Does the pursuit of happiness extend to recreational drugs?

Dr. Carl Hart has never met a recreational drug he did not like. All of them have their very positive aspects for him. They reduce stress, raise awareness, and induce respect, co-operation, empathy and intimacy. And then they wear off. He calls for a withdrawal of government from the drug-banning business. His constitutional rights preclude government interference, he says. His book, Drug Use for Grown-Ups is the distillation of years of research, plus lectures, speeches and feedback from them. It looks like a solid case.

Hart was chairman of the Psychiatry Department at Columbia University in New York. This both resulted from and continued to allow him to run studies on all kinds of drugs for all kinds of reasons. He could determine their effects from numerous angles. He found that they are not killers. He found (as many others have) that only 10–30% of drug users qualify as addicts. In his global travels as a respected academic, this has been supported and confirmed by his peers in countless panels and conferences.

Hart has made this his life’s work. Growing up in a high crime black area of Miami, surrounded by drug problems, he wanted to be part of the solution — meaning the elimination of all casual drug taking. Decades of intense research have led him to the precise opposite position. Throughout the book, he…