Higher Education
Professor Hart’s Drugs and Behavior course explores the academic appeal of drugs
With a Rastafarian poster of Bob Marley on the wall of his office, Carl Hart sits back and enjoys teaching one of the most popular classes semester after semester: Drugs and Behavior.
But Hart is humble about being so popular. “I think that drugs is a topic in which a lot of people are just interested in,” he says. “Kids are exposed to a lot of press about it and now they want the opportunity to academically pursue the topic.”
Unlike the potential psychology majors he now teaches, Hart did not begin his career with a focus in neuroscience. At the age of 17, he enlisted in the air force because he simply “wanted to play basketball.” For his first assignment, he was shipped to Okinawa, Japan—not exactly a full court.
The island’s beautiful beaches, however, did not keep him there for long, as he found the Japanese to be more ethnically and racially intolerant than Americans; he dubs that period “before the MTV era,” citing that the music channel was a key source of introducing cultural awareness to the country.
Disenchanted by the Japanese mind-set, Hart transferred to England. The British press was sharp in its criticism of the politics and social economy of the United States. He found that it was “discerning to think about what was happening in the United States, particularly about race.” The time he spent in England was, in fact, Hart’s first experience with intuitive and intellectual analysis. At the same time he started to develop a love for “music that makes some sort of social commentary and that strives to find out who we are in society.”
He began to participate in the study of some of these social issues and most importantly, the issues surrounding crack cocaine, which is the one of the least expensive drugs out there, making it a prominent drug in neighborhoods that face socioeconomic hardships.
Shortly afterward, a friend in North Carolina offered him the opportunity to study the neurobiological effects of morphine and nicotine on neurons in the brain. Their goal was to discover why people were so entrenched in their drug usage. He soon became an expert on rat experimentation.
While giving a tour for high school students as part of a National Institutes of Health program, he was asked whether or not the result of his studies had the same effects on humans—a question he was unable to answer. That was when he started studying why people do drugs.
Now at the New York Psychiatric Institute, Hart is constantly looking for chronic substance users to participate in his research. Found through common media outlets such as the Village Voice or Craigslist, the study participants are heavily dependent on drugs, to the point that he refers to them as “career users.”
In addition to being anonymous, participating in his studies is also beneficial to the substance abusers, as they are able to get a hit and a free physical, which, without medical insurance, can be rather expensive.
When asked why his patients return—and some new faces appear—Hart instantaneously responds with one word: “Respect.” When Hart works with his patients, he goes beyond the parameters of his job, offering them advice about drugs, their children, and their general health. The fact that a close relationship builds between him and his case studies is no surprise considering the friendly and pleasant vibes that come from the man.
Using the results of his studies at the Psychiatric Center, Hart hopes that his students “become better critical consumers about information they get from culture and from life.”
To him, drugs are neither good nor evil. It’s just important that students “don’t just accept what is told to them unless it is based upon solid evidence.”