by Carl Hart
We were called the Bionic DJs, after the Steve Austin character played by Lee Majors in the hit TV series The Six Million Dollar Man. Kenneth had come up with the name, wanting to illustrate the idea that our sound would be thunderous and powerful. Like Steve Austin, we wanted our sound to be amped up, superhuman. Our names were our alter egos, our aspirations.
Mine was Cool Carl. Kenneth, who was about five foot eight and muscular, went by Mr. Magic. He was the serious one in terms of taking responsibility; he arranged venues and coordinated transportation. But in his manner, he was actually a jokester who could do wicked impressions when he let loose. In contrast, his brother Richard was the star performer. Richard was six foot one. He had long eyelashes framing big almond-shaped eyes that made the girls wild. Silky Slim rocked the mic. He was so smooth that all the girls wanted to be with him and all the guys wanted to be him.
Their older brother Cecil—who didn’t deejay but along with Kenneth managed the logistics and the money—was known as Dr. Love. He had twinkly hazel brown eyes and a great smile that women loved. Their friend Adolph was called After Death for his initials and he was the fourth man in our group, although he did not emcee. Another Kenneth—a cousin of Kenneth Bowe, in fact, named Kenneth Good—took the nom de rap Captain Good. He did our lighting with strobes, disco balls, and police siren lights. There were also about a half-dozen honorary members, guys who’d be given black Adidas T-shirts with white lettering, identifying them as part of our crew. In exchange for helping us set up and break down the equipment, they got shirts that essentially told the girls that they were “with the band” and carried that kind of currency.
Soon 2,500 people would come out for us on Friday nights, paying two-dollar admission to a gym like Washington Park or a skating rink that we’d rented. I’d take my turn at spinning and emceeing and I’d feel like the man behind the Technics SL-1200 turntables. I knew how to keep the house rocking. I could sweet-talk the girls and have them out of their jeans by the end of the night. I thought I had mad skills.
We kept up with the latest records through a record club; for a few bucks, every week the labels would send us their new releases, hoping to kick-start a hit with club play. Many of them were garbage, but after hours of listening, you’d often come across something that had that sound, something you could build on. At first, virtually all we played was R&B, soul, and funk. In my early days, the big songs were Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love”; Captain Sky’s “Super Sporm”; Herman Kelly’s “Dance to the Drummer’s Beat”; and Freedom’s “Get Up and Dance” (Grandmaster Flash soon sampled that one to death). Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express” also got a lot of play.
When I started going to jams in the late 1970s, hip-hop (or rap, as it was called then) hadn’t yet gained much traction outside of New York. Up there, the mother of rap, a then-middle-aged singer and producer named Sylvia Robinson, had founded Sugar Hill Records earlier in the decade. She named it after Harlem’s most affluent neighborhood. Robinson was one of the first people to see the commercial potential in the emceeing and beats she was hearing from club DJs and at street parties. She put the Sugar Hill Gang together, choosing guys who looked cool to be the performers—in the same way that male producers had previously chosen sexy women to make up “girl bands.”
Sugar Hill’s “Rapper’s Delight” was the first rap record to win commercial success. Robinson was also behind Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, convincing them to record “The Message,” which was their big hit and brought a political sensibility to early rap. When I started, old-schoolers like Grandmaster Flash were just getting their earliest club gigs and innovating by using the turntable itself as a musical instrument, improvising techniques with their hands. Scratching, backspinning, using multiple turntables, mixing musical genres by sampling records—all of this was brand-new back then in the United States, though Jamaican DJs had been experimenting with these tactics for years.
About every other jam we held, there’d be gunfire and we’d all have to duck, but no one ever actually got shot. Wannabe gangsters were just firing their weapons to flex, to show that they couldn’t be messed with. In South Florida, our competitors were groups like Ghetto Style DJs, featuring Luke Skyywalker. His real name was Luther Campbell and he’s best known now as a member of 2 Live Crew. In the late 1980s, when he became famous, George Lucas sued him for using the Star Wars character’s name. Also coming up with us were groups and artists like Instrumental Funk, featuring Super Westley J; Opa-Locka DJs with Slick D; International DJs, starring Benjie the Bomber; South Miami DJs, with Tiny Head; and Party Down DJs, with Pretty Tony. Pretty Tony would go on to produce club-banging hits like Debbie Deb’s “When I Hear Music.”
And Luther Campbell honed the flow that would come out in 2 Live hits like “Me So Horny,” during the DJ battles we’d hold about once a month. They’d play on one end of the venue and we’d play on the other. No one really wound up winning, though: both of our groups had large followings that came to hear one crew or the other. Our sound personified what eventually became known as “Miami bass” or “booty bass,” which influenced many early hip-hop artists.
Early on, Cecil was the one who really tucked me under his wing. After the dances, everyone would want to celebrate, by cashing in on their stardom and power. When the night had gone especially well, there would be dozens of girls waiting in the wings to see if they could catch the eye of one of the DJs. The older guys usually sent me home at that time because I was so young. They wanted to be alone with the ladies. I knew the rules: if you didn’t have the skills or game to get girls out of their clothing, you were a liability and had to go. So at first, I couldn’t roll with the older cats when they were on the prowl.
