Carl Hart

Carl L. Hart (born October 30, 1966) is an American psychologist and neuroscientist, working as 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 use of drugs.

Hart became the first tenured African American professor of sciences at Columbia University.

After high school, he served in the United States Air Force (1984–1988), 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 US.

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.

Hart is the Mamie Phipps Clark Professor of Psychology (in Psychiatry) and former chair of the psychology department at Columbia University.

Hart 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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

Hart grew up in the Carol City neighborhood of Miami Gardens, a suburb of Miami considered one of the most dangerous in the US.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

In 2021, Hart published Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear.

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."