The New York State Psychiatric Institute looks like a bastardised version of the Louvre's glass pyramid, sliced down the middle and hacked on to the side of a low-rise tower. Three floors up is the lab where Carl Hart conducts experiments that, once explained, invariably prompt the same response: is that legal?
Hart pays volunteers to take ecstasy, methamphetamine or marijuana. He then monitors everything they do, eat, drink and say. He draws blood on the hour, sometimes more frequently. He searches their kitchen waste to see if they didn't finish any of their food. And to top it off, Hart's recruits -- who live in a windowless, fully surveilled apartment for up to three weeks -- spend hours taking computer-based cognitive tests, clicking away in a drug-induced euphoria, or a drug-withdrawal dysphoria.
Though Hart is a popular lecturer with a joint appointment in the psychology and psychiatry departments at Columbia University, it's his research that has made him an increasingly prominent figure in academic circles. Unlike any other in the US, Hart's lab comprises a full-scale laboratory-cum-apartment (called the ResLab, short for residential laboratory) and a nearby surveillance cubby, informally known as the control room.
From this nerve centre, research assistants record data, administer tests and keep a watchful eye on Hart's subjects 24 hours a day. The assistants watch live video feeds on 14 black-and-white monitors, and they listen in on conversations picked up by strategically placed microphones with individual volume controls. The surveillance is all-electronic -- no one-way mirrors here -- and its panopticon completeness would have made Orwell giddy.
For the most controversial studies, those that involve repeated high doses of insufflated meth (snorted up the nose to simulate the way the powdered form is often taken on the street), Hart has a separate room called the MethLab, where his subjects are hooked up throughout the day to an electrocardiogram, a blood-pressure monitor and a pulse oximetry finger sensor. Electrodes and other read-outs are connected from their bodies to wires that pass through a small hole in the wall, into a machine called the Poet Plus 8100 Vital Signs Monitor.
