Carl Hart wants us to know that he’s not a drug addict. Hart, a tenured professor at Columbia, uses drugs copiously, including marijuana, heroin, methamphetamine, and designer drugs. He insists that they do not limit his competency as a professor or as a father. If anything, they enhance them—because, he argues, he engages in the responsible drug use typical of the “grown-ups” in his new book, Drug Use for Grown-Ups.
Drug Use for Grown-Ups is the latest in a series of titles arguing that illegal drugs, though long stigmatized—primarily by racists, these books suggest—are in fact good; the only reason we think they are bad is our own internalized oppression. Such cant has been with us since at least the 1970s, yet learned reviewers still eat it up now, as fawning reviews from the New York Times and NPR suggest. Is it any wonder that this is Hart’s second book on the topic?
Hart’s understanding of drugs comes primarily from his personal use and his laboratory research, in which he exposes users and non-users to various illegal substances and studies their effects. From these experiences, he has largely concluded that drug use is safe, pleasurable, and even a fundamental right under the Declaration of Independence’s “pursuit of happiness” clause.
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