High Price

by Carl Hart

  I felt like my neighborhood was becoming increasingly threatening; I saw constant news coverage of the “crack epidemic” and how it was destroying everything it touched. From the news, it seemed as though the senseless killings were spreading and unstoppable. In 1986, Time and Newsweek had each run five crack-related cover stories; the national media screamed out more than a thousand stories on the “scourge” in that year alone. Ronald and Nancy Reagan took to national TV to promote “outspoken intolerance” against drugs, calling them a “cancer” and asking Americans to join their antidrug “crusade.”

  I couldn’t see it at the time, but what had really changed in my world was not the creation of an unprecedented wave of drug-induced violence and a codeless new group of predatory youth. It was how our problems were being described and explained. In the case of the media, politicians seeking reelection—of both parties—had spread the word that drugs were the cause of inner-city problems and that making war on them would fix things. News organizations picked up the simple narrative, not questioning its assumptions.

  In the case of my brothers-in-law, their reframing also had to do with having grown up. They’d settled down with jobs, mortgages, and kids. They no longer focused exclusively on their status on the street. All of these things—work, marriage, children—are strong alternative reinforcers. They aren’t as available or attractive during adolescence to youth, but they become more so in early adulthood, as the view of what’s appropriate and acceptable for one’s age changes.

  And once these alternative reinforcers began to matter more to my brothers-in-law, they started to see from a more mature and sophisticated perspective small incidents they once would have taken as challenges to their honor. These slights were no longer magnified by adolescence. More important, their jobs and families gave them other ways to see themselves as masculine that didn’t require defending against every insult. Having children and jobs, of course, also meant that they had much more to lose.

  The young guys really weren’t any more lawless than we were; we had actually responded in exactly the same ways when we were their age. Some of the cues and certainly the fashions and music were different. But drug use was actually falling: in 1979, 54.2 percent of high school seniors reported using an illicit drug within the last year; by 1986, this had dropped to 44.3 percent.2

  The same was true for murder rates. In 1980, there were 10.2 homicides per 100,000 people in the United States population; by 1986, this number had declined to 8.6. What’s more, on September 25, 1986, the Los Angeles Times printed an article summarizing findings from a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration report on crack cocaine. The report stated that media attention “has been a distortion of the public perception of the extent of crack use as compared to the use of other drugs.” The DEA report further noted that crack cocaine wasn’t even available in most places outside of New York and Los Angeles—crack problems and the later increase in dealing-related murders followed the wave of media hype about them, rather than preceding them. In other words, scare stories about an “instantly addictive” and violence-provoking drug served to spread crack cocaine, not accurately describe its use in most of America.

  The effect of crack, when it had one, was mainly to exacerbate the problems that I’d seen in my home and in the hood since the 1970s. It didn’t create the world of hustlers, dealers, and addicts celebrated by rappers or the underground economy that I’d always known. It was just a marketing innovation that added a new product to the drug world. The drug’s pharmacology didn’t produce excess violence. However, whenever a new illicit source of profit is introduced, violence increases to define and retain sales territory, then declines once turf has been marked out and the market stabilized. It happened in Miami first with powder cocaine and then again with crack cocaine, and the same pattern has been seen in numerous other locations with many different types of drugs.

  But contrary to the image presented by hip-hop of immense wealth for virtually anyone who got into the game, the reality was that most dealers made about the same amount of money they would have made if they’d worked at McDonald’s. Sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh meticulously documented the economics of crack dealing in his study of a Chicago street gang.3 Spending several years on the streets with the group, he was able to gain the confidence of both the leadership and lower-level members and learn exactly what each person earned and how the profits were distributed.

  While the risks of crack selling may not, on the surface, seem worth the low salary ultimately earned, to many young men it seemed the best of a bad lot. At fast-food chains or in similar low-level jobs, these youth would have to wear dorky uniforms and submit themselves to often demeaning treatment from (typically) white bosses and customers, with rigid hours and little apparent chance for advancement. Selling crack, however, offered a choice of hours, the opportunity to work with friends, and visible routes to success, along with greater status among peers and potential girlfriends. The potential glory made the risk of prison and death seem worth taking.

  But as with music or sports careers, dealing crack cocaine offered big cash only to a privileged few at the top of the pyramid. And the laws passed to “fight” the problem 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 Bosto
n 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 month5 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 tough mandatory drug sentences and then repealed them when they failed to have the intended effects. Almost immediately, it also became clear that the enforcement of the laws was having a biased impact—not because it was racist in intent, but because of the way law enforcement actually works and the way crack itself is sold.

  Here’s why. It is obviously a lot easier to catch people selling drugs in open-air markets than it is when people sell behind closed doors. Also, the more transactions a dealer or user makes, the greater the likelihood of being caught and arrested simply because more transactions means more opportunity to be caught in the act. One of the keys to crack’s success on the market was the selling of very small doses at a low price, something that obviously increases the number of transactions needed to make a profit for the dealer; and because the actual dose of cocaine contained in street crack is low, it might necessitate users to make several trips. Since it was a new product, street marketing was also important to generate sales.

  Unlike powder cocaine, crack was sold in smaller doses, making it affordable even to people with little money. These folks are both more likely to buy and sell on the street and to engage in more frequent sales transactions. Crack cocaine increased the prevalence of both street markets and frequent transactions in many black communities. Law enforcement agencies placed considerable resources in black communities aimed at arresting both dealers and users. This combination of factors meant that creating disparate sentences for crack would inevitably—even without any racist intent—put more black people in prison for much longer terms. And so, in Los Angeles, for example—a city of nearly 4 million people—at the peak of the crack epidemic, not a single white person was arrested on federal crack cocaine charges, even though whites in the cities used and sold crack.

