High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00GFRKAXO | Format: EPUB
High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society Description
A pioneering neuroscientist shares his story of growing up in one of Miami's toughest neighborhoods and how it led him to his groundbreaking work in drug addiction.
As a youth, Carl Hart didn't realize the value of school; he studied just enough to stay on the basketball team. At the same time, he was immersed in street life. Today he is a cutting-edge neuroscientist - Columbia University's first tenured African American professor in the sciences - whose landmark, controversial research is redefining our understanding of addiction.
In this provocative and eye-opening memoir, he recalls his journey of self-discovery and weaves his past and present. Hart goes beyond the hype of the antidrug movement as he examines the relationship among drugs, pleasure, choice, and motivation, both in the brain and in society. His findings shed new light on common ideas about race, poverty, and drugs, and explain why current policies are failing.
Though Hart escaped neighborhoods that were dominated by entrenched poverty and the knot of problems associated with it, he has not turned his back on his roots. Determined to make a difference, he tirelessly applies his scientific research to help save real lives. But balancing his former street life with his achievements today has not been easy - a struggle he reflects on publicly for the first time.
A powerful story of hope and change, of a scientist who has dedicated his life to helping others, High Price will alter the way we think about poverty, race, and addiction - and how we can effect change.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 11 hours and 49 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Audible.com Release Date: December 17, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00GFRKAXO
Disclaimer: I know Dr. Hart and had heard some of his story and have been exposed to his research before reading this book. That said, I started reading when it hit my Kindle and didn't put it down until I finished (for those fellow e-readers, like myself, I noticed no formatting issues as you sometimes see with kindle books). I found Dr. Hart's book to be utterly compelling and a magnificent achievement of the sort I have never read before in a "pop" psychology book. He manages to both make the neuroscience easily understandable, and uses he own autobiography to help support the argument prompted by his research findings. I have never seen an academic lay himself so bare, tenure or not. In doing so, Dr. Hart underscores his argument that drugs are not the primary problem in poor and/or minority communities. It is lack of many things: opportunity, personal decision making, family support, luck. Drugs are an issue, but this is due to the interaction of drugs with the above factors for most people (addiction is a different story, and Hart addresses that). The discussion of the similar depiction (by researchers, the government, and the media) of various drugs over the years as being instantly addictive and creating a culture of violence due to the nature of the drug's chemistry (whether it be cocaine, crack, or meth) was very powerful. Dr. Hart believed this himself until his research showed him that people were not mindless, poor decision makers only out for the next high. Using the lens provided by his research findings, he saw his own past and the pasts of the people he knew growing up in a different light. Dr.
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