BEING WRONG

Carl Hart’s Writing on Drugs

Those of us committed to making political change make big demands of other people: that they revise their understanding of the world and of history, be willing to transform their attitudes and their behaviour. What we don’t do often enough is provide models for changing our minds and our ways. That is just what Carl Hart does in  Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear. In short,

Hart has written a book telling us why he was wrong.

A scientist and leading expert on the effects of drugs on the brain, Hart is also a public intellectual and activist, using his expertise to fight for changes to existing drug laws. As someone involved in drug reform activism myself, I was overwhelmingly sympathetic to Hart’s message before I opened his latest book. Nevertheless,

his blending of memoir and scientific evidence challenged me to change my approach to drug reform.

Drug Use for Grown-Ups is no triumphant conversion narrative. It’s an honest account of how one adult came to terms with the unfathomable gap between the story he had been raised with, bought into and helped to spread throughout much of his career, and reality as revealed through science, experience and reflection.

Hart’s relationship to drugs didn’t start from a position of privilege. He grew up in a working-class Black community in Florida during the 1980s, when racist hysteria surrounding “crack” cocaine destroyed the lives of countless Black Americans while white powder cocaine users were largely left alone. At the time of writing some thirty years later, Hart still had family members serving lengthy sentences for drug-related charges, victims not of drugs themselves but of a penitentiary system Michelle Alexander has called the New Jim Crow.

For twenty-five years Hart studied the effects of drugs on the brain, enthusiastically setting out to confirm existing prejudices about specific substances and the people who use them. Along the way he began to realise that funding for drug research often aims to achieve results that fit existing political agendas. To demonstrate this point,

Hart, a self-described “citizen-scientist”, takes time to teach the lay reader how to interpret scientific articles.

Of course, scientific evidence is not enough to convince people to decriminalise the sale and use of drugs. Evidence needs a story. Hart builds his by weaving facts with personal experiences of taking drugs and working with other people to change the law.

To underscore his point that it’s the system and not the substance that kills, in the final chapter Hart comes out as someone who uses perhaps the most stigmatised and sensationalised drug of all: heroin.

He invites his audience to “read this chapter with an open mind and allow the evidence to determine your perspective”. 

I have my own biases, grounded in white middle-class privilege and living in a society that actively encourages excessive alcohol consumption while demonising and banning all other drugs. I’m not sure I’ll ever fully overcome lifelong warnings against heroin. But I’m open to many of Hart’s other suggestions, like taking a mild novel psychoactive substance “before attending some awful required social event, such as an academic reception”. I suspect my academic career would have been much more enjoyable had I followed this advice! But there is a serious point here too.

Hart has a clear message for middle-class professionals who sip wine in public while using classified drugs behind closed doors: if we’re going to get high in relative safety, we have a responsibility to ensure that everyone is able to do the same without paying the price of stigma, arrest or death.

I feel some shame when Hart addresses me directly as a middle-class drug user. Shaming is a familiar tactic in political discourse. In its naked form it’s risky, inviting defensiveness and backlash (beware the writer whose preferred modus operandi is guilt tripping). Hart’s shaming is more selective, more strategic. This whole book is about his own process of change, with plenty of shameful moments. Hart is “haunted by the many things [he] did wrong”, his “biases against amphetamines”, his failure to spot “the impressive level of responsibility” among research subjects he once dubbed “potheads” and “stoners”. He feels “profound regret” about the “ignorant, traitorous role [he] played in vilifying crack and the people who were targeted” by the racist war on drugs.

Own your shame and use it to make change, Hart seems to be saying. What’s more, his challenge comes with a large dose of compassion.

Unlike self-righteous politicians who attack “middle-class cocaine users” while getting drunk with their staff at “work parties”, Hart has a more generous take on bourgeois drug use. On a trip to Brazil he speculates that “cocaine provides some respite from the suffering among the poor and from the cognitive dissonance experienced by conscientious, well-to-do white Brazilians who know what is happening in their country is obscene”.

Hart writes to change the minds not only of people who are resistant to drug reform but those of us who support it.

An irony of committed political reading and activism is that we often pick up new prejudices and create new orthodoxies along the way.

Hart challenges the orthodoxy that the drug reform movement should focus on harm reduction. For this reason, his book is “unapologetically not about addiction”, not aimed at that minority (10-30%) of people for whom drug use causes distress and “interferes with important life functions”. He is not indifferent to these people, not oblivious to “negative drug-related effects”. However,

Hart insists that the harm reduction model cannot “capture the complexity of grown-up activities such as love or war or drug use”.

You don’t have to agree with all Hart’s conclusions to benefit from his wisdom. My definitions of freedom and happiness would rely less on the US constitution and more on anarchist models of collectivity. I couldn’t stomach stretching my support for liberty to the defence of gun ownership. And as someone whose consumption of an alphabet of “party” drugs helped to open my mind and go vegan, I can indeed “imagine waging a war on cheesecake or steak”! – albeit a war of words rather than weapons. Still, I have a lot to learn.

Hart’s generous invitation to practise “cognitive flexibility” has helped me to appreciate the limitations of an approach to drug reform that focuses primarily on potential harms.

People do drugs for a lot of different reasons, including the potential benefits – social, emotional, medical – and pleasures of drug consumption. I know from experience that it can be hard to defend safe and legal access to drugs for adults for recreational purposes in a world where there is so much emphasis on the dangers of drug use. Drug Use for Grown Ups reminds me that this is a necessary risk if we’re to have an honest approach to drug reform.