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What If Drugs Aren't as Bad as We've Been Told?

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In his new book, Columbia professor and recreational heroin user Carl Hart argues the harms of drug use and addiction have been systematically overstated.

Save this story Save this story Near the beginning of Dr. Carl Hart’s new book, Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear , you learn that he has studied and worked as a “drug abuse scientist” for more than twenty-five years—and that he’s entering his fifth year as a “regular heroin user.” Maybe not what you’d expect from a neuroscience Ph.D. and Columbia psychology professor. But that is, after all, what he’s getting at in his book. Many of the ideas we have about drugs are all wrong, he says. Hart had his own preconceptions when he began his job as a drug abuse researcher,

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