UK Looks At Drug Harms And Drugs Liberalization
“Since setting out an entirely different system of classifying drugs in terms of their relative harms in 2007 David Nutt has been on a collision course with the government.
Why? Because the system of drug classification that he proposed effectively dissolved the distinction between the legal drugs and the illegal drugs and created a single ranking of harmful substances. In doing so he was in effect proposing the dissolution of the distinction between the legal drugs and the illegal drugs that has been a cornerstone of our drug laws well before the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act.
If one is going to argue against that distinction it hardly makes sense to do it from the position of being the person responsible for advising government on the current laws relating to the illegal drugs.” Professor Neil McKeganey, Scottish Herald – 2 November.
With help of the news media ever hungry for a good story, ‘Sacked – for telling the truth about drugs’, The Independent; ‘Like Drunks in denial, MPs blow off the truth about drugs’ (Rod Liddle, The Sunday Times), Professor Nutt did his best, in a frenzied tour of the TV studios over the weekend, to turn himself into a martyr for dispassionate scientific advice; in between issuing ever bolder challenges to the government and traducing both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary.
Much has been made of this row, which has thrown the government’s relationship with its scientific advisors into crisis. Yet political commentators and scientists alike would be advised to hold their breath.
In media management terms David Nutt’s ‘it’s a bleak day for science and worse one for politics’ sound bite worked a treat. It set the editorial agenda for the reporting of his sacking. It ensured a media pursuit of ‘TV scientists’ prepared to pontificate on this apparent issue of principle, some of whom may indeed have been ready and waiting. Even my favourite sceptic, Rod Liddle, fell for some of it, opining that ‘we have a serious drugs problem and the sacking of Professor Nutt suggests that there is not the remotest political will to address it.’
Political will or not (though the jury is still out on Alan Johnson’s tenure as Labour’s sixth Home Secretary since 1997) Rod is wrong to think that Professor Nutt’s position was either contributing to or supporting our drugs policy, which however poorly or mistakenly applied, has the clear and correct purpose of tackling and controlling the illicit narcotic trade. As Neil McKeganey pointed out in yesterday’s Scottish Herald, the Professor’s collision course with the Government pre-dates his curious appointment to chair of the government’s arcane Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.
Nutt got a pretty clear run over the weekend. Yet he has been the one to spark the feud with government in the first place and to keep it alight. Ever since the government rejected the ACMD’s advice for the reclassification of ecstasy and cannabis he has been on the attack, using the public platform offered by his post to advocate the dissolution of the distinction between licit and illicit drugs. Many might agree with him but that does not make his position the any the less untenable or indeed any the less hypocritical.
Whether intentional or not, Nutt’s public stance has been to trivialise the drug problem, particularly the harms of so called recreational drugs, at a time when evidence is mounting of greater, not lesser, harms associated with both cannabis and ecstasy than previously thought and over a period which has seen a drop in the age of initiation and an increase in drug deaths.
The fact that these drugs have effectively been normalised through lax enforcement and media sanctioning should matter not one jot to the ACMD’s formal advice. Equally irrelevant to their ‘scientific’ judgement is resort to national statistics which suggest that cannabis use is going down – the argument they used to persuade Charles Clarke not to revoke their classification of cannabis. As any decent scientist or social scientist working in the drugs field will tell you the data base about cannabis use (prevalence, frequency and intensity) is alarmingly inadequate. The ACMD, for all its harm reduction credentials, has been sadly lacking in its attention to the precautionary principle.
On Saturday night on Radio Five Live a cannabis dependent and former LSD user expressed his horror at hearing Professor Nutt’s casual approach to drug harms and the entirely misplaced reassurance he was (possibly unwittingly) relaying to listeners. Free now from LSD but hating his cannabis dependence, this one caller anxiously described the spliff wrappers he walked through everyday on his Ladbroke Grove estate stairwell and his concern for the kids who dropped them there.
Nutt of course has form on bizarre and eccentric advice and on being out of touch in his laboratory. Amongst the incorrect statements about MDMA made in his famous ‘alcohol and tobacco are less harmful than cannabis and ecstasy’ Lancet article (Nutt, Blakemore et al, 2007) the strangest was that ecstasy generated less pleasure than smoking a cigarette, begging the question of why this drug is so popular at raves and used more by kids here than anywhere else in Europe.
So before any more scientific knights charge into battle on his behalf they might, as Professor Parrot has, check how well Nutt and Blakemore’s Lancet classification stands up on the basis of published scientific research about these drugs. Commenting on the low scores given to MDMA on every harm scale – 18th out of 20 – Andy Parrott wrote, ‘Unfortunately none of these statements was based on cited referenced sources’…… “When I rescaled these scores using scientific data, the MDMA emerged as the fifth most harmful drug on the list (lower than heroin and cocaine, but broadly similar to some of the other Class A drugs).”
He has not been alone in questioning this singular harm index. Just last week Professor Robin Murray attacked Nutt’s contrast of a 2.6 fold increase in the risk of psychosis carried by using cannabis with a twenty fold increase for lung cancer for tobacco smokers: ‘Unfortunately he is not comparing like with like. The twenty fold increased risk is not carried by just being a cigarette smoker but rather by being a long term heavy smoker”. Cannabis of course is normally smoked with tobacco – and without a filter. Attention has also been drawn to the low response of professors on whose views the harm index rested.
I suspect that Behavioural Pharmacology Professor Stollerman’s conclusion from Nutt’s sacking (that the Government places no value on scientific evidence and his stricture that scientific advisors all now risk being branded as ‘collaborators with government’) will prove as hasty and as intemperate as the Professor he defends.
Much as he and the Liberal MP, Dr Evan Harris, a staunch supporter of Nutt’s approach to drug harms and drugs liberalisation, are determined to elevate Nutt’s resignation into an issue of principle, scientific infallibility and freedom of speech, the sad fact is that there has been little of principle in Nutt’s conduct, even less of constraint and not always the best of science.
The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs would do well to reflect on this as they ponder their future and before they rush to resign in his support.
Topics: 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, Britain, current laws, David Nutt, drug classifications, drugs, England, Governance, government, harmful substances, illegal drugs, legal drugs, UK, United Kingdom
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