Gide, humans. Welcome to the safe space for unsafe conversations. This is your refuge from the black and

white world of right-wing blowhards and left-wing complainers. This is the place beyond the

echo chamber of your social media feed and the partisan mainstream press. It's a place without good guys and bad guys

where the only thing that's banned is taking offence at a true statement. And I suppose black and

white worldviews as well are not welcome here. There are no taboos. There are only good arguments

and bad arguments. I'm here to

sniff them out. Change doesn't happen in an echo chamber of friends. Welcome to uncomfortable

conversations. Today on the show, have you ever taken a mind-altering substance, especially in illicit one?

Dr. Carl Hart has, does, advocates for the responsible use of mind-altering illicit drugs, including heroin and other such boogeyman compounds.

I don't say that entirely satirically or snarkily.

I have been in close contact with people, friends, colleagues, interview subjects, whose lives have been

deranged and ruined by drug use. And so this was a difficult and sort of interesting conversation

to have and a difficult and interesting mind to probe. Carl is a professor at Columbia

University. He's one of the first tenured African-American

professors of sciences at Columbia. He's a psychologist and neuroscientist, and he's renowned,

notorious, some might say, for his research on drug abuse and drug addiction. And he's a strong and vocal advocate for decriminalizing recreational drugs,

for believing that drug use isn't necessarily bad,

and for essentially coming out of the closet as drug users.

He has, he does, he wants other people to as well. He thinks that we would all

have a much more healthy relationship to the way that we understand drug use in our society. If it

wasn't so cloaked in secrecy and sometimes shame, I don't agree with everything that Carl says,

but gee, it's lovely to have conversations with someone who just totally doesn't give, I mean, he gives zero Fs, so to speak, about what other people think and about what other people's assumptions about him and his habits are.

...