Carl Hart Quotes

#1. When you have the national narrative being "crack is awful and black people are using it," why go against that narrative when you want to get that publication in The New York Times or wherever? It encourages people to play right into it.

Carl Hart

#2. I am glad that people are trying to have a rational conversation about drugs.

Carl Hart

#3. You have rappers saying "stay off drugs, go to school" - empty verbal behavior. I think all of this became institutionalized in the early '90s. And it's become more and more solidified, more and more entrenched.

Carl Hart

#4. If we want to think about racism and how it might play out in drug policy, we have to think about the trial of George Zimmerman. We think about the prosecution, when they said "race is not a factor." It's so dishonest.

Carl Hart

#5. Our ability to study the brain has been limited because of our tools and our tools have only allowed us to look at one neurotransmitter and we haven't looked so much into co-localization and co-release of transmitters. Our thinking is hampered by our tools.

Carl Hart

#6. Dopamine makes up less than one percent of the brain's neurotransmitters. It's a small portion. Dopamine is released when people are happy, angry, stressed. So it's really hard to call this specific neurotransmitter "the pleasure neurotransmitter."

Carl Hart

#7. Much of the early work focused on dopamine and we were really looking for rewarding sorts of effects and sure enough, we only found that. But you can destroy the main dopamine-producing structures of the brain and you can still get an animal to self-administer drugs like cocaine.

Carl Hart

#8. We should decriminalize all drugs. The assumptions on which our drug policies are based are flawed.

Carl Hart

#9. I've had investigations of my lab because people didn't like what I had to say. And when you have investigations and you're doing research, you're shut down for a while. You have to start all over again. So that's one area where I paid a high price.

Carl Hart

#10. I don't want to be on the bandwagon of dogging any president or anybody in positions where they have all these different constituencies.

Carl Hart

#11. We need to continuously put pressure on politicians to do more, because they are happy just to do nothing - it's easier to do nothing.

Carl Hart

#12. My critique of how we deal with drugs in society is just that - that we use these anecdotes to apply to everyone and the anecdotes are not representative.

Carl Hart

#13. One of the things that has happened is that our drug laws have been institutionalized now. If you want to say that somebody's a bad person in a movie or in a television show or something about that, you say they sell drugs or they use drugs.

Carl Hart

#14. People rarely die from heroin alone, it's the combination that's deadly. Maybe we should blast that out as a public health education message. That way at least we're keeping people safe.

Carl Hart

#15. The way we're currently educating people about heroin is to say that heroin is so awful. Heroin is not so much the problem. It's when you combine it. It's hard to die from heroin alone.

Carl Hart

#16. High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society.

Carl Hart

#17. Writing in a nuanced way, getting at all the details in a way that remains interesting for the reader, is very difficult.

Carl Hart

#18. If you're a member of a despised group, look out! They'll find a drug and associate you with its use. There are a lot of people in the gay community using methamphetamine and paying taxes and going to work and doing well.

Carl Hart