High Price

Melissa.
    Over the course of our conversation, I discovered that the two women smoked weed—and as any self-respecting player knows, if you’ve got drugs, you can get girls. I said I had a hookup and invited Melissa to stop by Betty’s place that evening to hang out. Then I called Patrick, who typically had at least some reefer on hand, and had him bring it over.
    That afternoon I also watched Oprah . The show was then at the height of its popularity among wannabe in-the-know black people, so I was a daily viewer. The program that day featured a group of young, attractive women who were known as the “Rolex bandits.” Their trick was to target men with Rolexes in bars or clubs and get them so drunk or high that the women had little difficulty pretending to seduce them and thereby steal their expensive watches. I wasn’t paying all that much attention but got the gist.
    Early that evening, Betty left to go out with her boyfriend. Melissa arrived not long afterward, unexpectedly accompanied by her aunt. I understood; she didn’t yet know me and wanted to take her time. Visiting a man’s house alone at night might set up unwarranted expectations.
    After some small talk, the three of us passed around a joint. But although I’d continued to smoke reefer occasionally while in England, I had always stayed mindful of the fact that I could be urine-tested at any time. I generally didn’t inhale much: both for that reason and because I still found some of its psychedelic effects uncomfortable and disorienting. Although I’d smoked some in Atlanta with Patrick, I didn’t have much of a tolerance.
    But wanting to seem cool to impress the woman I was attracted to, I smoked far more reefer than I’d intended that night. At first we had a good time, just laughing a lot, making silly jokes. After about an hour or so, however, I started to become paranoid. It started with a nagging sense of unease. And then I became convinced that these two suspiciously beautiful women I’d picked up were Rolex bandits like the ones I’d seen on Oprah .
    Needless to say, I did not have a Rolex, nor was there anything of great value to steal in Betty’s apartment. Melissa and her aunt did not behave in any way that was at all suspect. It was highly unlikely that the day I watched an Oprah episode about females who preyed on men using sexual enticements to rob them I would have such an experience myself.
    Nonetheless, once the idea was planted in my head, I couldn’t get rid of it. Everything seemed to be telling me that these ladies were up to no good. I tried to tell myself to chill out, but it was to no avail. The paranoia became almost unbearable. I had to do something. To everyone’s surprise, without warning, I suddenly stood up and said, “Y’all gotta get the fuck out!”
    What had been a pleasant evening suddenly turned strange. They both looked at me and said, “What?”
    “You gotta go. Now,” I said. There was a serious edge in my voice. They froze and then began hastily gathering their things to leave.
    I certainly was attracted to Melissa and she seemed into me. But at that moment, I thought she was just trying to use me. I was so paranoid and insistent—and probably frightening—that the party stopped right there. I thought I’d never see her again.
    As silly as that experience seems in retrospect, it illustrates some important issues about drug use that have critical implications for how we understand and deal with it. A drug’s effects are determined not only by the dose and the way it’s taken into the body but also by many different characteristics of the user and her or his environment.
    LSD guru and onetime Harvard lecturer Timothy Leary first popularized the notion of set and setting as being crucial to the psychedelic experience. By set, he meant the mind-set of the person who has taken the drug: their preconceptions about the substance, expectations of its effects, and the person’s mood and physiology. Setting encompasses the environment: the social, cultural, and physical place in which the drug use occurs. It turns out that these two factors affect all drug experiences, not just those with psychedelics. Though some of Leary’s approaches had serious limitations, the concept of set and setting remains useful and they are crucial factors in understanding drug effects. The major point here is that psychoactive drug effects are not determined by pharmacology alone. It is the interaction between