Dr. Carl Hart & The Case for Full Drug Legalization
On the "Bad Faith" podcast, neuroscientist Dr. Carl Hart riffed on full drug legalization and what people get wrong about the "opioid epidemic."
By now many of you have seen the salacious headlines about the tenured Columbia University psychology professor who said he enjoys the ocassional bump of heroin.
That professor’s name is Dr. Carl Hart, author of Drug Use for Grown-Ups, a book that argues the vast majority of people who use drugs are healthy, responsible adults who do not experience dire consequences hyped by D.A.R.E. officers and Reefer Madness.
“When heroin binds to mu opioid receptors in my brain, I ‘lay down my burden’ as well as ‘my sword and shield’ just as described in the Negro spiritual ‘Down by the Riverside,’ ” Dr. Hart wrote in Drug Use for Grown-Ups. “Like vacation, sex, and the arts, heroin is one of the tools I use to maintain my work-life balance.” Instead of sipping a stiff whiskey after a hard day’s work, Dr. Hart unwinds with an opiate buzz.
After decades of conducting neuroscience research and examining his own relationship to substances, Dr. Hart grew angered by the way Americans view drugs as inherently bad and dangerous objects. Why, he thought, are these substances demonized and prohibited if only a minority of consumers develop problems like addiction? Dr. Hart argues for full drug legalization, posing the question: Wouldn’t a regulated market, rooted in consumer protections and quality controls, be far safer than today’s street market contaminated by ungodly potent fentanyl analogues?
I can already hear the anti-legalization critics sounding off in my head. They tend to respond to this argument with two words: alcohol and tobacco. Here are two legal drugs, sold in regulated markets (well, somewhat regulated) and they account for huge a slice of morbidity and mortality each year. These two legal, regulated drugs are, in fact, quite dangerous.
Tobacco (mainly combustible cigarettes) kills more than 500,000 people annually. Deaths from alcohol recently spiked during Covid-19, killing 99,000 people in 2020. More people under the age of 65 died from alcohol in 2020 than from Covid. More deaths are attributed to alcohol (99,000) than to opioids (68,000), another fact that rarely rises to the level of awareness, and certainly not something we hear politicians ever talk about (to be sure, a lot of those opioid-related deaths are actually polysubstance overdoses). Alcohol and tobacco tend to slide under the radar. Corporations that manufacture, sell, and market alcohol and tobacco seem to just kinda do their own thing even as their products kill hundreds of thousands of Americans each year.
While people are justifiably outraged over stunningly high levels of drug overdose deaths, mortality stemming from alcohol and tobacco is simply baked into American society, as though everyone agreed long ago that these deaths are worth the freedom to consume.
The drug prohibitionist thusly argue: A legal drug like alcohol, sold in a regulated market, kills more people than illicit opioids! See, legalization doesn’t fix the problems you (pro-legalizers) care about.
Pro-legalizers like Dr. Hart have a pretty decent rebuttal to the alcohol and tobacco argument posed by prohibitionists.
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