Drug Use for Grown-Ups

October 15, 2020
A full-throated defense of self-aware, voluntary drug use. Hart, the first tenured African American professor of sciences at Columbia University and former psychology department head, calls himself "an unapologetic drug user." His formulary is extensive, and it is likely only because he's tenured that he so readily admits to a liking for--but not addiction to--heroin, along with an overstuffed medicine cabinet full of other substances. His book has two overarching purposes. The first is to argue that the grown-ups of his title can indeed use drugs of varying descriptions--mostly marijuana, likely, but up to and including methamphetamines and opioids--and still be responsible parents and citizens. As the author suggests, millions of grown-ups already do so, and despite all the warnings and admonitions against it, by Hart's lights even pregnant women can use a little here and there without being or producing monsters. "It doesn't matter whether the drug is alcohol, caffeine, tobacco, or weed," he writes of the last point. "Consumption of any of these substances should be taken in consultation with a health-care professional and should be limited." His second large point is that the classification of drug use and public-health and law enforcement attitudes toward it is thoroughly racialized: Crack cocaine use was considered an epidemic evil when minorities, especially Black people, were using it. However, when it developed that "most crack users were white, and most drug users bought their drugs from dealers within their own racial group," the epidemic became one of concern rather than fear. Hart's openness in admitting to the use, often by way of experimentation, of drugs ranging from MDMA to methamphetamine and hexedrone and beyond is admirable, but doubtless, his thesis that taking drugs should be a matter of private choice alone will meet with considerable resistance. Civil libertarians will find this a valuable tool for mounting arguments in defense of free choice.

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October 19, 2020
In this comprehensive and illuminating study, Columbia University psychology professor Hart (High Price) combines his scientific research on how recreational drugs impact brain functioning with reflections on his own use of heroin and other drugs. Hart’s appeal for more liberal drug laws is based on his professional transformation from being a “true believer” in the ideology that drugs cause brain damage to debunker of the “distorted” science behind harsh drug policies. He views the war on drugs as a means for police departments to inflate their budgets, and points out that drugs are inherently more dangerous when illegal because people don’t know what they’re taking (fentanyl instead of heroin, for example). He critiques data collection methods for counting overdose deaths, noting that the qualifications for “death investigators” vary widely from state to state and that the co-occurrence of alcohol in opioid overdoses is often “completely ignored,” and alleges that police often use toxicology reports to justify excessive force. Hart closes the book with a call for “respectable middle-class drug users stop concealing their use” and engage in efforts to dismantle the “antidrug bureaucracy.” Careful reasoning and detailed evidence buttress the book’s most surprising claims, including that methamphetamine and Adderall produce “nearly identical effects” on users. This bracingly contrarian take provides much food for thought.

Starred review from November 1, 2020
By grown-ups, Columbia University psychology professor Hart, who studies the effects of psychoactive drugs in humans, here means "autonomous, responsible, well-functioning adults"" who ""meet their parental, occupational, and social responsibilities." In other words, the vast majority of those who consume amphetamines, marijuana, cocaine, psychedelics, even opioids, while continuing to lead productive lives, according to the author. The larger issues, says Hart, are the demonization of those pursuing personal happiness through drugs (pursuit of happiness being at the very foundation of the Declaration of Independence), society's false hierarchy that decides which drugs are "acceptable" and "not acceptable," drug enforcement that disfavors Black people (who are 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for pot than their white counterparts, while using it at about the same rate, per the ACLU), and the lack of a governmental testing program that could detect contaminants in street drugs, and thus save possibly thousands of lives annually. Every step of the way, Hart backs up his conclusions with science, showing, for example, how the actual, usually more benign, effects of a drug can often contradict the news media's negative portrayal of it. A timely, fact-based, coherent, humane counterargument to America's spectacularly failed War on Drugs.

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