeliner.
    The four of us would get high at my cousin Betty’s house—the same place where I almost got killed sleeping with Naomi, the night that Betty’s husband came home and thought I was in bed with his wife. I wasn’t sensitive enough to realize that Jana was a lesbian—and that was probably at least part of why I was never able to get with her. But I liked her offbeat personality and never would have become close friends with her if it hadn’t been for weed. Experience with the wide variety of people who are attracted to drugs and drug culture would also help me later when I began research aimed at understanding use and addiction.
    For those who focus on pathology, of course, my drug experiences would be seen as an aberration. I had many risk factors for addiction in my childhood. These types of risk factors are another part of the dialogue on drugs and addiction that is often misunderstood. For example, I grew up with domestic violence: this alone is linked to an addiction risk that is doubled to quadrupled compared to those who don’t live in a violence-plagued home. 5 My father certainly abused alcohol: that’s another factor associated with a doubling to quadrupling of risk. Moreover, my mother sometimes smoked cigarettes while she was pregnant with me, and my parents were divorced: both also are strongly linked with elevated risk. In addition, I lived in a poor neighborhood with bad schools at a time rife with racial tension.
    With all that against me, you might think that addiction would be inevitable. But that is not how risk factors work. As noted earlier, simply finding a correlation between two phenomena doesn’t mean that one causes the other. For instance, a space alien might visit earth and observe a strong correlation between the appearance of umbrellas and the amount of rainfall. The alien might conclude that the presence of more umbrellas causes more rain to come down. This would, of course, be inaccurate. We earthlings know that it simply means that the more it rains, the more likely people are to use umbrellas to protect themselves.
    It could genuinely be true that domestic violence does make children more susceptible to later-life addiction—or it could be that each of those things is