High Price Quotes

“One of the most fundamental lessons of science is that a correlation or link between factors does not necessarily mean that one factor is the cause of another. This important principle, sadly, has rarely informed drug policy. In fact, empirical evidence is frequently ignored when drug policy is formulated.”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“Indeed, a great deal of pathological drug use is driven by unmet social needs, by being alienated and having difficulty connecting with others. The”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“If Barack Obama had come up in a time when the drug war was being waged as intensely as it is now, we probably would never have heard of him. A single arrest could have precluded student loans, resulted in jail time, and completely ruined his life, posing a far greater threat to him than the drugs themselves did, including the risk of addiction to marijuana or cocaine.”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“Don’t try to change yourself; change your environment. —B. F. SKINNER”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. —JAMES BALDWIN”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“what look like disadvantages from one perspective may be advantages from another—and ways of knowing and responding may be advantageous and adaptive in one environment and disadvantageous and disruptive in another.”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“you have probably heard about studies in which rats or even primates continually pressed levers to get cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamine until they died, choosing drugs rather than food and water. But what you probably didn’t know is that these animals were kept in isolated, unnatural environments for most of their lives, where they typically became stressed without social contact and had little else to do.”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“Abandon the urge to simplify everything . . . appreciate the fact that life is complex. —M. SCOTT PECK”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“Racism is the belief that social and cultural differences between groups are inherited and immutable, making some groups inalterably superior to others.”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“I'd always known that shit was fucked-up, of course. But I hadn't had clear, precise language to describe it or to understand how best to fight back.”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict. It is the need to escape from a harsh reality. —SHIRLEY CHISHOLM”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“People often consider social relationships only as negative forces in drug use. However, what they fail to understand is the complexity of group behavior. Human beings have always devised means of determining who is “us” and who is “them,” and the consumption of specific foods or drugs is typically one way of doing so. Teens are especially sensitive to these cues of belongingness, and so if drug use is the price of group membership, it’s one that many are willing to pay. Some groups, however, mark their boundaries by avoiding certain types of drug use—for example, athletes rejecting smoking, 1960s hippies rejecting hard liquor in favor of marijuana and LSD, and blacks avoiding methamphetamine because it is seen as a white drug. From the level of the clique to the level of the national culture, behavior related to drugs isn’t only about getting high; it’s often used to delineate group membership and social standing. The social aspects of drug use also change with age. For example, having children and getting married are both associated with reductions in drug use; one of many studies with similar findings in this literature found that people who are married are three times more likely to quit using cocaine and those who have children are more than twice as likely to stop.1 Similar data shows that people with close family and romantic relationships tend to have better outcomes in treatment2—and students’ feelings of social warmth and connectedness to school and parents are linked with reductions in drug problems.”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“Chance favors only the prepared mind. —LOUIS PASTEUR”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“Indeed, a great deal of pathological drug use is driven by unmet social needs, by being alienated and having difficulty connecting with others.”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“Data now confirms that believing in the importance of practice, rather”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“if you have no experience with a particular reinforcer, it”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“But it wasn’t until I joined the air force and began taking college courses that I fully recognized the power of language.”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“... mais de 75% dos usuários de drogas - façam eles uso de álcool, remédios ou drogas ilegais - não enfrentam esse problema [do vício]. Na verdade, as pesquisas demonstram reiteradamente que essas questões afetam apenas entre 10 e 25% daqueles que experimentam até as drogas mais estigmatizadas, como heroína e crack.”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“Instead, the adults around us saw school as a quest for a certificate, a stamp of approval you could show around later in life. Rather than valuing the process of education itself and the essential critical thinking skills that can be gained from it, they saw school as a means to an end.”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“I found that people with addictions weren’t driven only by drugs. Moreover, they weren’t any more antisocial or criminal than people I’d grown up with, many of whom rarely or never got high; in fact, their behavior wasn’t much different from what I’d engaged in myself with my friends back home. They didn’t seem overwhelmed by craving: they basically sought drug rewards in the same way that they sought sex or food. I began to see that their drug-related behavior wasn’t really that special and to think that perhaps their drive to take drugs obeyed the same rules that applied to these other human desires. The notion that addiction was some kind of “character defect” or extreme condition that created completely unpredictable and irrational actions began to seem misguided.”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“One large American study examined the cases of nearly one hundred thousand teens who had their first contact with the juvenile justice system between 1990 and 2005. Fifty-seven percent of these youths were black; the overwhelming majority were male and their average age was fifteen. Most had been arrested either for drug crimes or for assault; all were studied at the time of their first offense. The researchers found that, regardless of the severity of the initial offense, teens who were incarcerated were three times more likely to be reincarcerated as adults1 compared with those not incarcerated for similar offenses. Being locked up hadn’t deterred them; rather, it had forced them to spend time with criminals, had possibly taught them more about how to commit different types of crime, and ultimately set them up to be reincarcerated.”