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DRUG USE FOR GROWN-UPS
Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear
By Carl L. Hart
It doesn’t take long to get to what is perhaps the boldest and most controversial statement in Carl Hart’s new book, “Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear.” In the prologue, he writes, “I am now entering my fifth year as a regular heroin user.” In all honesty, I don’t know how to feel about this admission. It’s not easy to square all that I’ve learned about this drug with the image I also hold of Hart: a tenured professor of psychology at Columbia University, an experienced neuroscientist, a father.
Hart knows this. He knows about the discomfort his readers might feel when they encounter his full-throated endorsement of opiates for recreational use. He offers the information in a spirit of radical transparency because he believes that if “grown-ups” like him would talk freely about the role of drugs in their lives, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in, a mess brought about by our ruinous drug policies, which have had such profound — and profoundly unequal — consequences for those who fall afoul of them.
For Hart, it wasn’t always so. Coming up in hard circumstances in Miami, Hart too bought into the widespread belief that “smoking crack is like putting a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger,” as one particularly memorable public service announcement put it. In 1986, he listened in “disbelief” as James Baldwin, his intellectual hero, argued for the legalization of drugs, believing that the recently passed Anti-Drug Abuse Act would be used disproportionately against poor and Black people.
Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear
By Carl L. Hart
It doesn’t take long to get to what is perhaps the boldest and most controversial statement in Carl Hart’s new book, “Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear.” In the prologue, he writes, “I am now entering my fifth year as a regular heroin user.” In all honesty, I don’t know how to feel about this admission. It’s not easy to square all that I’ve learned about this drug with the image I also hold of Hart: a tenured professor of psychology at Columbia University, an experienced neuroscientist, a father.
Hart knows this. He knows about the discomfort his readers might feel when they encounter his full-throated endorsement of opiates for recreational use. He offers the information in a spirit of radical transparency because he believes that if “grown-ups” like him would talk freely about the role of drugs in their lives, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in, a mess brought about by our ruinous drug policies, which have had such profound — and profoundly unequal — consequences for those who fall afoul of them.
For Hart, it wasn’t always so. Coming up in hard circumstances in Miami, Hart too bought into the widespread belief that “smoking crack is like putting a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger,” as one particularly memorable public service announcement put it. In 1986, he listened in “disbelief” as James Baldwin, his intellectual hero, argued for the legalization of drugs, believing that the recently passed Anti-Drug Abuse Act would be used disproportionately against poor and Black people.
When Getting High Is a Hobby, Not a Habit (Published 2021)
In “Drug-Use for Grown-Ups,” Carl L. Hart, a drug addiction expert, argues that we misunderstand the way most people use illegal substances.
www.nytimes.com