But Cecil took me in, even then. I’d go with him and his groupies to get some food or just back to his house. I was their mascot; their little pet. Watching Cecil, I learned how to talk to girls in ways that were subtle but clearly indicated your intentions.
Although I probably couldn’t have described it well at the time, relationships like those I had with Cecil and my brothers-in-law, with my older sisters, girlfriends, and Big Mama, probably protected me from a great deal of harm. Researchers studying resilience to stress repeatedly find that social support is one of the biggest protective factors. And I needed it. My parents had been absent for much of my early life. Even when my mother was physically present, she worked such long hours and had so much else to take care of that I got very little mothering from her.
But with five older sisters—and at least one grandmother who doted on me—I had some strong sources of maternal nurturing, although my sisters were quite young themselves.
People often consider social relationships only as negative forces in drug use. However, what they fail to understand is the complexity of group behavior. Human beings have always devised means of determining who is “us” and who is “them,” and the consumption of specific foods or drugs is typically one way of doing so. Teens are especially sensitive to these cues of belongingness, and so if drug use is the price of group membership, it’s one that many are willing to pay.
Some groups, however, mark their boundaries by avoiding certain types of drug use—for example, athletes rejecting smoking, 1960s hippies rejecting hard liquor in favor of marijuana and LSD, and blacks avoiding methamphetamine because it is seen as a white drug. From the level of the clique to the level of the national culture, behavior related to drugs isn’t only about getting high; it’s often used to delineate group membership and social standing.
The social aspects of drug use also change with age. For example, having children and getting married are both associated with reductions in drug use; one of many studies with similar findings in this literature found that people who are married are three times more likely to quit using cocaine and those who have children are more than twice as likely to stop.1 Similar data shows that people with close family and romantic relationships tend to have better outcomes in treatment2
—and students’ feelings of social warmth and connectedness to school and parents are linked with reductions in drug problems.3
The role of social factors is an important part of why the “dopamine hypothesis” (or any other purely biological explanation) of addiction like those that I first espoused in my early work falls well short of providing a meaningful explanation of such problems. It’s certainly true that many people initiate drug use by copying others and that having a social circle that revolves around drugs can support continued use. But the vast majority of drug users never become addicted. And, in fact, social support itself is actually protective against many health problems and multiple types of risky behavior, including addiction. Indeed, a great deal of pathological drug use is driven by unmet social needs, by being alienated and having difficulty connecting with others.
The majority of people who avoid drug problems, in contrast, tend to have strong social networks. Large extended families like mine, where dozens of cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents live close to each other, help prevent the wearing daily stress of living in poverty from being even worse. And these networks can be protective, even when they include drug users. For example, many of the older DJs in our group and their friends smoked weed, but they kept it away from me. My older friends and brothers-in-law wanted to protect me. They weren’t moralistic about it. When I was young they felt weed wasn’t appropriate for a kid of eleven or twelve and when I got older, they knew I didn’t want anything to hinder my athletic performance.
The important role of social connections in pathological drug use was actually seen in the early work on dopamine if you knew where to look for it, and it was also predicted by the behavioral principles originally propounded by B. F. Skinner. Indeed, even in rat models of addiction—which are just models because they cannot reflect all of the complexities of human behavior—it is clear that excessive drug intake is not simply caused by mere exposure to a substance.
This was demonstrated in dramatic fashion by Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander and his colleagues.4 These researchers conducted an important series of experiments that have come to be known as Rat Park. Alexander had recognized that the environment in which most lab rats are kept is unnatural for their species. Like people, rats are extremely social animals and get stressed if kept in isolation—but that was the “normal” condition for most rats used in drug research. Thus Alexander wanted to find out whether the lack of rewarding alternatives—what we call alternative reinforcers—like social contact, exercise, and sex would affect their choices about whether to take drugs.
To do so, these researchers created an enriched environment for the rodents, which more closely modeled their natural habitat. In this enclosure, there were lots of other rats for social contact and mating, interesting places to explore, exercise toys, and dark refuges in which to nest (rats avoid bright, open spaces). Rat Park also offered its residents another amenity: morphine-laced water, sweetened enough to be appealing for rats to drink.
The researchers then compared the morphine use of rats living in Rat Park to that of those kept in ordinary, isolated cages. They found that while the isolated rats quickly took to morphine drinking, the Rat Park rats did not. Indeed, even when the morphine solution was so sweet as to be overwhelmingly attractive to rats, the Rat Park residents still drank much less of it than the solitary animals did. Under some circumstances, the isolated rats would drink twenty times more morphine than their social-living compatriots.
The same kinds of results have now been found with cocaine and amphetamine. For example, rats reared in enriched environments take less cocaine or amphetamine than those raised in isolation.5
When natural rewards, such as social and sexual contact and pleasant living conditions—also known as alternative reinforcers—are available to healthy animals, they are typically preferred. There is now a plethora of evidence collected in animals and humans showing that the availability of nondrug alternative reinforcers decreases drug use across a range of conditions.
