High Price

created an even crueler trap for those who succumbed to the drug’s allure, whether users or dealers.
    That’s because, unfortunately, while crack cocaine itself wasn’t an unprecedented phenomenon, what did genuinely change in the 1980s was the way the leaders of our community thought about the police and justice system. When I was coming up, we’d called the police “the Beast,” and blacks had pretty much stood united in opposition to “crackdowns” on crime because we knew how unjustly they’d be enforced. But with the arrival of crack cocaine, black people themselves started to call for more officers and longer prison sentences, seeing the drug as turning their own sons and daughters into monsters who were beyond help.
    The ongoing media emphasis on extreme pathological behaviors of crack users led people to believe incredible stories about it. For example, one of the most widely reported misconceptions about crack cocaine was that after one hit a person could become addicted. Addressing this issue at the time, Yale University psychiatry professor Dr. Frank Gawin told Newsweek , “The best way to reduce demand would be to have God redesign the human brain to change the way cocaine reacts with certain neurons.” 4 This is simply hyperbole. Even at the peak widespread use, only 10–20 percent of crack cocaine users became addicted. Another persistent stereotype was that most crack cocaine users are impulsive, focused only on getting another hit of the drug. Evidence from my own research (as well as from other researchers) shows that this too is incorrect. During my studies, I impose demanding schedules on crack cocaine users; they are required to do considerable planning, inhibit behaviors (for example, drug use) that may interfere with meeting study schedule requirements, and delay immediate gratification. Most meet these demands with no problems.
    But the shift to a “law and order” perspective was real. Those who had once stood in opposition to the “get tough on crime” brigade, who had previously called for rehabilitation and community service, were now united with those who wanted more prisons and less mercy. In calling for the passage of the Anti–Drug Abuse Act of 1986—which ultimately created penalties for crack cocaine harsher than any other drug—Democrats and Republicans in Congress were equally rabid. They were eagerly trying to outbid each other in creating the harshest ways to “crack down on crack.”
    Indeed, when college basketball star Len Bias died on June 19, 1986, the hysteria reached an even higher pitch. At first, the twenty-two-year-old was believed to have died from smoking crack cocaine, but it later turned out that he’d used powder. The six-foot-eight University of Maryland student with a sweet jump shot had been the Boston Celtics’ number-one draft pick. He died while celebrating having been selected to be on the team that had just won the NBA championship. His death had an outsize impact because the then–Speaker of the House, Democrat Tip O’Neill, was from the Boston area and a committed Celtics fan. Rev. Jesse Jackson, in his eulogy for Bias, said, “Our culture must reject drugs as a form of entertainment, recreation and escape. . . . We’ve lost more lives to dope than we did to the Ku Klux Klan rope.”
    The cocaine-attributed death of Don Rogers, the twenty-three-year-old Cleveland Browns defensive back, later that month 5 only made matters worse. The closely timed deaths of these two young athletes in their prime contributed to the public belief that cocaine’s effects were dangerously unpredictable. But they weren’t placed in the context of the millions who had used or were using the drug without such effects.
    In my research, I’ve conducted nearly twenty studies in which I’ve given cocaine to participants without incident: while it can, in rare cases, exacerbate preexisting heart problems, its effects in doing so are comparable to those that occur when people engage in other vigorous activities, like intense exercise. With increasing doses you get predictable increases in physiological measures like heart rate and blood pressure. Nonetheless, without any congressional hearings or much thought about potential negative consequences, the ill-conceived 1986 legislation was hurriedly passed.
    Recall now that crack and powder cocaine are actually identical pharmacologically. Consider, too, that only a few decades earlier, Congress had passed