High Price

associated with a third factor, for example, stress, that causes both domestic violence and addiction to increase, while domestic violence itself has no effect on addiction susceptibility. Simply having one risk factor or even many, therefore, may not even directly relate to addiction itself, let alone doom people to definitely develop it. I myself never got close to being addicted to anything.
    And even when I later tried drugs like cocaine, I remained unscathed. Further, the reality is that my experience is actually far more typical of drug use than the dramatic addictions we see on TV, in movies, and in books. Most people who use any type of drug don’t get addicted; in fact, most people who try particular drugs don’t even use them more than a few times.
    Consider our last three presidents: Bill Clinton, who claimed he “didn’t inhale” the marijuana cigarette(s) he smoked; George W. Bush, who admitted marijuana use and is widely suspected of having taken cocaine; and Barack Obama, who admitted to using both drugs. President Obama even said that inhaling “was the point” of smoking reefer. Whatever your politics, none of them can be seen as not having reached the pinnacle of power and success.
    Their drug use was inconsequential—in large part because they all avoided legal consequences from it. If Barack Obama had come up in a time when the drug war was being waged as intensely as it is now, we probably would never have heard of him. A single arrest could have precluded student loans, resulted in jail time, and completely ruined his life, posing a far greater threat to him than the drugs themselves did, including the risk of addiction to marijuana or cocaine. Even among people at the highest risk, like I was, it is still the case that the majority do not become alcoholics or drug addicts.
    W e got a hit record, they gonna come out for that,” Russell Simmons told my brother-in-law Dr. Love, arguing that we should charge five-dollar admission rather than the two dollars we usually got for a Saturday night dance. Russell was managing his brother’s group, Run-DMC. He would ultimately, of course, become one of rap’s biggest promoters, parlaying Def Jam Records and other hip-hop ventures into a multimillion-dollar fortune. And Run-DMC—with Russell’s younger brother Joseph “Run” Simmons, Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, and Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell—would soon be the pioneering voices of hip-hop, taking home its first ever gold record and bringing the music into the mainstream. In 1983, though, all they had was a single: “It’s Like That,” with “Sucker MC’s” on the B side.
    At the time, rap was still nascent. It was so below our radar that I barely even mentioned to my friends at school that we’d be performing with Run-DMC at our next show. We certainly weren’t convinced that people would pay five dollars to see rappers, even if they did have a hit single. We still thought it was kind of uncool, perhaps even clownish. No one had a clue that Run-DMC would amount to anything.
    Russell had contacted the Bionic DJs because he wanted his group to tour South Florida—and we were known as the hottest DJs in the South Florida scene. Run-DMC didn’t have their own traveling equipment yet, so they wanted to borrow ours for that portion of the tour. We worked out a deal where they could perform with us, using our equipment in a trial run at Washington Park Gym, where I’d attended my first dance in middle school. It wasn’t our best venue. We’d had problems with turnout there at times, but it was big and available at the right price and time.
    Dr. Love raised our objections to the price but ultimately agreed to Russell’s terms. We confirmed the date. And soon we learned from the rappers that the heavy bass beat came from an 808 drum machine. We wanted to see it—but they hadn’t even brought it with them. As they performed, we discovered that they’d decided to use the sound from their own record, not the 808, when they played live with us. That left my brothers-in-law decidedly unimpressed. At nine thirty or ten the night of the show, we all went out back to smoke weed before we got started. Someone lit up a fat one and it was passed around as we talked about music and equipment and which of the girls who passed by were the hottest.
    As we’d predicted based on the price, however, only about a hundred people actually turned up to see them. The show itself was interesting: I