Dr. Carl Hart was supposed to be an athlete. Basketball was going to be his ticket and the NBA his reward.
In high school, the football team and hoops were his saving grace. Sports kept him in school. He did just enough to keep the 2.0 grade point average he needed to stay on the basketball team. Off the court, Hart pored over “kiddy biographies” about athletes. They told him “that drugs were bad, that smoking anything could hurt performance.” He also took to heart what those books had to say about success and survival: “They showed me that the way to win was to outwork your competitors and use everything you had to maximize your skills,” writes Hart in his new memoir.
In a recent interview at his office at Columbia University, Hart, the neuroscientist, is recounting his climb from one of Miami’s toughest neighborhoods to the academy and to the top of his field. “When it comes to drugs, and I don’t mean this in an arrogant way,” Hart prefaces, “I’m the best.” As he tells it, there are few people who know as much as he does about the brain, how it works and how it looks when illicit drugs are introduced. “This work,” he says, “is all that I have done.”
It’s been 22 years since Hart began to probe the pharmacology behind drugs as a neuropsychopharmacologist. Fourteen of those years have been at Columbia, where Hart is an associate professor of psychology, a research fellow at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, and a research scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. In his early days as a researcher, Hart was motivated to study the brain — first in mice, then in humans — thinking it was the surest way to help his family and friends overcome the scourge of addiction and violence that caused their decline. At one point, Hart, 46, even thought that he was going to “cure” substance abuse.
“But over the years, of course, I learned that drug addiction wasn’t the problem,” says Hart. Of those who regularly use alcohol, prescription drugs or illegal substances, 85 percent or more “do not have a problem,” concludes Hart of the group he’s most concerned about. Then there is a smaller population — 10 to 15 percent of people who use illicit drugs and are addicted to them. Despite their numbers, Hart says, it’s this small group that most clouds the nation’s perceptions about the impact of drugs and their users. This is a troubling matter for a scientist in constant search of the evidence to explain “what drugs do and don’t do.”
One of the most important lessons Hart says he’s learned from research is that “drug effects are predictable.” As the drug dose increases, so does the “potential for toxic effects.” There are safeguards for drug use. But Hart contends that today’s war on drugs is destroying Black communities through disproportionate sentencing while most social ills — unemployment, racial segregation, underfunded schools and dropout rates, which were crippling communities long before the crack epidemic — are being ignored.
Where Hart comes from, poverty plagued many of his relatives and friends. In a family of eight, welfare was a lifeline for Hart and his siblings, who were raised largely by their grandmothers when his parents divorced and his household splintered. In the 1970s and 1980s, when crack cocaine found its way into Black homes and neighborhoods like his, Hart says its greatest toll was “exacerbating” problems that were already there, like poverty.
