Long before he brought people into his laboratory at
Columbia University to smoke crack cocaine,
Carl Hart saw its effects firsthand. Growing up in poverty, he watched relatives become crack addicts, living in squalor and stealing from their mothers. Childhood friends ended up in prisons and morgues.
Those addicts seemed enslaved by crack, like the
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It's not that you have anecdotal evidence; it's just that the people you know are much more likely to be similar to each other. I've talked to other guys who've said most of their friends look online for bareback sex, and other guys who say their friends always use condoms with their primary partner but not their secondary (or vice versa), and other guys who say all their friends think they can tell who has HIV by looking...lots of disparate groups.
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I don't know if this could make people drop the urge to punish, invest in harm reduction and community development but it can only help, right?
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Like with many things, it's not simply black and white. Social circumstances as well a physical dependency and permanent brain changes can play a role here.
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It's an important hypothesis--people turn to drugs to self-medicate horrible circumstances. If true, it has far-reaching implications for how we handle addicts and the 'war on drugs'.
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