 Quick! What's your mental image of a regular heroin user? Probably not Carl Hart, a 54-year-old Air Force veteran who holds an endowed chair in psychology at Columbia University. He's also the author of the new book, Drug Use for Grown Ups, in which he unabashedly cops to the fact that he's been a regular heroin user for the past five years and declares it his favorite drug for recreational use. Why do you use heroin? Why do people do alcohol? To unwind, to relax, the same is true with my heroin use. I use heroin in part because it's really good at helping me to unwind, to be more forgiving of other people, to look at my own behavior and see where I need to modify in order to be a more responsible person, in order to be a better person. It helps to make me a better person because I can forgive about some of the sort of petty things that I may have had in my mind and in holding those things against people. Instead, I learned how to be more forgiving and more magnanimous. Hart writes that he sniffs or swallows this heroin and he stresses that it's the impurities and adulterines mixed in black market heroin that are particularly harmful. And he underscores, to paraphrase Spider-Man, that with great drug use comes great responsibility. I meet my parental, personal, and professional responsibilities. I pay my taxes, serve as a volunteer in my community on a regular basis, and contribute to the global community as an informed and engaged citizen. I am better for my drug use. The stereotype that all drug users are addicts who can't control their behavior is mostly drug war propaganda, he says, and at odds with reality. My heroin use is just like my sort of taking time out to go to a club to see a comedian perform or to go see a concert. I set aside that time for that activity, and I enjoy that activity in that moment. And when that moment is over, I'm done. When you think about something like methamphetamine, it's been documented about five to 10% of the people who try methamphetamine will meet criteria for addiction. Something like heroin somewhere between 20 and 30% of the people who try heroin will become addicted. So what can clearly be seen is that the vast majority of those folks don't have problems related to addiction. If such percentages seem high, realize that they're in line with lifetime occurrence of alcohol use disorder, and that booze causes far more deaths and health problems than other intoxicants. Drug use for grown-ups is a bracing manifesto that calls for us to treat hard drugs the same as beer, wine, and distilled spirits. Hart shares his personal experiences as a way to help us see that illegal substances are similar to the ones we use without hesitation on a daily basis. He takes heroin out of the shooting gallery and puts it back in the family room. Oftentimes my drug use is with my partner, and so we have discussions about our kids. Our youngest kid is 20, but we, just like any other parents, we can be pain in the ass as to our children. And so how can we be better parents? How can we support them in a more loving way, in a way that is more effective, in a way that is more acceptable, in a way that they find more helpful? Hart says prohibition has inflicted incalculable damage by driving the drug market underground. It's not just the attendant violence, but also the lack of brand reliability and quality control. And the drug war makes it harder for people with substance abuse problems to get help, since they have to admit to being criminals as well as addicts. As a black man who grew up in a tough neighborhood in Miami in the crack-crazed 80s, Hart is especially attuned to how prohibition has devastated poor and minority communities through overzealous policing and mandatory sentencing. But he says the drug war's greatest sin is against the founding ideals of America as the home of the brave and the land of the free. What I'm trying to do is ask Americans to think about their own liberty, and not in this jingle-wistic, false patriotic sense, but in terms of what the Declaration of Independence guaranteed, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all of us, as long as we don't disrupt anybody else's ability to do the same. That means we get to live our life as we choose, as we see fit, and taking drugs can be a part of that, and it is a part of that for a lot of Americans. This book is for grown-ups, and I mean people who are responsible, they handle their responsibilities, they are members of their community, they participate in their community, people who are autonomous, people who are responsible, that's who I'm defining as adults. How would Hart know if his use of heroin, amphetamines, LSD, MDMA, or other substances is getting out of hand? I would know it's problematic if I'm failing to meet my responsibilities. That are important to me. You write a book, you write, you have these deadlines, and I'm not making these deadlines because I am, I don't know, hung over from some drug use, well as heroin or something else. I'm not making these deadlines because I'm engaged in this behavior of using this drug when I should have been producing. I'm not meeting the obligations that I've made to my children. When I start to fall short in those areas as a result of my drug use, then that has to go. The subtitle of Hart's book is Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear. He says it took him so long to come out of the chemical closet about his drug use because he was worried about his professional image. I was a coward. I was afraid of the blowback that would occur if I said, oh yeah, of course I do a little cocaine, MDMA, heroin. There are millions of people using these drugs. I had to take a long look in the mirror and say, all right, we're vilifying people who are out of that drug users for having been labeled a drug user. And here I am doing the same activity and I'm staying in the closet. What kind of man am I? And I wasn't happy with the person who I was looking at in the mirror. And so that helped to force me to get out of the closet. I no longer want to be a coward.