oday, Hart continues to challenge status quo assumptions about the frequency of addiction and how drug use affects people. He’s even held Eric Holder to task for calling heroin use in the country “an epidemic.” Instead, Hart argues that the number of true addicts is much smaller, and when addiction does occur, it’s often because of environmental factors, rather than hardwired doom in the brain. His conclusion: Much of what we’ve been taught about drugs is wrong.
With more than $40 billion being spent on anti-drug efforts a year, it’s not a message that many people want to hear. But when mass incarceration, often for misdemeanor drug possession charges, affects communities of color so deeply that health studies can’t conduct statistically sound surveys on the population not in prison, it’s a message that could disrupt the social order. We spoke to Hart about how he reached his conclusions and what it takes to speak truth to power in the scientific community.