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    High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society
    Unavailable
    High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society
    Unavailable
    High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society
    Ebook406 pages6 hours

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

    By Carl Hart

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    About this ebook

    High Price is the harrowing and inspiring memoir of neuroscientist Carl Hart, a man who grew up in one of Miami’s toughest neighborhoods and, determined to make a difference as an adult, tirelessly applies his scientific training to help save real lives.
     
    Young Carl didn't see the value of school, studying just enough to keep him on the basketball team. Today, he is a cutting-edge neuroscientist—Columbia University’s first tenured African American professor in the sciences—whose landmark, controversial research is redefining our understanding of addiction.

    In this provocative and eye-opening memoir, Dr. Carl Hart recalls his journey of self-discovery, how he escaped a life of crime and drugs and avoided becoming one of the crack addicts he now studies. Interweaving past and present, Hart goes beyond the hype as he examines the relationship between drugs and pleasure, choice, and motivation, both in the brain and in society. His findings shed new light on common ideas about race, poverty, and drugs, and explain why current policies are failing.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 11, 2013
    ISBN9780062198938
    Author

    Carl Hart

    Carl Hart is an associate professor in the departments of psychology and psychiatry at Columbia University. He is also a research scientist in the Division of Substance Abuse at the New York State Psychiatric Institute; a member of the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse; and on the board of directors of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence and the Drug Policy Alliance. A native of Miami, Florida, he lives in New York City.

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    Reviews for High Price

    4/5

    40 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I read this book after hearing the author interviewed on The Majority Report podcast. From the interview, I had the impression the book would focus primarily on how drug policy in the U.S. had been used to oppress the poor and minorities over most of the last century.

      However, that was really just a small part of the book. It is primarily an autobiography of the authors life, which is a very compelling story. He does address the fallacy, folly and cruelty of our drug policy more thoroughly in the last part of the book.

      One of the things I really appreciated and admire in Dr. Hart is his recognition of the role luck played in allowing him to achieve what he has in his life. He identifies several points at which he happened to meet the right person or get advice to make that choice that moved him in the right direction. It reminded me of several similar instances in my own life.

      The fact that luck presented him with opportunities in no way diminishes the role of hard work in his accomplishments. Its just refreshing to hear someone acknowledge what is always true, that luck plays a huge role in allowing us to accomplish what we accomplish.
    • 2/5
      I saw Dr. Carl Hart speak in Grand Rapids, Mich., and was impressed by his thoughtfulness about how our drug policies impact the poorest and most under-served in our population, and completely agreed that the drug policy that leads to mass incarceration for non-violent offenders needs to change. Dr. Hart is a neuro-psychologist who pulled himself up out of a risk-laden environment and who is succeeding wonderfully as the first African-American tenured neuroscientist at Columbia University. I applaud that. I did feel that the science part of the discussion was missing from his talk, and then found that his book was shelved in the biography section of the library, when I was expecting to see it in the science area. After reading it, I agree, it belongs in the biography section. It's mostly memoir, with some discussion of Dr. Hart's studies and behavioral experiments thrown in. While I agree with his social premises, I was underwhelmed with the writing and the content of the book. I'm going to try some other books that address the topic of mass incarceration to try and figure out if it's just me, or if there are more clear and commanding arguments out there. 2 1/2 Stars.
    • 4/5
      I read DRUG USE FOR GROWNUPS before reading this; if I had read this first, I think I would have been surprised to read the second. This is Dr. Hart's memoir. Throughout his youth and young adulthood, we feel him just floating above the surface of drug use - just a little marijuana and alcohol, very little, with his athletic performance as an excuse. And a little cocaine later. He doesn't seem really into any of it. So what a surprise to find him an unapologetic heroin hobbyist in the second book. His overall message is the same - drugs don't ruin lives, people ruin lives; it's just that I really wouldn't have pegged him for a user.I do love a life story and I enjoyed his memoir. It did give an interesting perspective on life and problems in "the hood". Hart grew up with five older sisters and two younger brothers; an alcoholic father, eventually separated parents. He witnessed crime, addiction, abuse; he shoplifted, he fathered a child he didn't know about for 16 years. He also played basketball and joined the military, and from there it's a story of life turned around.
    • 4/5
      Entertaining and informative. I laughed at some of his stories and jokes. I've already read some of his articles and saw some of his videos, so some of the stuff here just added more detail. They should make this into a movie like they did with the life of the CTE doctor Bennett Omalu.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      In this provocative and eye-opening memoir, Dr. Carl Hart recalls his journey of self-discovery, how he escaped a life of crime and drugs and avoided becoming one of the crack addicts he now studies. Interweaving past and present, Hart goes beyond the hype as he examines the relationship between drugs and pleasure, choice, and motivation, both in the brain and in society. His findings shed new light on common ideas about race, poverty, and drugs, and explain why current policies are failing.
    • 5/5
      A must read! Hart’s personal story reveals that the right decisions can shape a person’s life if presented with the opportunity; more so, social and economic situations are binding factors rather than the actual use of drugs or alcohol. If drugs were the single cause of child abandonment, family dysfunction, poverty, and crime, then Hart would have been less likely to become a happily married father and a tenured associate professor at Columbia University, New York.

      3 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This is mostly an autobiography: a black boy grows up in Florida, through luck makes it into the military where his interest in learning is slowly awakened, and ends up a tenured Columbia professor. Many in his family have downward trajectories instead; early poverty and violence didn’t provide them with the resource cushions that would have helped insulate them from individual bits of bad luck/bad decisions. Hart discusses his early experiments with drugs, crime, and random sex (in fact, he later discovered he had a son he didn’t know about—a son who didn’t graduate from high school and now has five children of his own, while the two slightly younger sons Hart raised are just teenagers) in the course of arguing that poverty and racism, not drugs, produce the scary things we’re taught come from drugs. Only a small percentage of users, he says, become truly addicted; even addicts make rational decisions; but if you’re poor, the alternatives to drugs aren’t that attractive. He advocates decriminalization and treatment, not so much to decrease the rate of drug use—he doesn’t think that’s the right goal—but to decrease the appalling toll of imprisonment, impaired job prospects, and destroyed lives that a police-oriented approach has on African-American communities and especially men.

      1 person found this helpful