i have so much respect for dude. He speaks about drugs and neuroscience.... but his end goals are around social science and BS cac policies.
More importantly........... his backstory is good for urban black youth. @
theworldismine13
He's not a fake muthfacker who thinks that black people are to blame for everything. He doesn't think if we stop saying nikka or "adopt white western ways" our situations will improve.
He pretty much grew up in the hood/ sold drugs and did hood shyt ---- then used the military (and other cac institutions) to pay for school and studied the real causes of the situation just like many of us to including posters here on the coli. He used his credentials and built credibility; but I'm sure he had common sense in the first place.
KG: How does the lack of people of color in academia or research affect our understanding of drugs?
CH: I’d just like to be clear, I don’t say people of color, I say black people, because people of color can mean a number of other [races]. I’m talking about black people who, like me, when we go back to our communities and we ask about people who we grew up with, the response is, “Well, they got caught up with a drug charge, they’re upstate. They’re doing some time” or, “Oh, he’s doing better now that he got out of jail. He can’t really find a good job, but he’s doing his best.”
It would be nice if we had black scientists, more black people in science, to incorporate these kinds of experiences as they think about the questions they investigate.
The problem is it’s so homogenous that critical questions about our community are ignored because they’re not seen as being important.
@
2Quik4UHoes This is another interview by him.
KG: And the result is that they don’t comprehend environment, or the other variables that are affecting someone’s decisions or behavior, and miss the mark?
CH: That’s exactly right. It’s that if you don’t contextualize what is happening with drugs in the country you might get the impression that drugs are so bad they’re causing all these people to go to jail: “Let’s find out how drugs are exerting these awful effects.” Now, you have just completely disregarded context in which all of these things occur, and that is what has happened in science. If you don’t fully appreciate the context, and you think that drug users are awful, then you don’t think about how a person takes care of their kid, takes care of their family, goes to work, but they also use drugs. If you don’t think about all of those contextual factors, you limit the picture and that’s what we’ve done.
It’s not that science lies. Science doesn’t lie. But
when you look at your research with a limited view, you may erroneously draw conclusions about drugs, when in fact other variables you might not understand are what’s really at play.
KG: You talk about how people are always blaming problems on drugs, when those issues really spring from the stress of poverty. What are some examples?
CH: I think crack cocaine is the easiest example In the 1980s, as I was coming of age in my teens and my early 20s, people—black people, white folks, a number of people in the country—said crack was so awful it was causing women to give up their babies and neglect their children such that grandmothers had to raise another generation of children.
Now, if you look at the history in poor communities—my community, my family—long before crack ever hit the scene, that sort of thing happened in my house. We were raised by my grandmother. My mother went away because she and my father split up. She went away in search of better jobs and left the state, but it wasn’t just her. This sort of thing, this pathology that is attributed to drugs, happened to immigrant communities like the Eastern European Jews when they came to the Lower East SIde, but people simply blamed crack in the 1980s and the 1990s.
Another example is that, since the crack era, multiple studies have found that the effects of crack cocaine use during pregnancy do not create an epidemic of doomed black “crack babies.” Instead, crack-exposed children are growing up to lead normal lives, and studies have repeatedly found that the diferences between them and babies who were not exposed cannot be isolated from the health effects of growing up poor, without a stable, safe environment or access to healthcare.
KG: What about the idea that drugs can turn people into criminals?
CH: The pharmalogical effects of drugs rarely lead to crime, but the public conflates these issues regardless. If we were going to look at how pharmalogical drugs influence crime, we should probably look at alcohol. We know sometimes people get unruly when they drink, but the vast majority of people don’t. Certainly, we have given thousands of doses of crack cocaine and methamphetamine to people in our lab, and never had any problems with violence or anything like that. That tells you it’s not the pharmacology of the drug, but some interaction with the environment or environmental conditions, that would probably happen without the drug. Sure, new markets of illegal activity are often or sometimes associated with increased violence, or some other illegal activity, but it is not specific to drugs like people try to make it out to be.
Other than crime, you have myths that drugs cause cognitive impairment, make people unable to be productive members of society, or tear families apart.
KG: What about addiction? Won’t some people who use drugs inevitably become dependent on drugs?
CH: Given the large percentage of people who are not addicted and try these drugs, it’s something other than the pharmacology of the drugs that’s causing addiction. We find that 85% of the people, for example, who use cocaine are not addicted, even though they use the same cosmetological substance as those who are. Somebody could say there may be something biologically predisposing people who get addicted, but there is no evidence to support that position. Certainly, that idea should be investigated, but there is far more evidence to support the view that there are other things going in the lives of people who are predisposed to addiction, that can predict their addiction as well as other problems.
