High Price

brothers-in-law, their reframing also had to do with having grown up. They’d settled down with jobs, mortgages, and kids. They no longer focused exclusively on their status on the street. All of these things—work, marriage, children—are strong alternative reinforcers. They aren’t as available or attractive during adolescence to youth, but they become more so in early adulthood, as the view of what’s appropriate and acceptable for one’s age changes.
    And once these alternative reinforcers began to matter more to my brothers-in-law, they started to see from a more mature and sophisticated perspective small incidents they once would have taken as challenges to their honor. These slights were no longer magnified by adolescence. More important, their jobs and families gave them other ways to see themselves as masculine that didn’t require defending against every insult. Having children and jobs, of course, also meant that they had much more to lose.
    The young guys really weren’t any more lawless than we were; we had actually responded in exactly the same ways when we were their age. Some of the cues and certainly the fashions and music were different. But drug use was actually falling: in 1979, 54.2 percent of high school seniors reported using an illicit drug within the last year; by 1986, this had dropped to 44.3 percent. 2
    The same was true for murder rates. In 1980, there were 10.2 homicides per 100,000 people in the United States population; by 1986, this number had declined to 8.6. What’s more, on September 25, 1986, the Los Angeles Times printed an article summarizing findings from a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration report on crack cocaine. The report stated that media attention “has been a distortion of the public perception of the extent of crack use as compared to the use of other drugs.” The DEA report further noted that crack cocaine wasn’t even available in most places outside of New York and Los Angeles—crack problems and the later increase in dealing-related murders followed the wave of media hype about them, rather than preceding them. In other words, scare stories about an “instantly addictive” and violence-provoking drug served to spread crack cocaine, not accurately describe its use in most of America.
    The effect of crack, when it had one, was mainly to exacerbate the problems that I’d seen in my home and in the hood since the 1970s. It didn’t create the world of hustlers, dealers, and addicts celebrated by rappers or the underground economy that I’d always known. It was just a marketing innovation that added a new product to the drug world. The drug’s pharmacology didn’t produce excess violence. However, whenever a new illicit source of profit is introduced, violence increases to define and retain sales territory, then declines once turf has been marked out and the market stabilized. It happened in Miami first with powder cocaine and then again with crack cocaine, and the same pattern has been seen in numerous other locations with many different types of drugs.
    But contrary to the image presented by hip-hop of immense wealth for virtually anyone who got into the game, the reality was that most dealers made about the same amount of money they would have made if they’d worked at McDonald’s. Sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh meticulously documented the economics of crack dealing in his study of a Chicago street gang. 3 Spending several years on the streets with the group, he was able to gain the confidence of both the leadership and lower-level members and learn exactly what each person earned and how the profits were distributed.
    While the risks of crack selling may not, on the surface, seem worth the low salary ultimately earned, to many young men it seemed the best of a bad lot. At fast-food chains or in similar low-level jobs, these youth would have to wear dorky uniforms and submit themselves to often demeaning treatment from (typically) white bosses and customers, with rigid hours and little apparent chance for advancement. Selling crack, however, offered a choice of hours, the opportunity to work with friends, and visible routes to success, along with greater status among peers and potential girlfriends. The potential glory made the risk of prison and death seem worth taking.
    But as with music or sports careers, dealing crack cocaine offered big cash only to a privileged few at the top of the pyramid. And the laws passed to “fight” the problem