High Price (30 page)

Ultimately, although we did not get our counterpoint published as an op-ed in the student paper, the students who had protested did become more politically active on campus. Just after that, Wyoming had its first black student body president and the student senate experienced a wave of elections of minority students. Many of them later went on to jobs at the university—but sadly, most did not stick with their early activism. As is often the case, once many people become a part of the system they once criticized, they are rewarded for behaving in a manner similar to those around them.

Nonetheless, I had learned that I could organize people to take effective action. I was continuing to grow and learn as a scientist. While I wouldn’t be conspicuously politically active again until much later in my career, the experience was galvanizing and formative. I was learning not only that I could succeed in academia but also that I might be able to change it.

T
he most important relationship I began in Wyoming, however, was with the woman who would become my wife and the mother of my two sons. Robin and I first crossed paths when I served as graduate adviser to the psychology honor society there in 1992. She was a psych undergraduate at the time. Her intelligence deeply impressed me. In fact, I suspected she was smarter than I was. At age twenty-six, she already had undergraduate degrees in international studies and French.

Robin was white. She was also one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. Her style was striking. She always wore stylish hats and scarves, not just functional winter gear. While many of the students on campus looked like they’d just come in from feeding livestock at the ranch, Robin looked more like a Manhattanite, even though she had actually been raised in Montana.

She has olive skin and green eyes, with lovely deep brown hair. We were friends before we became involved, but when we took the same class together in 1994, I knew I had to make a move. After she brought a plant to my office as a gift, I could see that she was interested in me, too. Soon we were inseparable.

Unfortunately, not long after we first got together, I had to leave Wyoming. In the summer of 1993, I’d won a highly competitive minority fellowship to work at the National Institutes of Health: only one minority graduate or medical student in the entire United States was accepted each year. I hadn’t even considered applying, but Charlie had insisted and I eventually relented.

And to my great surprise, I had won the chance to spend the summer working in Irv Kopin’s lab. Kopin was studying the neurobiology of stress, trying to understand the neurotransmitters and metabolites involved. However, what was even more impressive was that the lab I’d worked in was where Julius Axelrod had done much of the work that won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Axelrod had solved key problems in understanding how brain cells talk to each other, discovering mechanisms involved in neurotransmitter storage, release, and inactivation. It was thrilling to work in the lab where these critical discoveries had been made—and even more exhilarating to be asked to return the following summer, after completing my master’s, to do my PhD work there. That, however, would mean leaving Robin behind in Wyoming.

When Robin and I had first gotten together, it seemed simple. We were both intensely attracted to each other, physically and intellectually. But we were also both at a point in our academic careers where we had little time to devote to a long-term relationship. I assumed it would be a casual thing, a nice diversion from our academic pursuits.

However, over time, things got more and more intense. We spent all of our free time together—limited as it was by our work—and constantly talked. I opened up to her in ways I hadn’t done previously, and she, too, shared a great deal of herself. We were always talking about books and ideas: she was the first woman in my life who gave me books as presents. She gave me
Washington Post
reporter Nathan McCall’s
Makes Me Wanna Holler
as a master’s graduation gift. I read it while enduring the lengthy and tedious ceremony.

Soon I could see that she really was the kind of woman I sought as a life partner, and I think she felt similarly. In most ways, she seemed perfect. Except, of course, for being white. I wasn’t sure how to deal with that, even as I hated that it mattered.

It was fine to have a fling with a white woman in Wyoming—but I couldn’t imagine making a family with one, given all the baggage that interracial relationships carried in the wider world. Together we read Derrick Bell’s
Faces at the Bottom of the Well
, particularly the allegorical short story “The Last Black Hero,” which tells the tragic tale of a black militant who falls in love with a white woman and faces the paradoxes of trying to fight for racial equality while living in the inequitable world as it is.

Like the activist in the story, I was uncomfortable envisioning a future with a woman who wasn’t black. I thought about what little black girls would think as they saw so many of the most successful black men marrying white women. I wanted to be one of those success stories—but I didn’t want to disappoint the people who looked up to me. I certainly didn’t want to reinforce the image that black women weren’t good enough for high-achieving black men.

And so, as I prepared to leave for the NIH, Robin could tell that something was up and we needed to talk. She drove me to a spot up in the mountains, with a majestic view of the wide-open sky. Darkness had fallen and the stars were out. They seemed like they were everywhere in the late spring chill as we sat in the car on the mountainside. We started to talk.

I didn’t want to hurt her, but I knew that if we got much closer, that was inevitable. So I explained as kindly as I could what I’d been thinking. I told her that I didn’t know if I could face my community and be the man I wanted to be if I was with a white woman. I stressed that it had nothing to do with her and that our relationship itself was wonderful. I didn’t want to have to make this decision. But to my surprise, she understood immediately. She didn’t want to let me go, but she didn’t want to stand in my way, either.

