High Price

pushed me forward; what early influences were positive and which were negative; what happened by chance and what happened by choice; and what helps and harms children who face the same kind of chaos that I did. What allowed me—but not many of my family members and friends—to escape chronic unemployment and poverty, and to avoid prison? Can I give my own children the tools that worked for me? How do drugs and other sources of pleasure interact with cultural and environmental factors like institutional racism and economic deprivation?
    It became clear to me quite early in life that things are often very different from the way they seem on the surface; that people present very different faces to the world at work, in church, at home, and with those they love most. That complexity is also found in some interpretations of research data. As citizens in a society where there are many people with varying agendas trying to wrap themselves in the cloak of science, it’s important to know how to think critically about information that is presented as scientific, because sometimes even the most thoughtful people can be duped.
    I want to explore with you what I’ve learned, especially the importance of empirical evidence—that is, evidence that comes directly from experiments or measurable observations—in understanding issues like drugs and addiction. Importantly, such evidence is reliable and experiments are designed to avoid the bias that can come from looking at one or two cases that may not be typical. The opposite of empirical evidence is anecdotal information, which cannot tell us whether the stories told are outliers or are ordinary cases. Many people rely on personal anecdotes about drug experiences to try to understand what drugs do or don’t do, as if they are representative cases or scientific data. They are not. It is easy to get bamboozled if you do not have specific tools for critical thinking, such as understanding different types of evidence and argument. I’ll share these tools throughout this book.
    All that said, what I do know for sure is that in my neighborhood, long before crack cocaine was introduced, many families were already being torn apart by institutional racism, poverty, and other forces. In his classic book World of Our Fathers , Irving Howe reminded us that the pathology seen in neighborhoods like mine was not unique to black communities. Many early immigrant Jewish families from Eastern Europe were disrupted by hostilities faced from other groups and poverty, which required family members to work different schedules and made it impossible for them to spend time together. Some were required to conceal or abandon their religious beliefs and customs in order to obtain marginal employment. As a result, it’s not surprising that many early Jewish immigrant communities were plagued by crime, men abandoning their wives, prostitution, juvenile delinquency, and so forth. When these things happened in my neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s, crack was blamed. For example, although crack is often blamed for child abandonment and neglect and for grandmothers being forced to raise a second generation of children, all those things happened in my family well before crack hit the streets.
    My own mother, who was never an alcoholic or addict of any type, left me and the rest of her children to be raised by her relatives for more than two years during my early childhood. Some of my siblings were not raised by her at all. My maternal aunts also frequently relied on my grandmother for long-term child care. But none of these relatives ever touched cocaine or had any other addictions.
    Although Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty had helped bring the percentage of black families living in poverty down from 55 percent to 34 percent between 1959 and 1969, 2 that progress began to be reversed during my childhood. Unemployment among urban black men rose throughout the 1970s, reaching 20 percent by 1980. 3 The rate for blacks has always been at least double that for whites—and studies find that this bias tends to persist, even when blacks are equally or even more qualified than whites.
    And so, atop this clear example of institutionalized racism, job losses driven by industrial contraction and cuts in social services under President Ronald Reagan created vulnerable communities. High unemployment rates were indeed correlated with increases in crack cocaine use, it’s true: but what’s not well known is that they