Two drugs experts quit in nanny state clash

‘Collision’ over cannabis use comes as some American states consider legalising pot

FIRST POSTED NOVEMBER 3, 2009

The fallout from the sacking of the Government's chief drug adviser, Professor David Nutt, has begun. Two members of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) which Nutt chaired - Dr Les King, a respected chemist, and Marion Walker of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society - resigned on Sunday and others are expected to follow.

In short, scientists and politicians have met head on and the result is chaos.

Nutt was fired in a letter from Home Secretary Alan Johnson on Friday, days after he had expressed dismay at prime minister Gordon Brown's insistence that cannabis remain a class B drug, against the advice of scientists - Nutt included - who say it is no more harmful than alcohol and nicotine.

Senior scientists were appalled by Johnson's decision to fire Nutt. Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice at King's College, London, told the Independent on Sunday: "I'm shocked and dismayed that he [Johnson] appears to believe that political calculation trumps honest and informed scientific opinion".

The Home Secretary's argument is that Nutt, who also believes ecstasy is no more harmful than horse-riding, has "crossed the line" and become a campaigner rather than an adviser.

The BBC's home editor Mark Easton, who broke the story of Nutt's sacking, is among those observers who are saying that the result of this "collision" between science and politics could have profound ramifications.

Easton, who has published Johnson's letter and Nutt's response in full on his BBC blog, makes the point that when the ACMD was set up in 1971, Parliament was informed by Home Office ministers that the council was there to provide "the key advice" on how drugs should be classified, and to ensure that government policy on drugs was always "evidence-based".

But what if the minister doesn't like the evidence, asks Easton. Twice in the past year the Labour government has ignored its experts because of what the former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith described at the weekend as the "need to send out a message".

In other words, the nanny state knows best, whatever the evidence-based advice of the scientists might be.

By chance, the row over Nutt's views on cannabis use comes at a time when in America the prospect of legalisation of cannabis is becoming a reality in some states. This is mainly because of the increasingly widespread use of cannabis for medical reasons - to tackle the side-effects of chemotherapy in cancer patients and the crippling nausea suffered by HIV patients on medication.

Writing for the Sunday Times, Andrew Sullivan reports that a California legistative committee held the first hearings last week on a proposal that the use of marijuana should be decriminalised. "The incentive? The vast amounts of money the bankrupt state could raise by taxing cannabis," wrote Sullivan.

A report in yesterday's Los Angeles Times from northern California showed how the local economy in one rural town had become virtually dependent on "medical pot farming".

FIRST POSTED NOVEMBER 3, 2009

Add to:

Comments

Hide comments

Get a thicko Stalinist nutter who left school with no qualifications - ideally someone who hates anyone with an education. Make him Home Secretary. Then allow him to overrule the Government's own qualified experts. Next this over-promoted Marxist thug will be over-ruling judges too. It's just like the early days of the USSR, when "workers" without a clue, but with a hatred of paper-pushers, were promoted and made Ministers... having qualified and able people fired (or shot) out of envy and stupidity. Johnson is a typical Marxist commissar - thick as shit, full of evil, and gets off on pushing other people around.

Posted by Neil McGowan at 10:15am on November 2, 2009

Why did David Nutt cover his mouth with his hand so many times when offering only tangential answers to questions (on TV)? People often do that when they are telling porkies.

Posted by TomNightingale at 11:02am on November 2, 2009

I have no idea if he is a Stalinist, unlikely on a minister's salary in this governmnet of managers, but some right wingers call anyone who is left of Thatcher Marxists and Stalinists, rather than sticking to the facts. Johnson was a postman, fact, and probably a shop steward. He's brownnosed his way up through newLabour, sucked up to Brown, and now thinks he's superior to a highly qualified professor. Just shows how the inadequate lose all sense when given any power. It's the dictatorship of the inept, academic advisers should resign en masse until these jumped up idiots learn some respect for learning. Didn't he even get an Open University degree in home economics? It's nothing whatever like the early days of the USSR, that's just silly hyperbole.

