Carl Hart Quotes

If the ideas expressed in this book are embraced, we can get on with the business of treating each other better and enjoying more meaningful and fulfilling lives. And isn't that what we all want?

When it comes to drugs, most people have beliefs that have no foundation in evidence.

I'm now firm in my belief that marijuana is a key ingredient to happiness for a great number of people. What kind of person prevents another's responsible pursuit of happiness? Not a very humane one.

What if I told you that the awfulness of drugs has been wildly exaggerated? The predominant effects of drugs are good. They have beneficial effects, but we get paid to study the negative effects of drugs.

I’m concerned that if we add more money, we will send most of the money to law enforcement. And when we do that, we know what happens. We saw it with crack. We saw it with opioids before, in the 1960s. What happens is more black and brown people will be arrested. Do not forget that.

all drugs can produce both negative and positive effects. So to act as if marijuana is intrinsically or morally superior to heroin-or any other drug, for that matter-highlights the ignorance of the holder of this belief. Such ignorance also decreases the odds of people honestly reporting the use of drugs other than marijuana because of the stigma attached to so-called harder drugs, such as heroin. (Chapter 2)

Just like any other drug, most of the people who use these drugs do so without a problem.

Without welfare, I wouldn’t be here.

Everybody knows that the war on drugs, as has been fought since the 1980s, has had a disproportionate negative impact on specific community: black communities, Latino communities. Everyone knows that. So, what Jeff Sessions is doing is engaged in—or he’s advocating being engaged in racial discrimination. So let’s call Jeff Sessions what he is. Jeff Sessions is a racist, if he takes on this action. It’s clear. We know it. So let’s stop playing around with it...Jeff Sessions is allowing us or is using drug policy to separate the people who we like from the people who we don’t like. And it provides a way to go after those people we don’t like, usually poor minority folks, without explicitly saying we don’t like those people. And that’s how drug law—that’s how drug law or drug policy has been enforced in this country. And so, if we allow Sessions to turn back the hands of time, then shame on all of us. The blood is on all of our hands, because we know the consequences of his proposed actions.

the first priority of law enforcement should be to keep users safe, not to arrest them.

With every drug, whether it's cocaine, PCP, or marijuana, there's some historical report about the horrors of this drug producing superhuman strength. It provides a rationale to engage in police brutality. This is quintessential American racism.

I marvel at what we are learning about how the brain works, in general. And so, we are not anywhere near being able to explain drug addiction with our brain science yet. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t continue to try and figure out what’s going on in the brain.

Make sure we warn people not to combine opioids with another drug. Set up free drug purity testing sites. People who are addicted to opioids and who are having a problem, and they need treatment. We should look around the world, places like Switzerland.

I share my story in an effort to encourage others, especially successful professionals who are less at risk than people on the margins of society, to get out of the closet about their own drug use. If they did so, more people would see that there are far more respectable drug users than our criminal-justice regime and popular culture would have us know.

when we think about the numbers of African Americans who are in neuroscience and why—they’re low—and why the numbers are low, that’s an issue that the society hasn’t grappled with. And it’s related to some of this marijuana talk that we’re talking about. You played something about Kennedy earlier. Those kind of people, they sicken me, quite frankly, when we think about the role that racism has played in our drug enforcement, and those people don’t knowledge that? Those kind of—those types of practices have played a role in why African Americans are not in many areas in the United States.