Hart grew up in the Carol City neighborhood of Miami Gardens, a suburb of Miami considered one of the most dangerous in the US.[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 (1984–1988), 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] Hart 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 is centered around human subject experiments conducted in his research lab at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (a hospital located in the Columbia University Irving Medical Center). The facility, informally called the ResLab (residential laboratory), accommodated subjects for extended periods; a typical experiment ran for two weeks. The subjects, habitual drug users, were given precisely metered doses of drugs such as marijuana, 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. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, states that visible differences in the brains of addicts helps explain the nature of compulsive drug usage. Hart states that most studies show that drug users' cognitive abilities and functions are within the normal range. Commenting on Hart's argument, Anna Lembke, head of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic, said that "intelligent, informed people can disagree on the disease model of addiction", and noted 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 indicates that the absence of positive outlets and activities is one reason drug use can occur in communities. He argues that drug laws intended to make a 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, and co-authored, with Charles Ksir, 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, Hart 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 his 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 the 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 the decriminalization of drugs, stating 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 the number of drug related deaths. He advocates for a move to 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 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 media interviews around its publication), Hart revealed that he is a recreational heroin user, and indicated that he uses a number of other drugs. He argued that he is not an addict, but that he uses drugs responsibly in the "pursuit of happiness".[14][27] Hart further argued that for the majority of individuals, recreational use of drugs has a positive effect, and that journalists and researchers overstate the harms of such drug use.[27][15]
Public debate
Hart argues that drug policy in the US 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] As an example, 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 indication of the way drug criminalization has been based on social problems rather than scientific fact, considering both contain the same active chemical.[18][29]
Hart states that the poor, crime-ridden environment he grew up in influenced his world view, and he believed that drugs were the reason for poverty and crime in most neighborhoods.[2] Only later, through his research, did he come 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 marijuana use, arguing that there is no scientific basis for casual marijuana use having an 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, he commented on the toxicology report presented in the case of Trayvon Martin, where the indication of marijuana in Martin's blood was used as evidence that he might have been paranoid the night of his fatal shooting, causing him to attack the person who shot him.[32] Hart stated that the assertion subscribed to outdated notions of marijuana use, such as those implied in Reefer Madness, and failed to recognize the seven decades of research on marijuana that show the levels of marijuana present in Martin's blood were insufficient to cause the aforementioned side effects, and that the side effects mentioned are extremely uncommon in marijuana users.[33]
In May 2017, speaking at a drug policy conference at the University of the Philippines Diliman, Hart addressed the misconceptions about methamphetamine in the Philippines amidst President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs. Citing lab tests on animals, Hart refuted Duterte's claim that methamphetamine shrinks people's brains and causes them to become violent. In the aftermath of his speech, Hart began to receive online death threats which forced him to leave the Philippines shortly thereafter.[34][35][36] Duterte commented on Hart's claims, saying: "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 described Duterte as "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.
^ abcTonti, 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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