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September 17, 2013 | With an advertisement in the Village Voice, Carl Hart invited addicts to earn $950 smoking crack made from pharmaceutical-grade cocaine in his lab at Columbia University. Hart, an associate professor of psychology, grew up in poverty in a black community and was no stranger to the effects crack has on its addicts.
According to an article in the New York Times, “Like other scientists, he hoped to find a neurological cure to addiction, some mechanism for blocking that dopamine activity in the brain so that people wouldn’t succumb to the otherwise irresistible craving for cocaine, heroin and other powerfully addictive drugs.”
When Hart began to study addicts, according to the Times, he realized that drugs like crack and meth were not impossible to resist as is commonly misconstrued.
Hart told the Times “80 to 90 percent of people who use crack and methamphetamine don’t get addicted…and the small number who do become addicted are nothing like the popular caricatures.”
Most of the respondents to Hart’s ad were black men from low-income neighborhoods like the one where Hart was raised in Miami. To participate in the study, they had to live in a hospital ward for a number of weeks while researchers watched from behind one-way mirrors.
Read more here.
According to an article in the New York Times, “Like other scientists, he hoped to find a neurological cure to addiction, some mechanism for blocking that dopamine activity in the brain so that people wouldn’t succumb to the otherwise irresistible craving for cocaine, heroin and other powerfully addictive drugs.”
When Hart began to study addicts, according to the Times, he realized that drugs like crack and meth were not impossible to resist as is commonly misconstrued.
Hart told the Times “80 to 90 percent of people who use crack and methamphetamine don’t get addicted…and the small number who do become addicted are nothing like the popular caricatures.”
Most of the respondents to Hart’s ad were black men from low-income neighborhoods like the one where Hart was raised in Miami. To participate in the study, they had to live in a hospital ward for a number of weeks while researchers watched from behind one-way mirrors.
Read more here.
