Freedom, criminal justice, and drug legalization

Sneak Peak: Episode 10 with Dr. Carl Hart

Just days after the Virginia legislature voted to legalize recreational marijuana in 2024, we’ll be hosting Dr. Carl Hart, neuroscientist and researcher of drug usage at Columbia University. Hart, who authored Drug Use for Grown-Ups, argues against the punitive response to drug usage in the United States, which has led to the construction of the prison-industrial complex and the senseless destruction of many lives, disproportionately in communities of color. Not only does Hart address the ills of our society’s puritanical treatment of drug usage, but he makes a broader, more controversial argument for the legalization of all drugs — with the belief that this openness will allow for better education and more responsible consumption of drugs.

Paid subscribers to KK&F can join us Friday for the video release of our conversation, which will be available on audio Saturday through Substack and major streaming platforms like Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Stitcher, Spotify, and more. If you can’t wait until Saturday, click the button below:

Virginia lawmakers’ Saturday vote on legalization, advocates have argued, does too little to acknowledge the harms caused by the racist policing of the War on Drugs, placing focus on creating the infrastructure to sell the commodity. For example, while recreational marijuana remains illegal until 2024, details about how drug usage will be regulated remain undecided until next year. Democrats have voiced concern that these measures may be decided at a time when their party no longer controls the House and Senate. In other words, while the step toward future legalization promises to remove a major avenue through which people are policed and incarcerated, these changes may still reflect how the interests of markets are prioritized over the interests of community members. We look forward to talking to Carl about how the struggle for drug legalization plays into larger conversations relating to freedoms and criminal justice, and we hope you’ll join us.

Sneak peek: Below is an excerpt from an interview of Dr. Carl Hart by Vox’s Sean Illing, which ran on Feb. 25, 2021. You can read the full interview here.

Sean Illing: People often — and I’ve done this in my own reporting — draw distinctions between different drugs. We’ll put drugs like heroin or meth in one box and we’ll put something like psilocybin or other psychedelics in another box, and the conventional wisdom is that the latter class of drugs are safer (less addictive) and therefore fundamentally different from the former class of drugs.

You say this is a bullshit move, and there’s no evidence to justify it. Can you explain why?

Carl Hart: When people take psilocybin, they are seeking to alter their consciousness some way for some purpose. Typically, the users of psilocybin are middle-class or higher, they’re well-educated, and their use of the English language is more sophisticated than the typical heroin user. And what you’ll often hear from psychedelic enthusiasts is a lot of lofty talk about seeking higher planes of consciousness or religious transcendence or whatever.

But here’s the thing: A person doing heroin is often doing the exact same thing; they just don’t have the same language to describe it. But ultimately it’s all about the pursuit of happiness, of pleasure, of greater well-being.

Now the folks who are advocating for psychedelics know how the American psyche thinks about heroin and crack, so they’ve worked really hard to separate themselves and these drugs from those people and those drugs. Because the image that is conjured up in your mind about the average heroin user is not desirable. And so you have to do whatever you can to separate yourself from that person because what you’re doing is different when in fact it’s the same shit.