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“The real connection between drugs and violent crime lies in the profits to be made in the drug trade. The stereotype is that crack typically causes crime by turning people into violent predators. But evidence from research shattered this misconception. A key study examined all the homicides in New York City in 1988, a year when 76 percent of arrestees tested positive for cocaine. Nearly two thousand killings were studied.4 Nearly half of these homicides were not related to drugs at all. Of the rest, only 2 percent involved addicts killing people while seeking to buy crack cocaine and just 1 percent of murders involved people who had recently used the drug. Keep in mind that this study was conducted in a year when the media was filled with stories warning about “crack-crazed” addicts. Thirty-nine percent of New York City’s murders that year did involve the drug trade, however, and most of these were related to crack selling. But these killings were primarily disputes over sales territories or robberies of dealers by other dealers. In other words, they were as “crack-related” as the shoot-outs between gangsters during Prohibition were “alcohol-related.” The idea that crack cocaine turns previously nonviolent users into maniacal murderers is simply not supported by the data. When it comes to drugs, most people have beliefs that have no foundation in evidence.”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“Of course, you have probably heard about studies in which rats or even primates continually pressed levers to get cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamine until they died, choosing drugs rather than food and water. But what you probably didn’t know is that these animals were kept in isolated, unnatural environments for most of their lives, where they typically became stressed without social contact and had little else to do. By analogy, if you were in solitary confinement for years with only one movie as a source of entertainment, you’d probably watch it over and over. But that wouldn’t necessarily mean that that particular movie is “addictive” or compulsively watchable. You’d probably still watch it if it were the worst film ever made, just to have something to do. Similarly, saying that unlimited access to cocaine “makes” animals addicted to the point of killing themselves, based on research in isolated rodents or primates, doesn’t tell us much about drug use in the real world.”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“Where I grew up, nerds, dorks, and other kids who had a reputation for being “smart” in school did not automatically become targets for bullies for “acting white,” as the stereotype of poor black neighborhoods portrays it. We didn’t scorn nerds any more—or less—than white kids do. We definitely didn’t scapegoat them for the reasons that some “experts” have invoked to try to explain some of the persisting racial achievement gap in school. We were no more anti-intellectual than the rest of America. It wasn’t school achievement itself that we saw as “acting white.” It’s something much more subtle than that. And understanding this complexity is important to understanding my story and to recognizing what’s really going on in poor neighborhoods. What was being reinforced and what was being punished was not about education. Sure, there were some black children who were bullied for “acting white” in the neighborhoods where I grew up. And, indeed, some of those kids were high achievers in school. Some, however, were not. It wasn’t scholarly success itself that made people targets. We didn’t disdain academic achievement per se and we didn’t look down on those who got good grades because of their marks. “Acting white” was a whole different ball game, something that frequently correlated with school performance but wasn’t defined by it. What really got kids labeled as dorks or sellouts and picked on about their schoolwork were their attitudes toward other black people. It was the way they used language to demonstrate what they believed was their moral and social superiority. The kids who were targeted wouldn’t speak in the street vernacular that the rest of us used, even on the street or in other informal settings. They wouldn’t really deign to talk to us at all if they could avoid it. Their noses in the air, they looked down on us. It was snobbery, not schoolwork, that was “white” to us.”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“Both of these parenting styles have their advantages, Lareau found (although I should note that she did not look at families that used corporal punishment as severe as in my family after my parents split). The middle-class way was not, as some might expect, superior all around. The working-class children were often happier and better behaved. They were much closer to their extended families and were full of energy. They mostly did as they were told. They knew how to entertain themselves and were rarely bored. They were more adept at relationships. The middle-class youth, however, were much more prepared for school and far better situated to deal with adult authorities. They could speak up for themselves and use well-crafted arguments to come to conclusions more skillfully. This elaborated way of thinking also helped them better make plans that required multiple steps. Essentially, they were more prepared for success in the American mainstream than the working-class children were. And this was true regardless of whether they were black or white. Through this parenting style, middle-class children were being trained to lead, whether intentionally or not. Meanwhile, the poor and working class were being trained for life on the bottom. Middle-class children were constantly being taught explicitly to advocate for themselves with authorities, while the lower classes were taught to submit without question. Or, if they were going to resist, the poor learned by experience to do so covertly, not openly.”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“Less conspicuous factors like children’s exposure to a broad or limited vocabulary and to varying amounts of linguistic encouragement and discouragement can do far more than obvious scapegoats like drugs to influence their futures.”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society

“Boa parte do que temos feito em termos de educação, tratamento e políticas públicas no terreno das drogas está em desacordo com os dados científicos. Levando em conta o que tenho visto no laboratório e lido na bibliografia científica, não posso deixar de me pronunciar. [...] No fundo, boa parte do que achamos que sabemos a respeito de drogas, vício e escolhas possíveis está errada.”
― Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society