Paying a high price for the war on drugs:
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/03/war-drugs.aspx"In a new memoir, neuroscientist Carl Hart discusses how his research on drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine has led him to decide that all drugs should be decriminalized."
"As a child growing up in one of Miami's roughest neighborhoods during the 1970s, Carl Hart saw first-hand the toll that poverty, drugs, guns and domestic violence took on his close family and friends. When he was 6, his mother separated from his abusive father. At age 12, he saw his sister injured in a drive-by shooting. Many of his childhood friends ended up dead or in prison. As a teen he used drugs, shoplifted and occasionally carried a gun himself. But eventually — through hard work, mentors, the military and education — he launched himself to the highest rungs of academia.
Hart, who earned his PhD in 1996 from the University of Wyoming, is now Columbia University's first tenured African-American professor in the sciences, where he studies the neuroscience of drug use. Some of his work undercuts widespread assumptions about drug users, such as the idea that most will become addicted. In laboratory studies with cocaine and methamphetamine users, he's found that rather than being held hostage to their drug use, most people can make a rational decision to give up a dose in exchange for a reasonable reward — even as little as $5.
Recently, Hart has become involved in drug policy advocacy as well. In his book "High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society," he interweaves personal memoir and scientific research to conclude that drug abuse is a symptom rather than a cause of societal ills — and that America's drug laws, not drugs themselves, have wreaked the greatest havoc on the country's poorest and most vulnerable citizens."