Summary Of High Price By Carl Hart

In the book High Price, highly credible author and neuroscientist, Dr. Carl Hart explains the misconceptions that everyone normally has about drugs and their users. He uses his own life experiences coming from a troubled neighborhood in Florida. The book consists of Hart’s life growing up with domestic violence in his household and the chance he had to come out and excel academically. He talks about the war on drugs and how within this war on drugs we were actually fighting the war with the wrong thing.
He says that drugs are a symptom of living in poverty and with inequalities. The drugs are not the cause for poverty they are what comes out of living in those situation along with inequalities in the system. In the text Hart states, “empirical evidence is frequently ignored when drug policy is formulated.”1 meaning that drug policy is basically all formed on theory rather than actual observation. In the book it is mentioned how racism set into institutions and poverty, before crack was the main reason for his family falling apart.

For example, he uses the book discussed in class The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. A lot of material discussed in class he discusses in his book. Dr. Hart talks about how the charges for have crack cocaine are far worse that having pure powdered cocaine. Within his research as stated before, he presents myths about drug addiction. Everyone is taught to believe that people become so addicted to a drug that the drug becomes irresistible. He uses the alternative of cash and discovered that even those who are regular users or “addicted” would prefer the