High Price

everyone on the corner lie down on their bellies, stealing their drugs and cash. Then for reasons known only to the killers, they shot Melrose in the back of the head.
    Within three minutes, the shooters were caught and arrested by the police. But medical aid didn’t come nearly as quickly. No ambulance at all arrived to help Melrose. His friend Michael’s mother, Annie, called 911 four times, trying to get someone to take him to the hospital. Michael’s sister Jackie ran to a nearby firehouse, where firefighters stood with their arms crossed, not responding to her pleas for help.
    Annie had covered Melrose with a blanket and was sitting with him as he lay dying on the street for nearly twenty minutes before the paramedics finally showed up. An angry crowd of more than a hundred people later marched to the firehouse, furious about the slow response. Authorities claimed the rescue workers weren’t authorized to help until police arrived to ensure that the shooting was over. But the arrests had occurred within minutes—and there was no reason to believe that there were additional gunmen at large.
    Derrick “Melrose” Brown left behind four fatherless children. We’ll never know if he could have been saved by a faster emergency response.
    Melrose never had a chance. There were many critical experiences and policies that had led him to that corner, starting with his dismal educational history and the lack of economic opportunities it presented. But at the time, I blamed it all on crack cocaine. If he hadn’t been slinging, if drug trade rivals hadn’t come for him, he would still be with us, I thought. Forgetting my own early experience seeing my sister shot for no good reason and the equally senseless deaths of my friend’s brother and the white motorcyclist I saw shot in retaliation for his death, I became convinced that crack had made everyone go crazy. And I soon decided to get involved in research that I thought could help do something about it.

CHAPTER 10
    The Maze
    It is one thing to show a man that he is in an error and another to put him in possession of the truth.
    —John Locke
    E veryone in the psychology department knew about the class: some students even created T-shirts reading, “I survived experimental psychology,” which they wore proudly afterward. It was among the most demanding courses in the entire curriculum, one of those make-or-break requirements that tend to weed out the distracted, lazy, uncommitted, or otherwise challenged.
    Still, we hadn’t expected to face a human version of the radial arm maze. We had seen this eight-armed, circular contraption in the rat lab and read about it in our texts. None of the thirty-odd students was quite sure what to do as we found ourselves, on a beautiful sunny North Carolina day, in the center of a large unpainted wooden structure, the size of a half-court in basketball.
    It was about the third week of what was essentially my senior year of college, 1990. I was at the Wilmington campus of the University of North Carolina. I had no idea that this class and my professor, Rob Hakan, were about to change the course of my life. All I knew was that I was keeping my eyes on the prize, which for me at the time was simply graduating with a degree in psychology. I still had a vague idea that I wanted to work with underprivileged black children. I didn’t have a specific path to that job in mind, beyond finishing college. Although that goal was tantalizingly close, if I hadn’t taken Rob’s class, I don’t think I would have gone on to become a scientist.
    Experimental psychology was focused on research methods, and the maze exercise initially seemed irritating to me. It was not exactly a challenge to determine which of the arms did, in fact, have a jar of Skittles or M&M’s at the end of it. I felt slightly insulted to be treated, quite literally, like a lab rat. However, because I knew and trusted Rob, I went with it, figuring that he must have an important point to make by putting the class through this exercise.
    And indeed when I tried to write up the results afterward, I immediately understood the experiment’s purpose. I had to go back to check the number of the arms in the maze, the markers like red and blue dots of paint that helped distinguish between the arms that contained rewards and those that were empty and other specifics that I hadn’t realized were important at the time. I could see why these details mattered and the importance of