MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksHe dismantles the racist underpinnings of arguments that drug use causes poverty and crime, showcases the benefits of harm reduction approaches (though he prefers the term \'health and happiness\' strategies), and convincingly takes on the influential but problematic neuroscientific model of addiction as a brain disease ... This is at once profoundly problematic and profoundly familiar: it evokes an expedient legal framework with strong precedents in the libertarian strand of United States politics. Circumventing the need for handwringing about addiction or complex systemic issues, it attributes all responsibility for the consequences of drug use to the individual ... Most egregious in this alleged cutting of the bullshit is Hart’s strategic dismissal of the \'so-called\' opioid epidemic ... The billions of dollars in profit reaped by the Sackler family are curiously absent from Hart’s analysis. Hart may think he can purge addiction from the room, but its absence haunts his argument ... Carl L. Hart’s Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear is good drug policy based on bad rhetoric.
