High Price

thought to be obvious about drugs were similarly shaped by racial bias. And I soon learned that it was sensational reporting like this that had largely led first to state and then national prohibition of the currently illegal drugs. I read histories like David Musto’s 1973 classic, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control , which helped me to further understand that drug laws banning drugs like cocaine, opioids, and marijuana were based less on pharmacology and more on racial vilification and discrimination.
    For example, between 1898 and 1914 numerous articles appeared in the scientific literature and popular press exaggerating the association of heinous crimes and cocaine use by blacks: the New York Times piece was not an exception, but an example. As Musto has detailed, “experts” testified before Congress that “most of the attacks upon white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain.” 4 As a result, it was not difficult to get passage of the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, which effectively prohibited the drug.
    Before learning this history, I’d always assumed that the legal status of a particular drug was determined primarily by its pharmacology. However, I found that there were actually no sound pharmacologically rational reasons behind why alcohol and tobacco were legal, and cocaine and marijuana were not. It was mainly about history and social reasons, about choosing the drug dangers that would be highlighted to spur public concern and those that would be ignored. It seemed as if sound pharmacology was almost never considered or minimized.
    Bans on drugs were inevitably preceded by hysterical coverage filled with scare stories about drug use by despised minorities, often immigrants and the poor. As Musto details, in the case of cocaine, the fears were linked to southern blacks. With marijuana it was blacks and Mexicans who were the bogeymen, and with opium it was Chinese railroad workers. In all three cases, sensational press reports were coupled with salacious portrayals of males of these groups using the drugs to facilitate rape or seduction or both of white women. 5 Even national alcohol prohibition had been passed with an aim at controlling the behavior of what the mainstream saw as frightening minority groups. In that case, it was primarily beer-drinking Germans and other poor immigrants in the run-up to and during America’s involvement in World War I.
    My skepticism about the nature of the drug problem slowly increased during my academic training. For one, under Charlie Ksir’s tutelage, I had begun teaching a course on Drugs and Behavior, starting out as his teaching assistant. In the class and in the textbook he wrote that we used (I became his coauthor on later editions), myths about drugs were constantly discussed and debunked.
    For example, in one lecture, I remember him carefully presenting data showing that cocaine-exposed infants fared no worse than those who had been exposed to nicotine during their mother’s pregnancy. Another time, I remember Charlie calling the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP, better known as the drug czar’s office) to ask for the source of some information. An advertisement they’d released had claimed that some high number of cocaine-exposed infants was born every minute. But when Charlie pressed the ONDCP representative for the citation, it became clear that the number was obtained by extrapolating from other numbers. At best, this wasn’t an ideal strategy, and at worst, it wildly overstated the real statistic.
    At first I found these facts hard to believe because of everything I’d heard about the dangers of crack cocaine. But I soon realized that I had nothing other than what I could now see as media hype to support my position. Jim Rose had pounded into my head the need to back all of my statements with rigorous empirical data, and when I started applying my critical thinking skills to what I thought I knew about drugs, very little survived.
    Much of what we learn as scientists involves critically interrogating the methodology used to conduct research and trying to root out as many sources of bias as we can. The media, however, does not apply these methods to its reporting and therefore frequently presents an overly simplistic and a distorted picture.
    Did we really now understand cocaine in a more sophisticated scientific manner—or had we just changed the language that we use about it in