High Price

Scott-Heron implied symbolically in his lament written from the perspective of a black heroin addict. The man in the song “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” is trying without success to use drugs to relieve his pain, pain so severe that he’s considering never going home again. Listening to this song, I began to understand why someone might be driven to that sort of escape; to empathize in ways that I had not been able to do when I’d smoked marijuana and found the alteration in consciousness disorienting rather than liberating.
    I still held conventional views about drugs as destroyers of life, however—and I would continue for years to come to buy into the idea that crack cocaine was the main thing that was devastating my neighborhood and other black communities back home. But I was also beginning to be able to see from multiple perspectives and to recognize more complexity than I’d earlier admitted. In this light, Gil Scott-Heron’s own later problems with cocaine were only more tragic for me.
    The public perception of his personal relationship with drugs and his songs about them unfortunately perpetuated myths about certain types of drug use. Because his own use appeared to be so pathological—and it seemed to have such a visible negative impact on him later in life—it played right into the stereotypes that use always leads to devastating addiction and that drug use by black people is the real source of our problems. Many of his antidrug songs recapitulated this conventional wisdom, without the penetrating analysis he usually brought to political issues.
    While I listened then, though, I didn’t yet recognize this. I saw drugs as being in opposition to black consciousness, as an obstacle. Fighting against drugs, listening to Scott-Heron’s antidrug songs, and sharing them with others was a way to fight oppression. It was a way to show that you were righteous. I didn’t see then that the way we fought drugs actually made our oppression worse. I viewed the drugs as the problem, not our ideology around them or our treatment and law enforcement policies.
    In fact, when I was home on leave in 1987, I became utterly convinced that crack cocaine was the cause of everything that I now saw as wrong with the neighborhood. I didn’t realize it then, but I had reframed in my mind many things I’d seen around me. At the time, I was making the same mistakes in thinking that our leaders were. For example, I began to think that violence, the presence of guns in the hood, and the willingness of people I knew to use them were all caused by drugs. I left out the pieces—like my own family’s experiences with domestic violence and parental absence and my personal experiences with gun crimes—that didn’t fit.
    I’d always looked up to my brothers-in-law and the rest of the older guys in our DJ group, seeing them as the baddest brothers in the world. But when I was back home, I started to hear them decry “these kids today.” They said crack was turning nice girls into “chicken-head hos” and driving ordinary boys to “thugs, ready to cap a muthafucka.” They couldn’t stop talking about the lawlessness of the younger brothers coming up.
    Of course, they’d schooled me themselves in all the nuances of respect and disrespect when I was younger. They’d trained me in the southern culture of honor that doesn’t allow even the slightest dis, like a stepped-on shoe or dirty look, to go unchallenged. It wasn’t like we hadn’t ourselves carried guns and, in some cases, even used them to avenge incidents that outsiders would surely have characterized as trivial or even crazy.
    Indeed, in the early 1980s, one of my brothers-in-law himself had been arrested after his bright-colored vehicle was used in a shooting: two people had been killed in the drive-by incident. No one was convicted for the crime because the shooter remains unidentified—but the chain of events that led up to the killings had begun when someone stepped on someone else’s shoes. No drugs were involved.
    The motives of young men who engage in these types of potentially fatal interactions over slights to honor are frequently portrayed as irrational overreactions. But these types of altercations that seem to have such petty origins are by far the leading motivation for deadly violence—contributing to significantly more crimes than the pharmacological effects of drugs. In their influential study of homicides in Detroit, Martin Daly and Margo