Just as growing acceptance for decriminalizing and legalizing marijuana sweeps the country, 54-yearold Columbia University psychology and neuroscience Prof. Carl Hart touted the benefits of heroin for his personal and professional use. Whatever Hart’s research or recent book, Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the land of fear,” Hart shares his personal experience with heroin, claiming that it helps him cope with stress in everyday life. Hart, who’s a married man with three kids, admitted that he’s used heroin for 10 days in row. Hart admitted he experienced 12-16 hours of mild withdrawal symptoms after the initial dose. Many moons ago, another psychologist Timothy Leary advocated of drug use, largely psychedelics, was terminated from Harvard University with his colleague Richard Albert [Ram Dass], for letting his drug “research” consume his life and wreck his academic career.
As crazy as Leary was with all his drug experimentation, he would have never sanctioned the use of heroin, a highly addictive narcotic with known tolerance and withdrawal symptoms, associated with overdoses and deaths. “There aren’t many things in life that I enjoy more than a few lines by the fireplace at the end of the day,” Hart writes in his book. Hart admits that heroin helps him get “refreshed” and “prepared to face another day,” showing that he has severe coping problems, requiring heroin to help him deal with everyday stresses. If you follow Hart’s example, he’s encouraging people to used heroin to cope with daily life, regardless of the risks and dangers, especially for young people whose addictions can lead to suicide or disability. Hart thinks heroin is a good alternative to alcohol, clearly justifying, like Leary did in the sixties, depraved behavior in his “scientific” research.
Writing a book about his nasty habits doesn’t give Hart a license to preach to the drug-addict choir, looking for any excuse to use dangerous substances. While there’s real progress in the country, possibly in Washington, about changing federal drug laws, Hart hurts the credibility of the cannabis lobby, when elected officials look at Hart trying to spread dangerous drug use. Heroin use is “as rational as my alcohol use. Like vacation, sex and the arts, heroin is one of the tools that I use to maintain my work-life balance,” admitting that he used heroin like a self-prescribed psychiatric drug. Hart’s a disgrace for Columbia University, having someone on staff who excuses his bad drug habits, urging other to follow suit. Hart’s book states “that the demonization of drug use—not drugs themselves—[has] been a tremendous scourge on America, not least in reinforcing the country’s enduring structural racism.”
Unpacking Hart’s twisted logic, he blames white society for demonizing drug use and unfairly singling out African Americans, punishing the community for using drugs. Conflating drug abuse with racism shows how well-intentioned professors exploit their fields to justify their own self-destructive behavior. Whether or not Hart get relief from heroin or any other drug is no basis for concluding that there should be no regulation of dangerous d rugs. Oregon recently passed Measure 110 Feb. 1 to decriminalize drugs, meaning that the police can only issue, for any drug possession, a $100 fine and suggestion for drug rehab. Hart’s book goes much further advocating the use of heroin for a healthy lifestyle, something egregiously self-serving. When Hart talks about the “country’s enduring racism,” he’s referring to the disproportionate arrests and incarceration of people of color.
Hart talks about his use of MDNA AKA “Ecstacy” and methamphetamine, both widely abused drugs by young-and-old alike. “When I’m rolling, I just want to breathe deeply and enjoy it. The simple act of breathing can be extremely pleasurable,” Hart said, exposing that the suffers from high levels of anxiety requiring him to self-medicate with various narcotics and stimulants. It’s irresponsible for a psychologist or neuroscience researcher to excuse his drug abuse, hiding behind his research to justify his own mental problems requiring him to cope with his life by abusing drugs. When Hart talked about getting pleasure from snorting “bath salts,” calling it “unequivocally wonderful,” he goes over the top, not seeing the hazards of drug abuse, the downward spiral that leads to low motivation, withdrawal, counterproductive behavior, including crime, and eventually suicide and death.
Promoting dangerous drug abuse by pretending there’s some scientific basis to his research is the same kind of nonsense that led Harvard to part ways with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert in 1963. Leary found out the hard way what happens when you flout the nation’s drug laws and wind up in prison. Unlike Hart who happens to be black, Leary was of Irish decent, not part of the government’s racist plot to persecute the African American community. Calling his use of Ecstacy and highly toxic bath salts “euphoric, clearheaded and highly social,” it shows how Hart justifies drug abuse as a way to control his anxiety disorder. It’s no joke when the CDC reports 15,000 deaths from heroin overdoses in 2018. Whatever Hart’s personal problems, it’s despicable for an academic to hide behind “science” or “research” to justify his bad habits and advocate dangerous drug use to his students and young people.
