Blinded by science

The Economist
Nov 5th 2009

Drugs policy

Blinded by science

An outspoken scientist is dumped, leaving the government in a mess

"THE Nutty Professor", as David Nutt is known in the Sun and other newspapers, has never been far from controversy. As chairman of the government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), Mr Nutt, who heads Bristol University's psychopharmacology unit, issued reports on narcotics and recommended where each should be placed on Britain's three-point scale of harmfulness. Such is the seething state of the drugs debate that more or less anything he said was guaranteed to enrage somebody.

Most recently he managed to upset Alan Johnson, the home secretary, who promptly sacked him on October 30th. His offence was to have repeated his view that cannabis and ecstasy are both less harmful than the government implies in its classification of them. Cannabis, currently class B, and ecstasy, class A, should both be demoted to class C, he said, adding for good measure that both were less harmful than alcohol and tobacco.

His comments about cannabis, which Mr Johnson described as part of a "campaign" against government policy, were made in a lecture at King's College London in July, which was published as a pamphlet last month. It followed an article in the racy Journal of Psychopharmacology in January, in which Mr Nutt upset ministers by comparing the risk of taking ecstasy with the risk of riding horses, a pursuit that claims a few deaths each year. Both lecture and article represented Mr Nutt's personal views and were clearly billed as such.

The government insists that the professor was sacked not for his scientific views but for overstepping the boundary between advising government and criticising it. But lecturing and publishing papers is hardly something that a full-time academic can give up when he takes on an (unpaid) advisory role. Anger has spread beyond the drugs world: Lord Drayson, the science minister, sent a private e-mail to Downing Street asking if the "big mistake" of Mr Nutt's dismissal could be reversed (it could not), and many of science's great and good have voiced their dismay.

Two more of the 31-member ACMD have since resigned in protest, and at least five others are said to be wavering. Mr Johnson is due to meet remaining members on November 10th to explain himself. Unless he manages to reassure them, other scientific jobs in government may prove harder to fill. By coincidence, the chief scientific adviser to the Home Office is to step down early next year. That job, like many across government, looks decidedly less appealing now.

In the meantime, who would want to take Mr Nutt's place? Even before the latest fiasco the job was wretched. The ACMD's recent reports on cannabis and ecstasy were dismissed by ministers before they were published. Following his article on ecstasy and riding, Mr Nutt was told by the home secretary of the day, Jacqui Smith, to apologise to the families of ecstasy victims for his "insensitivity". (He may have enjoyed her own comically insincere apology last month for over-claiming thousands of pounds in expenses. Ironically for someone who repeatedly turned a deaf ear to the ACMD, she said that she had only been following the recommendations of advisers.)

Unfortunately, the Conservatives are unlikely to handle things very differently if they win power next spring. David Cameron, who leads them, spoke out as a backbencher in favour of reclassifying ecstasy but has now clammed up. His party says only that Mr Nutt should have been sacked sooner. Amid the squabbling, important work is being neglected.

One of the ACMD members to resign was Les King, an expert on Spice, a "herbal high" which is not banned but many think should be. His departure means that work on it has stalled. Not for the first time in the war on drugs, public safety is taking a back seat.

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Economist.com

Nov 5th 2009

Drugs policy

Time to come clean

Politicians need to tell the truth about drugs, not sack those who are brave enough to do so

IT WAS unwise of Richard Nixon to describe the worldwide prohibition of narcotics as a "war on drugs". But the ban, which marked a gloomy 40th anniversary this year, has been very much like a war in one sense: the first casualty has been the truth. The latest victim is David Nutt, an eminent psychopharmacologist who was sacked from his role as chair of Britain's drugs advisory panel on October 30th after a bust-up with the home secretary (see article). Professor Nutt was held to have overstepped the line between advising and interfering when he repeated his view that cannabis and ecstasy were less harmful than the government claims.

Quarrels between ministers and their scientific advisers are neither new nor unusual: Winston Churchill harrumphed that experts should be "on tap, not on top", and advisers on everything from energy to education are routinely favoured or frozen out according to the whims of ministers. But in drugs policy the relationship is badly on the rocks, thanks to the yawning gap that has emerged between the evidence that scientists provide and the policies that politicians are prepared to support in public. The guilty party is the politicians-and until they adopt a more realistic approach to drugs, they will struggle to find any serious experts with whom they can get along.

Policy-based evidence

Overruling expert advice is a minister's prerogative. But in drugs policy, advice has come to be disregarded altogether. Despite claiming to follow an evidence-based approach to policy-making, Britain's government has serially ignored research that fails to support its own position. When its drugs experts began a review of the harmfulness of cannabis in 2007 (the third such review in five years, the previous two having failed to come up with the right answer), Gordon Brown, the new prime minister, made it clear that he intended to upgrade the drug on Britain's three-point scale of harm even if the report recommended otherwise (which it duly did). The following year, as the expert panel began a review of ecstasy, the then home secretary ruled out downgrading the drug, whether or not the report found evidence that she should (again, it did).

These repeated run-ins with the facts were embarrassing enough, but the solution that the government has now found in sacking Professor Nutt is more shameful still. The professor's inconvenient remarks were not part of a "campaign" against the government's policies, as ministers have shrilly suggested: they were made in an article in a peer-reviewed pharmacological journal and in a lecture at King's College London. If unpaid academic advisers are sacked for publishing such research, there will soon not be many left.

The debate about drugs has become so divorced from reality that it is hard to imagine what sort of advice-and what exquisite tact-would be required to avoid inadvertently embarrassing politicians over their wilder pronouncements on the subject. Mr Brown, for instance, is on the record as saying that cannabis is "lethal". It is not, and there is no way around that.

Sadly, the evidence-free approach to dealing with drugs seems no less popular with Britain's Conservative opposition. Before he became their leader, David Cameron supported a parliamentary report calling for ecstasy to be downgraded and for the government to get the UN's Commission on Narcotic Drugs talking about different ways to tackle drugs, including legalising them. Now that he is within a whisker of power, his confidence has deserted him: he says that no drug should be downgraded, and his party's line on Professor Nutt's dismissal is that it should have happened sooner. Such contempt for the facts-and for the lives that an evidence-based approach to drugs could save-is deplorable.