Hart grew up in the Carol City neighborhood of Miami Gardens, a suburb of Miami considered one of the most dangerous in the U.S.[2][4] As a youth, he engaged in petty crime and the use and sale of drugs, and at times carried a gun. He was also a proficient athlete involved in high school sports.[2][5][6] He was raised by a single mother, who separated from an abusive father when Hart was six.[7][8] After high school, he served in the United States Air Force from 1984 to 1988, which became his path to higher education.[9][10]
Hart is the Mamie Phipps Clark Professor of Psychology (in Psychiatry) and former chair of the psychology department at Columbia University.[14] He arrived at Columbia in 1998; in 2009, he became the university's first tenured African-American professor of sciences.[2][3] His area of expertise is neuropsychopharmacology,[15] with a research focus on the behavioral and neuropharmacological effects of psychoactive drugs in humans.[1][15] He has a particular interest in the social and psychological factors that influence self-administration of drugs.[10] He is the Principal Investigator at Columbia University's Neuropsychopharmacology Lab.[16]
Hart's research centers on human subject experiments conducted in his research lab at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (a hospital in the Columbia University Irving Medical Center). The facility, informally called the ResLab (residential laboratory), accommodates subjects for extended periods; a typical experiment runs for two weeks. The subjects, habitual drug users, are given precisely metered doses of drugs such as cannabis, cocaine, and methamphetamine, while being continuously monitored and tested.[13]
Hart opposes the brain-disease model of addiction dominant in the field, which holds that addiction is a brain disorder. National Institute on Drug Abuse Nora Volkow has said that visible differences in addicts' brains help explain the nature of compulsive drug usage. According to Hart, most studies show that drug users' cognitive abilities and functions are within the normal range. Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic head Anna Lembke has said, "intelligent, informed people can disagree on the disease model of addiction", and that there is evidence that long-term drug use can alter the brain in a different way than learning a new language or a musical instrument.[17] Hart has said that an absence of other outlets and activities is one reason people use drugs. He argues that drug laws intended to make society safer should be based on empirical evidence.[18][19]
Hart is also a Research Fellow and former co-director at Columbia's Institute for Research in African-American Studies.[20]
Books
Hart has written two books for the general public, High Price and Drug Use for Grown-Ups. He and Charles Ksir co-authored recent editions of the introductory textbook Drugs, Society, and Human Behavior.[21]
In 2013, Hart published High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society, described as "combining memoir, popular science, and public policy."[22] In it, he discusses misconceptions about illegal drugs, speaking from the combined perspectives of growing up in a poor, crime-ridden African-American neighborhood and his career as a research neuroscientist.[7][23] He describes his upbringing, time in the military, years in college and grad school, and journey to a PhD and tenured professorship at Columbia. He discusses the challenge of learning white cultural norms and language as an aspect of succeeding in academia, and then returning to his family and feeling alienated and unable to connect. Using drug crime statistics and details from his lab research, he argues that drugs are a symptom, not a cause, of crime and poverty, and that they mask issues of lack of education, racism, unemployment, and despair.[7][23] He ends the book with an argument for decriminalizing drugs, saying that his research has shown that the dangers associated with drugs are largely misunderstood, and that a decrease in stigma and increase in conversation would likely decrease drug-related deaths. He advocates drug policies based on scientific evidence and human rights, not irrational fear and sensationalism.[23][24]
In 2021, Hart published Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear.[25] In it, he writes that, in his over 25-year research career, he has found that "most drug-use scenarios cause little or no harm and that some responsible drug-use scenarios are actually beneficial for human health and functioning."[26] In the book and in interviews about it, Hart revealed that he is a recreational user of heroin and other drugs. He says he is not an addict, but uses drugs responsibly in "pursuit of happiness".[14][27] Hart argues that recreational drug use is beneficial for most people, and that journalists and researchers overstate its harms.[27][15]
Public debate
Hart argues that drug policy in the U.S. and most of the rest of the world "is based on assumption and anecdote, but rarely on scientific evidence".[5] He advocates decriminalizing drug use through policies that are scientifically based rather than heavily influenced by social determinants such as race and class.[23][28] He discusses the criminalization of crack cocaine (typically associated with poor communities) and lack of similar criminalization of powder cocaine (traditionally associated with wealthier communities) as an example of how drug criminalization has been based on social problems rather than scientific fact, since both contain the same active chemical.[18][29]
Hart has said that the poor, crime-ridden environment he grew up in influenced his world view, and that he once believed drugs caused poverty and crime in most neighborhoods.[2] Later, through his research, he came to believe that "crime and poverty were mostly independent of drug use".[15][18]
Hart has lectured and testified around the world as an expert on psychoactive drugs.[30] He testified before the United States Congress Committee On Oversight and Government Reform.[31] He has testified, on the stand and in written submissions, in family courts in New York City, advocating for children to stay with parents who have tested positive for cannabis, arguing that there is no scientific evidence that cannabis use has a detrimental effect on parenting. In one case, a mother had tested positive while giving birth at a city hospital and been charged with negligence (the case was later dropped).[12]
In a 2013 New York Times editorial, Hart commented on the toxicology report in the case of Trayvon Martin, where the indication of cannabis in Martin's blood was used as evidence that he might have been paranoid the night of his fatal shooting, causing him to attack his shooter.[32] Hart said this argument relied on outdated notions of cannabis use, such as those in Reefer Madness, and failed to recognize the seven decades of research on cannabis that show the levels in Martin's blood were insufficient to cause paranoia, which is extremely uncommon in cannabis users.[33]
At a 2017 drug policy conference at the University of the Philippines Diliman, Hart addressed misconceptions about methamphetamine in the Philippines during President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs. Citing lab tests on animals, Hart refuted Duterte's claim that methamphetamine shrinks people's brains and makes them violent. After his speech, Hart began to receive online death threats that forced him to quickly leave the Philippines.[34][35][36] Duterte said of Hart's claims, "That's all bullshit to me" and called Hart a "son of a bitch who has gone crazy".[37] In an interview with Public Radio International, Hart called Duterte "a president making such ignorant comments about drugs like he's a pharmacologist" and added that Duterte was "out of his league when he talks about drugs".[35][36]
Hart, Carl; Lynch, Wendy (2005). "Developing Pharmacotherapies for Cannabis and Cocaine Use Disorders". Current Neuropharmacology. 3 (2): 95–114. doi:10.2174/1570159053586726.
1 2 3 Tonti, Alexis (Winter 2012–13). "The Truth Teller". Columbia College Today. Archived from the original on December 23, 2016. Retrieved April 10, 2021.
↑ OPaungsawad, Gamjad; Hart, Carl (October 1, 2016). "Bangkok 2016: From overly punitive to deeply humane drug policies". Drug and Alcohol Dependence. 167: 223–234. doi:10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2016.08.004.
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