when people overindulge, like every day multiple times a day, it’s going to disrupt some of your psychosocial functioning. Now, that is a small numbe… - Carl Hart

I worry that people who need prescription opioids for their pain will not be able to get their prescription opioids, because we are getting crazy about opioids, in general. Opioids are excellent medications to treat pain. And we can’t forget that. We also have seen, even before this—we know that, for example, black people are less likely to be prescribed opioids even when they need it, less likely than their white counterparts. And so, all of these sort of unintended consequences, they always happen when we get crazy about drugs. And we don’t even save people.

I wrote this book to present a more realistic image of the typical drug user: a responsible professional who happens to use drugs in his pursuit of happiness. Also, I wanted to remind the public that no benevolent government should forbid autonomous adults from altering their consciousness, as long as it does not infringe on the rights of others. (Author's Note)

one of the things that shocked me when I first started to understand what was going on, when I discovered that 80 to 90 percent of the people who actually use drugs like crack cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana—80 to 90 percent of those people were not addicted. I thought, “Wait a second. I thought that once you use these drugs, everyone becomes addicted, and that’s why we had these problems.” That was one thing that I found out. Another thing that I found out is that if you provide alternatives to people—jobs, other sort of alternatives—they don’t overindulge in drugs like this. I discovered this in the human laboratory as well as the animal laboratory. The same thing plays out in the animal literature.