  Nonetheless, one of the key leaders in the war on crack cocaine was New York’s black congressman from Harlem, Charles Rangel. He was then chairman of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. In 1985, he’d criticized the Reagan administration for its “turtle like speed” in cracking down on drugs.6 In 1986, his was one of the loudest voices calling for the imposition of tough measures to fight crack cocaine.

  Rather than considering what was happening in New York under similarly harsh legislation that had not “solved the drug problem” but had resulted in mass incarceration of black and brown people, he enthusiastically supported the most draconian drug war policies. That included the 100:1 disparity in sentencing for crack and powder cocaine, respectively, first ensconced in federal sentencing in the 1986 law. Seventeen out of twenty-one members of the Congressional Black Caucus, of which Rangel is a founding member, sponsored this law.7

  Under the 1986 provision, a person convicted of selling 5 grams of crack cocaine was required to serve a minimum sentence of five years in prison. To receive the same sentence for trafficking in powder cocaine, an individual needed to possess 500 grams of cocaine—100 times the crack cocaine amount. In practical terms, 5 grams of cocaine results in 100–200 doses, whereas 500 grams results in 10,000–20,000 doses. From a scientific or pharmacological perspective, the disparity wasn’t justified: it didn’t accurately reflect any real difference in harm related to the drug. And soon, the Anti–Drug Abuse Act of 1988 extended cocaine-related penalties to persons convicted of simple possession, even first-time offenders. Simple possession of any other illicit drug, including powder cocaine or heroin, by a first-time offender carried a maximum penalty of one year in prison.

  Overwhelmingly, those incarcerated under the federal anticrack laws were black: for example, in 1992, the figure was 91 percent and in 2006 it was 82 percent.8 While the intent may not have been racist, the outcome—lack of outrage and failure to change course in response to the disproportionate number of black men who were convicted, imprisoned, and disenfranchised—certainly was. The result, in many black communities, was an unchecked disaster that reverberates even today.

  And as the late 1980s turned into the early 1990s, I began to see what I then thought were the effects of crack cocaine on my own family and friends. My cousins Amp and Michael became my own family’s example. On one visit home around this time, I discovered that they had been exiled from my aunt Weezy’s house because of their cocaine use. The cousins I’d once looked up to, who’d instructed me on sex and manhood, had now been kicked out of their own mother’s house.

  Instead of getting their own place, however, they had begun living in a toolshed in her backyard. It was the same one, in fact, that we’d tried to hide behind unsuccessfully when we were caught trying to smoke our first cigarettes as boys. Amid the rakes and lawn mowers in this ten-by-ten shack, my cousins had their new sleeping quarters.

  When I came to see them, the shed was squalid, filthy. It had no electricity or plumbing, of course. Where were the cool older cats I’d admired and hung out with? Could these be the same brothers I’d looked up to, the ones I’d trusted to get advice from when I’d had my first embarrassing sexual experience?

  These days, Amp and Michael weren’t working or taking care of families; they were stealing from their own mother in order to buy crack. They were once even caught trying to steal their mother’s washer and dryer to sell them to buy drugs. The only way their behavior made sense to me was if it had been compelled by a drug. At the time, I didn’t recognize the roles played by factors like their failure to graduate from high school and Anthony’s chronic unemployment. I didn’t think about how we’d all engaged in crime back home, even without using drugs. I didn’t know how Michael had gone from having a wife and steady job as a truck driver to living in that shack at his mom’s. I didn’t think about the difference the military had made for me. All I could see that differentiated me from them was their drug use.

  I tried to find them to talk sense into them on a later trip home. But they dodged my sanctimonious black ass. They weren’t going to let themselves feel humiliated. They also knew that I had nothing to offer them but empty words. The “just say no” rhetoric of the time wasn’t effective for adults who had limited employment options and had previously said yes. And that’s all I really had to give them then.

  For one of my friends, though, the consequences of our failure to recognize the real problems that were behind the “crack epidemic” were even worse. I knew that when I’d joined the air force, Melrose and a few other friends had started slinging rock (meaning, selling crack cocaine) on the corner. They’d boasted to me about how girls would do “anything” to get crack and bragged about all the money they were going to be making. I hadn’t paid much mind at the time because I knew that for all their talk, they were still living at home with their mothers or in other equally nonaffluent situations.
Obviously, they hadn’t made any real money.

  I thought that their dealing was virtually all talk, like so many of the capers we’d planned in high school but never really gone through with. We had always been just about to get some real loot, always been about to grab the riches and fame that we knew were just around the corner. My experience in England had made the futility and unlikeliness of success in these endeavors transparent to me, and it now seemed a bit sad, embarrassing even. I hadn’t expected their small-time hustling to amount to anything, good or bad.

  But apparently, Melrose had been selling cocaine, on the 3900 block of Southwest 28 Street in Carver Ranches, pretty regularly. He wasn’t moving large quantities and was no one’s idea of a kingpin. Of all my friends, he was never one I expected to be involved with violence: although he was incredibly physically fit and an imposing-looking specimen, he was a genuinely good-hearted person. As a child, he’d been sent to that “special” school where he’d gotten no education at all, but he was gentle and no real threat to anyone. On August 14, 1990, he’d spent hours celebrating his daughter Shantoya’s first birthday with her. Then he went out to the corner.

  The guys who decided to jack him—some small-time dealers from another neighborhood who had targeted the spot where he worked—didn’t know he’d just come from a toddler’s birthday party. They didn’t know Melrose was as kind and loyal a person as you’d ever meet. They didn’t know him at all. They drove up and pulled out their guns before Melrose and his boys on the street had any chance to react. They made 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.