High Price

problems. As a scientist, I have learned to be skeptical about the causes attributed to the difficulties that my family faced, living first in a working-class and later in a poor community. Simple factors like drinking or drugs are rarely the whole story. Indeed, as we know from experience with alcohol, drinking itself isn’t a problem for most people who do it. As we will see, the same is true for illegal drugs, even those we have learned to fear, like crack cocaine and heroin.
    While I could tell my story without highlighting what I’ve learned about these issues, that would merely perpetuate the misinterpretations that misguide our current thinking. To truly understand where I came from, you have to understand where I wound up—and how mistaken ideas about drugs, addiction, and race distort the way we see lives like mine and therefore, how society addresses these questions.
    First, in order to understand the nature of influences like alcohol and illegal drugs, we need to carefully define the real nature of the problems related to them. Knowing that someone uses a drug, even regularly, does not tell us that he or she is “addicted.” It doesn’t even mean that the person has a drug problem.
    To meet the most widely accepted definition of addiction—the one in psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , or DSM —a person’s drug use must interfere with important life functions like parenting, work, and intimate relationships. The use must continue despite ongoing negative consequences, take up a great deal of time and mental energy, and persist in the face of repeated attempts to stop or cut back. It may also include the experience of needing more of the drug to get the same effect (tolerance) and suffering withdrawal symptoms if use suddenly ceases.
    But more than 75 percent of drug users—whether they use alcohol, prescription medications, or illegal drugs—do not have this problem. 1 Indeed, research shows repeatedly that such issues affect only 10–25 percent of those who try even the most stigmatized drugs, like heroin and crack. When I talk about addiction in this book, I always mean problematic use of this sort that interferes with functioning—not just ingesting a substance regularly.
    So why is our image of the illegal drug user so negative? Why do we think that drug use is addiction and that degradation is the primary result of taking drugs? Why do we so readily blame illicit drugs for social problems like crime and domestic violence?
    Part of what I want to do here is look critically at why we see drugs and their users the way we do, the role racial politics has played in this perception, and how that has led to drug-fighting tactics that have been especially counterproductive in poor communities. I want to examine the way we ascribe causes to people’s actions and fail to acknowledge the complexity of the influences that guide us on the paths we take through life. I want to explore the research data that is often used to back the claims that people make about drugs, addiction, and racism and reveal what it can and cannot tell us about these issues. By looking at how these issues affected my own life, I hope to help you see how mistaken ideas impede attempts to improve drug education and policy.
    However, before proceeding I also need to clearly define one more term: racism . So many people have misused and diluted the term that its perniciousness gets lost. Racism is the belief that social and cultural differences between groups are inherited and immutable, making some groups inalterably superior to others. While these ideas are bad enough when lodged in the minds of individuals, the most harm is done when they shape institutional behavior, for example, that of schools, the criminal justice system, and media. Institutionalized racism is often much more insidious and difficult to address than the racism of lone individuals, because there’s no specific villain to blame and institutional leaders can easily point to token responses or delay meaningful action indefinitely. I hope to shed some light on how that works here—but I never want to give the impression that I am overemphasizing its force or exaggerating when I use that word. I mean precisely the role that the belief in innate racial inferiority plays in shaping group behavior.
    By looking closely at all these factors, I hope to understand what forces held me back in my early educational experiences and what