I hadn’t intended on breaking up with her, just talking it all through, but that’s where we seemed to end up. It was painful, but we decided to stay in touch and be friends. I hated to do it—and hated that race was so inescapable—but I couldn’t see a way around it. I left for the NIH believing that our relationship was over.

CHAPTER 12

Still Just a Nigga

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

—
JAMES BALDWIN

N
egro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are a New Southern Menace”

That was the title of the “journal article” I’d discovered when I began trying to track down a reference from a paper I’d read about cocaine. I was looking for early historical reports of cocaine withdrawal. The authors had cited the reference with a disclaimer. They wrote: “Reports of patients with similar symptoms had appeared in the early 1900s, but because these reports were deeply interwoven with elements of racist hysteria they were never taken seriously.” But I still wasn’t prepared for what I found when I read the entire article.

Of course, I knew that such blatant racism was common even in the medical literature in the Jim Crow era, and that I couldn’t hold historical work to modern standards. This was just science. If the author had accurately described cocaine withdrawal, it could be a useful citation, I told myself.

It was March 1996 and I was in the science library at the University of Wyoming, finishing up my PhD. My dissertation dealt with how nicotine’s behavioral effects were influenced by changes in parts of nerve cells called calcium channels. For the opening of my thesis, I was required to describe the rationale for the experiments I’d done. That involved comparing the effects of nicotine to those of cocaine, and I wanted to cite relevant work about the influence of cocaine on human behavior. And since my education had shown me that if I had a particular thought, someone else had probably already considered the idea in depth, I went back as far as the leads would take me.

The paper that cited the provocatively headlined article had used it to support a claim that cocaine-related deaths and other problems had been described early in the drug’s history. I wanted to see for myself what arguments it made. Though immediately offended by the language of the header, I was also excited because I’d never seen this paper cited before. If I could track it down, I might be able to find a very early description of cocaine to add to my work, which might impress my professors.

My first surprise came when I read the full reference: the “journal” in which the article had been published did not seem to be some august peer-reviewed medical publication. It was, instead, listed oddly as “New York,” perhaps having been cut off by mistake. I can’t recall how, but I eventually ascertained that what was meant was actually the
New York Times
, and, even though I now knew it was just a newspaper story published on February 8, 1914,
¹
I decided to get a copy of the whole article.

I walked across the snowy campus to Coe Library, the university’s main reference library. Old newspapers were stored there on clunky microfilm, not kept in the more specialized science library where I did most of my literature searches. I looked up the citation in a big bound index with a thick, worn cover. Then I requested the relevant reels of microfilm and watched them scroll blurrily across the reader’s screen until I found the right frames. That was what research was like in the days before the Internet.

The first thing I could read besides the headline was the subhead: “Murder and Insanity Increasing Among Lower Class Blacks Because They Have Taken to ‘Sniffing’ Since Deprived of Whisky by Prohibition.”

I was surprised at how shocked I was to see that. I knew intellectually that such blatantly racist writings existed and that it was once acceptable to print such things in respectable papers, but it had always seemed abstract and distant to me. It was very different to see the words in black-and-white on the pages of the
New York Times
, the publication that to this day is seen as the “paper of record.” It was as different as reading about slavery in a history book is from holding in your hand an iron shackle once used to bind a real human being. Or as different as learning about the Holocaust in history books, versus actually going to Auschwitz and seeing firsthand the shoes of the children killed there.

But what shook me even further was how similar the article was to modern coverage of crack cocaine in the mid-1980s. The author, who was a medical doctor, wrote:

Most of the negroes are poor, illiterate and shiftless. . . . Once the negro has formed the habit he is irreclaimable. The only method to keep him away from taking the drug is by imprisoning him. And this is merely palliative treatment, for he returns inevitably to the drug habit when released.
²

This rhetoric was unsettlingly modern. For example, recall what Dr. Frank Gawin told
Newsweek
on June 16, 1986: “The best way to reduce demand would be to have God redesign the human brain to change the way cocaine reacts with certain neurons.” The message is that crack users are irretrievable, except for divine intervention. Of course, in 1986 explicit reference to race in such a context was no longer acceptable; instead, crack-cocaine-related problems were described as being most prevalent “in the inner city” and “the ghettos.” The terms
inner city
and
ghetto
are now code words referring to black people.

Dr. Edward H. Williams, author of the “Fiends” article, went on to claim:

[Cocaine] produces several other conditions that make the “fiend” a peculiarly dangerous criminal. One of these conditions is a temporary immunity to shock—a resistance to the “knock down,” effects of fatal wounds. Bullets fired into vital parts that would drop a sane man in his tracks, fail to check the “fiend.”
³

In other words, cocaine makes black men both murderous and, at least temporarily, impervious to bullets. By the way, the author was describing the effects of cocaine taken by snorting it. Attempting to further bolster his case, the writer then added anecdotes from southern sheriffs, who claimed to need higher-caliber bullets to take down these black “fiends.” He also contended that cocaine improves the marksmanship of blacks, making us even more dangerous to the police and society.

I began to wonder how many of the “truths” that I now 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.