Carl Hart

Carl L. Hart (born October 30, 1966) is an American psychologist and neuroscientist who is the Mamie Phipps Clark Professor of Psychology (in Psychiatry) at Columbia University. Hart is known for his research on drug abuse and drug addiction, his advocacy for the legalization of recreational drugs, and his recreational drug use. Hart became the second tenured African-American professor of sciences at Columbia University. He is the author of two books for the general public, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery that Challenges Everything You Know about Drugs and Society (2013) and Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear (2021).

Early life and education

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. 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. He was raised by a single mother, who separated from an abusive father when Hart was six. After high school, he served in the United States Air Force from 1984 to 1988, which became his path to higher education.

Hart earned a Bachelor of Science degree in psychology from the University of Maryland and a Master of Science (1994) and PhD (1996), both in psychology/neuroscience, from the University of Wyoming. When he received his doctorate, he was the only black PhD in neuroscience in the U.S. Hart attended University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he worked with his undergraduate neuroscience professor, Robert Hakan, before attending the University of Wyoming. He pursued postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Francisco and Yale University, and completed an Intramural Training Award fellowship at the National Institutes of Health.

Career and research

Hart is the Mamie Phipps Clark Professor of Psychology (in Psychiatry) and former chair of the psychology department at Columbia University. He arrived at Columbia in 1998; in 2009, he became the university's first tenured African-American professor of sciences. His area of expertise is neuropsychopharmacology, with a research focus on the behavioral and neuropharmacological effects of psychoactive drugs in humans. He has a particular interest in the social and psychological factors that influence self-administration of drugs. He is the Principal Investigator at Columbia University's Neuropsychopharmacology Lab.

In 1999, Hart began investigating the effects of crack cocaine on behavior. Through 2009, he received research grants totaling over $6 million from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

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.

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 director 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. 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.

Hart is also a Research Fellow and former co-director at Columbia's Institute for Research in African-American Studies.

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.

High Price

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." 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. 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. 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.