High Price Summary

In High Price Dr. Hart gives us a window into his life, as black man born into a lower class family, and how he broke out of poverty to become a neuroscientist. Along with the struggles he faced along the way. Not only being a black man in a field dominated by whites, but also how his success affected the relationships of his family and friends. Dr. Hart shows us how the media distorts the facts of drug use. As well as how the government uses drug policies as institutionalized racism on the "crack-cocaine epidemic." How the knowledge Hart's gained throughout his research helped to debunk common myths about drugs as we know them.
When it comes to the relationship between; drugs, crime, and violence, the media/government has a flawed approach to going about things. They tend to confuse correlation with causation. Correlation being a mere connection between two things, regardless of …show more content…
The media portrayed it as a war on drugs, when in reality the bill was riddled with institutional racism polices. A person caught selling 5 grams of crack cocaine was required to serve a minimum of five years in prison. Whereas the same sentence for powdered cocaine was five hundred grams (Hart, 2013). The "crack epidemic" had gotten so blown out of proportion that the same drug in a different form had a completely different sentencing. Powdered cocaine is known as "a rich mans" drug and mostly done by white people. Whereas it's cheaper twin known to be done by lower class blacks had a sentencing rate that was 100% higher. "Overwhelmingly, those incarcerated under the federal anti-crack laws were black: for example, in 1992 the figure was 91% and in 2006 it was 82%" (Hart, 2013, 192). Recently President Obama had gotten the sentencing down from 100:1 to 18:1. However, this is still not a viable solution for not only America's drug problem, but also its prejudice