Indeed, many researchers have found that making sweets available to rats reduces their preference for cocaine and can even prevent them from developing a preference for it in the first place.6 One typical study in this literature found that 94 percent of rats preferred saccharin-sweetened water to intravenous cocaine.7 In another series of experiments, in this case with rhesus monkeys, researchers found that the animals’ choice to take cocaine is reduced in proportion to the size of the food reward they are offered as an alternative.8 While people are now using this kind of data to claim that junk food is as addictive as cocaine, this logic is circular: cocaine was supposed to be especially addictive because animals preferred it to food when hungry; now food substituting for cocaine is used as evidence of the reverse.
And contrary to claims that cocaine inevitably leads to child neglect, even in rat models this is not the case. Like human mothers, rats tend to change their lifestyles when they become pregnant and researchers have found that pregnant and nursing rats choose to take far less cocaine than virgin rat females do. While it may not always seem like it, babies are actually powerful sources of reward to their parents.
Similar findings have also been obtained in human laboratory studies that offer cocaine users a choice between the drug and other types of rewards. (One such study, which we did, was described in the prologue.) In another study, cocaine users had the option to snort cocaine under two conditions. In the first one, they had to choose between cocaine and placebo; in the second, their choice was between cocaine and a monetary reward of up to two dollars. Not surprisingly, the volunteers consistently chose cocaine over placebo. However, even though the monetary alternative was small, they chose to take less cocaine when they had that option, compared to when the only alternative they were offered was placebo.9
Basically, having choices makes an enormous difference, even when drugs are involved. Cocaine isn’t always the most compelling alternative, even for people whose lives seem to revolve around it. It can be extremely pleasant, of course, but at many times, the pleasure isn’t actually more desirable than that from sex or other natural rewards. The choice to use depends far more on context and availability of alternatives than we have been led to believe.
Of course, you have probably heard about studies in which rats or even primates continually pressed levers to get cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamine until they died, choosing drugs rather than food and water. But what you probably didn’t know is that these animals were kept in isolated, unnatural environments for most of their lives, where they typically became stressed without social contact and had little else to do.
By analogy, if you were in solitary confinement for years with only one movie as a source of entertainment, you’d probably watch it over and over. But that wouldn’t necessarily mean that that particular movie is “addictive” or compulsively watchable. You’d probably still watch it if it were the worst film ever made, just to have something to do. Similarly, saying that unlimited access to cocaine “makes” animals addicted to the point of killing themselves, based on research in isolated rodents or primates, doesn’t tell us much about drug use in the real world.
Obviously, if you are spending 24-7 alone and without any social contact let alone affection, some drugs, at the right doses, can be quite attractive. However, studying the drug without providing these important alternative reinforcers tells us little about how cocaine affects people or even animals in the natural world.
It presents the drug as uniquely pleasurable and the addicted person as a fool caught in mindless hedonism: it obscures the fact that when people have appealing alternatives, they usually don’t choose to take drugs in a self-destructive fashion. But it does show that in the absence of social support or other meaningful rewards, cocaine can be very attractive indeed. The bottom line is that we have been repeatedly told that drugs like crack cocaine are so attractive that users will forgo everything for them. Nonetheless, overwhelming empirical evidence indicates that
this is simply not true.
My own social network, however, was also profoundly affected by the stresses of my neighborhood, even as it often helped ease them. Early in my adolescence, one sister, the one I felt most connected to, was nearly taken from me forever. Although Brenda and her husband and his brothers may have had a bigger overall impact on my life, Joyce was the sister I was closest to, both in age and emotionally. She’s only a year older than I am. On the outside, Joyce seems tough: we mirror each other in that we both set aside and compartmentalize our emotions. She doesn’t take crap from anyone. Joyce is also very sensitive, however, and I think this made our childhood especially challenging for her.
Unlike me and my other sisters, she didn’t resist the constant wear of growing up poor and black by trying to stand out or lead. She didn’t attempt to be a star athlete like I did or to aspire to college like Brenda. She didn’t do well in school the way my other sisters did. She wasn’t into high school cheerleading like Beverly and Patricia. She didn’t even distinguish herself by surrounding herself with friends with status. In fact, we ultimately grew apart as she began to see me as arrogant. “You think you’re better than me,” she’d say.
The change in Joyce escalated when MH moved us to the Crystal Lake projects in 1980. These projects, which, ironically, have now become expensive condos, were located in Dania, which is closer to Fort Lauderdale than to Miami. They were two-story brick buildings, built low to the ground. There, for the first time ever, the apartment my mom rented had enough bedrooms that I shared with only one sibling.
But the Crystal Lake projects were zoned to a different high school than the one I’d started at. Since it was Patricia’s senior year in 1981, MH didn’t try to switch any of us until that fall. Then, however, she wanted us to go locally. I didn’t want to make the change. I’d established myself at Miramar and had standing in sports and a tight group of friends. So I stayed true to my school, splitting my time mainly between my girlfriend Marcia’s house and Big Mama’s, which were nearby, and only occasionally staying at my mother’s new, more distant apartment. Joyce, however, agreed to switch schools and began attending South Broward. I started to see her less.
