High Price

preceded cocaine use, rather than followed it. While crack cocaine use has been blamed for so many problems, the causal chain involved has been deeply misunderstood.
    Indeed, much of what has gone wrong in the way we deal with drugs is related to confusing cause and effect, to blaming drugs for the effects of drug policy, poverty, institutional racism, and many other less immediately obvious factors. One of the most fundamental lessons of science is that a correlation or link between factors does not necessarily mean that one factor is the cause of another. This important principle, sadly, has rarely informed drug policy. In fact, empirical evidence is frequently ignored when drug policy is formulated.
    We will see this most clearly when we examine the penalties for crack and powder cocaine and explore the disconnect between spending on law enforcement and prisons and drug use and addiction rates. Crack cocaine, for example, was never used by more than 5 percent of teenagers, the group at highest risk of becoming addicted. Risk for addiction is far greater when drug use is initiated in early adolescence versus adulthood. Daily use of crack—the pattern showing the highest risk for addiction—never affected more than 0.2 percent of high school seniors. A 3,500 percent increase in spending to fight drugs between 1970 and 2011 had no effect on daily use of marijuana, heroin, or any type of cocaine. And while crack has been seen as a largely black problem, whites are actually more likely to use the drug, according to national statistics. 4
    Indeed, when I first learned about actual crack cocaine use rates and the race of most crack cocaine users—among the many other false claims made about the drug—I felt betrayed. I felt like the victim of a colossal fraud, one that had been perpetrated not only against me but also against the entire American people. To understand my story, we need not just to understand the results of one policy but also to explore some of the ways drug strategies have been used for political ends.
    As Michelle Alexander brilliantly explains in her magisterial analysis, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness , American drug policy has often intentionally masked a political agenda. The use of drug policy to “send a message” about race was a key part of Richard Nixon’s infamous Republican “southern strategy.” That strategy was aimed at winning the South for Republicans by exploiting white fear and hatred of blacks in the aftermath of Democratic support for the civil rights movement. It made words like crime , drugs , and urban code for black in the eyes of many white people. Consequently, it gave legitimacy to policies that appeared to be color-blind on the surface but in reality inevitably resulted in increased black incarceration and disenfranchisement. Even as later administrations continued this so-called war on drugs without necessarily having the same goals, the biased results remained the same.
    Indeed, all of the outcomes of these policies—the wasted potential of people behind bars, the shattered families, the missing fathers, the violence seen in the drug trade, even high unemployment rates for black men—were soon being blamed on the nature of crack cocaine itself. I myself agreed with this view in my twenties, even though, as we’ll see, my own experience should have made me question it. But in fact, these problems were either worsened or actually created by political choices in economic and criminal justice policy. The policy decisions and misconceptions about the dangers of drugs devastated my generation while we ourselves were blamed for their outcomes. Before I became a scientist, I bought right in.
    Meanwhile, the real problems that had made our communities vulnerable to many social ills remained absent from public debate and unaddressed. They are visible in stories like mine, but only if you know where to look and how to think carefully about the problem. It took me many years to understand it. Unfortunately, many people—both blacks and whites—fell for the idea that crack cocaine was the key cause of our problems and that more prisons and longer sentences would help solve them.
    And now, even though crack cocaine is no longer a major political or media concern, one in three black males born after 2000 will spend time in prison if we don’t shift course drastically. 5 My youngest son, Malakai, is in this age group and I am doing my