Posted by Peter Simmons at 11:39am on November 2, 2009

Irony is, the stats show that no deaths have been recorded as a direct result of taking cannabis; by contrast, thousands die of drink-related and smoking-related diseases or accidents - every year. Such stats are 10-20 years old, even if Joe Public seems unaware. There can be certain dangers, but chiefly when cannabis consumption is prolonged. The crux of the matter is, will the generational divide on this subject ever be reconciled? Under 40s are generally comfortable with changing our archaic drug laws, or at least discussing the subject; but the over 40s and colonel blimps are, for a variety of reasons (chiefly unfamiliarity with medical and police findings) feel the status quo provides the answers ... despite all evidence to the contrary. Worldwide experience points to the fact that increased spending on banning drugs and their use is (a) a failure - because the drugs industry keeps growing; and (b) counter-productive - because it drives everything underground ... making it more dangerous. Why more dangerous? Because substances thereby become impossible to monitor for quality (dubious and sometimes dangerous replacements are often added); and drug barons use ever more desperate measures to get past law enforcement agencies and on to the streets. This pushes up the risk and the likely loss of life in the supply chain. It's now a hoary old argument to suggest that drugs be legalised, so they can be monitored for quality and taxed (to raise valuable revenue), and to provide clean, regulated points of sale. Best of all is the virtual certainty that if society were able control the distribution of drugs, rather than allowing their sale on the streets, at night, to anyone with the cash, crime of all kinds would drop like lead ballon - saving huge amounts of police time and resources. But society prefers the comfy dream that drugs can be, or ever have been controlled. There is no statistical evidence for that pipedream whatsoever. We nurture the crazy illusion that we're being logical and responsible, despite all evidence to the contrary, yet we pile an expensive and absurd burden on our overstreched police ... which is rightly resented. Welcome to our emotional world of smokescreens, mirrors and delusions.

Posted by Anthony McCall-Judson at 11:57am on November 2, 2009

I wish we could have a 'grown up' debate once and for all on soft drugs - no Daily Mail, no pandering to vociferous moralists, no 'shock horror', just sensible people debating the pros and cons. Personally, I look forward to the day (or night) when our city centres are full of stoned people rather than drunk people.

Posted by Jess D at 12:06pm on November 2, 2009

Once again the nanny state's approach towards the regulation of addictive, harmful and mind-altering substances is called into question - yes, I am talking about tobacco and alcohol, and the harm and problems that they cause in total must dwarf the similar damage caused by the currently illegal drugs, as drug-related deaths are often individually reported in the Press, but tens of thousands die unreported each year from tobacco- and alcohol-related illnesses. Spasmodic calls for legalising (and regulating) some currently illegal drugs are heard from time to time, and if this were to take place then, as with booze and smokes, the Government, and the country as a whole, could benefit from the potential tax take, the cost savings from being able to dispense with anti-criminal efforts towards their suppression, and possibly even the savings in avoiding war-mongering in such out-of-the-way places as Afghanistan. So let's consider buying up the entire Afghan poppy crop to keep the native farming communities onside, use what is required for medical purposes, make some available to "users" at an official price (cf the pre-1971 private prescribing of heroin) in a heavily-regulated market (and they don't come much more regulated than tobacco at present) or allow them to use methadone if they need to...and then burn the rest. Viola! no illegal drugs industry, no need to invade Afghanistan, no drug wars and cartels, no pushers, no drug-related crime! Sure, there would be a flurry of lurid events and statistics to show that it apparently wasn't working, but it would settle down eventually (probably about as quickly as the current liberalisation of drinking laws...), and we could then all get on with our lives, able to choose whether or not to participate - but as with smoking, most of us would choose (our choice, not the Government's) to opt out. I am sure I haven't got all the details right, but this topic really needs to be discussed properly - it shouldn't be a "third rail" route to political purdah.

