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    High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society
    High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society
    High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society
    Audiobook11 hours

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

    Written by Carl Hart

    Narrated by JD Jackson

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    A pioneering neuroscientist shares his story of growing up in one of Miami's toughest neighborhoods and how it led him to his groundbreaking work in drug addiction.

    As a youth, Carl Hart didn't realize the value of school; he studied just enough to stay on the basketball team. At the same time, he was immersed in street life. 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, he recalls his journey of self-discovery and weaves his past and present. Hart goes beyond the hype of the antidrug movement as he examines the relationship among drugs, 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.

    Though Hart escaped neighborhoods that were dominated by entrenched poverty and the knot of problems associated with it, he has not turned his back on his roots. Determined to make a difference, he tirelessly applies his scientific research to help save real lives. But balancing his former street life with his achievements today has not been easy—a struggle he reflects on publicly for the first time.

    A powerful story of hope and change, of a scientist who has dedicated his life to helping others, High Price will alter the way we think about poverty, race, and addiction—and how we can effect change.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateDec 17, 2013
    ISBN9780062330758
    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

    51 ratings10 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I loved this book. His life story and the scientific findings. Brilliant.
    • 5/5
      One of the most interesting books I read recently. Absolutely beautiful
    • 5/5
      This book is well worth listening to or reading! Unfortunately there are frequent interruptions in the audio book here on scrbd.com. I did try to report the problem.
    • 5/5
      Such an important read. The different ways we treat drug users based on class and race is alarming. We have to start talking about this more often and create policy change that reflects what we have learned.
    • 5/5
      Eye opener from one who lives it daily. Thank you Carl.
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed this book. Its sad that decades later laws related to drugs haven’t changed based on the scientific implications. This was a great way to make such an important topic relatable to so many people’s lives.
    • 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 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.