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Hari’s Ex-Boyfriend
Carl Hart is a neuroscientist who studies drug use and addiction at his Columbia University laboratory. He tells Hari that, because the U.S. government controls most funding for drug research, most scientists are afraid to challenge the drug war’s dogmas. This is why they ignore the clear evidence showing that addiction stems more from individual psychological trauma than from the effects of drugs themselves, that most drug users don’t become addicted, and that alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than most illegal drugs.
Carl Hart Quotes in Chasing the Scream
The Chasing the Scream quotes below are all either spoken by Carl Hart or refer to Carl Hart . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 13
Quotes
Almost all the funding for research into illegal drugs is provided by governments waging the drug war—and they only commission research that reinforces the ideas we already have about drugs. All these different theories, with their radical implications—why would governments want to fund those?
[…] [Eric Sterling] told me that if any government-funded scientist ever produced research suggesting anything beyond the conventional drugs-hijack-brains theory, […] the head of NIDA would be called before a congressional committee and asked if she had gone mad. She might be fired. She would certainly be stopped. All the people conducting the science for NIDA—and remember, that’s 90 percent of research on the globe into illegal drugs—know this.
So they steer away from all this evidence and look only at the chemical effects of the drugs themselves. That’s not fake—but it’s only a small part of the picture.
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Carl Hart Quotes in Chasing the Scream
The Chasing the Scream quotes below are all either spoken by Carl Hart or refer to Carl Hart . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 13
Quotes
Almost all the funding for research into illegal drugs is provided by governments waging the drug war—and they only commission research that reinforces the ideas we already have about drugs. All these different theories, with their radical implications—why would governments want to fund those?
[…] [Eric Sterling] told me that if any government-funded scientist ever produced research suggesting anything beyond the conventional drugs-hijack-brains theory, […] the head of NIDA would be called before a congressional committee and asked if she had gone mad. She might be fired. She would certainly be stopped. All the people conducting the science for NIDA—and remember, that’s 90 percent of research on the globe into illegal drugs—know this.
So they steer away from all this evidence and look only at the chemical effects of the drugs themselves. That’s not fake—but it’s only a small part of the picture.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