Posted by Carruthers at 12:08pm on November 2, 2009

This is what you get with a morally and mentally lightweight Government. They do things 'because they can'. I'm all in favour of anyone been able to represent the people (subject to a selection process to weed out criminals etc) but if you haven't got the mental capacity for the job you're given then you should draw on the knowledge of those appointed experts that have; civil servants and the like. We've had 12 years of it now, so nothing really surprises any more. Only another 6 months to go!

Posted by Keith Gowthorpe at 2:55pm on November 2, 2009

I do not wish to air any opinions on the 'correct' classification of drugs, but (speaking as a scientist) this is a fight that scientists will likely lose because many have already sold themselves to the devil and think they have a right to get involved in advocacy. The task of scientists is to produce reliable evidence, not to become an advocacy group. Politicians govern, and should not interfere with the scientific process. However, government is not science, and it is quite in order for politicians to listen respectfully to scientists and choose not to take their advice. Normal science doesn't deal with values, ethics and morals, and a whole lot of other things that politicians grapple with. Unfortunately, there is a postmodern idea known as 'post-normal' science where so-called scientists do get involved in such things. In my view, that's a prostitution of science, but governments have deliberately dragged scientists into the political world to underpin their lying propaganda such as 'climate change', and have poured money into bodies such as the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and supported political enterprises such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Our taxes have been supporting this basically Marxist thinking such that Mike Hulme, socialist, founder of the Tyndall Centre, and Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia (UEA), no longer sounds like a scientist when he states "Philosophers and practitioners of science have identified this particular mode of scientific activity as one that occurs where values are embedded in the way science is done and spoken...It has been labelled post-normal science. Climate change seems to fall in this category. Disputes in post-normal science focus on who gets funded...who has the ear of policy. The IPCC is a classic example of a post-normal scientific activity...a 'normal' reading of science...assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow...exchanges often reduce to ones about scientific truth rather than about values, perspectives and political preferences...self-evidently, dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth-seeking...scientists and politicians must trade truth for influence...The function of climate change...is not a[n]...environmental phenomenon to be solved...not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change...to rethink how we take forward our political...projects...mythical ways of thinking about climate change reflect back to us truths...The idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource...As a resource of the imagination, the idea of climate change can be deployed around our...virtual worlds...The idea of climate change can provoke new ethical and theological thinking...We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilise these stories in support of our projects."

Posted by Kevin McGrane at 5:38pm on November 2, 2009

But is there any truth about the surfeit of anecdotal evidence loose on the streets of London. An inordinate amount of mentally disturbed Jamaicans who presumably misspent their youth seeking Jah and ska via skunk !

Posted by Iqbal Halani at 7:54pm on November 2, 2009

Actually, Peter Simmons, it was Johnson himself who described himself as a "radical Marxist"... although like most Stalinists, he quickly learned to keep quiet about his political leanings if it would help him trouser a nice Ministerial salary and expenses. He left school at 15, has no educational qualifications whatsoever, and is completely unqualified for his post as Home Secretary, presiding over the UK Legal System. "Stalinist bully-boy thug" describes him very accurately - a Luddite whose hate-fuelled rants would make "Dave Spart" look like a moderate.

Posted by Neil McGowan at 10:22pm on November 2, 2009

Each of us owns our own body. We are not owned by our government. What we do TO our bodies is our business only. That is our Primary Fundamental Right. My Body. My Business.

Posted by Bernard Palmer at 12:21am on November 3, 2009

Kevin McGrain - I found your post difficult to follow but that's mostly due to the First Post being unable to let posters use paragraphs. But on the subjects of cannabis and climate change, the only connection I see is that hemp is a preeminent solution to climate change; the fastest growing plant on the planet, grows on any land including marginal, takes up carbon and can be made into products like clothing, bedding, furnishing, ropes, building boards and thousands of others, which, because it's so hard wearing, last for decades, removing the carbon for a long time, and even when worn out it can be recycled into strengthening paper. It takes a long time to grow forests, and trees remove less carbon than hemp in a growing season, depositing a lot of it back in the form of leaves.

Posted by Peter Simmons at 11:14am on November 3, 2009