The sacking of Professor David Nutt as the Government's chief adviser on drugs has produced an extraordinary reaction. The Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, fired Professor Nutt after he said alcohol and tobacco were more dangerous than drugs such as cannabis, ecstasy and LSD. He also criticised politicians for 'distorting' and 'devaluing' the research evidence in restoring cannabis to the category of a class B drug from class C. Professor David Nutt said alcohol and tobacco were more dangerous than drugs such as cannabis, ecstasy and LSD The entire bien-pensant world appears to have decided that Nutt is a martyr to free speech - sacked because his 'scientifically-based' advice was rejected by ministers who were pandering to popular hysteria about drug use. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs that Nutt chaired is, apparently, in uproar. Two members resigned yesterday in protest at the sacking, with claims that others will follow. The row is being characterised as a battle between science in one corner, represented by the heroic Nutt, and populist prejudice represented by the Home Secretary in the other. This is an absolute travesty of the truth. First of all, Nutt was not sacked because he gave ministers advice they didn't want to hear. It was because he was playing politics and undermining government policy. As the Home Secretary said yesterday, it is for an adviser to advise and a minister to decide. An adviser cannot then step into the public field and campaign against government decisions. Just suppose the chief adviser on education, say, were to campaign against tuition fees; or the adviser on climate change were to attack the Government for reducing carbon emissions because the effects of global warming had been exaggerated. They would be out on their ear - and the commentators now screaming about 'freedom of speech' would be the first to applaud. The reason they are casting the Home Secretary as the villain of this episode is that the chattering classes have bought into the idea that soft drugs are indeed less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco. They therefore think Nutt is the voice of scientific reason. But he is not. This is the man who previously said ecstasy was less dangerous than horse riding. This fatuous argument was shredded by one of the country's leading experts on ecstasy, Professor Andrew Parrott, who said that 'nearly every statement Nutt made about the effects of ecstasy was incorrect' and 'displayed a staggering disregard for the empirical evidence' which showed that ecstasy was at least as powerful as cocaine. Other scientists have also come out against Nutt. According to experts such as psychiatrist Dr Robin Murray, there is significant evidence that cannabis triggers psychosis and schizophrenia. Even the Government's own National Director for Mental Health, Professor Louis Appleby, told the Advisory Council last year that cannabis should be reclassified as more harmful because there was now sufficient evidence that it could contribute to a pattern of relapse and risk in mental health patients. Nutt claims his arguments are 'scientific'. Does that mean that scientists such as Professors Parrott and Appleby or Dr Murray are not scientific? And just how rigorous is Nutt's science anyway? For his comparison of the relative risks of alcohol, tobacco and soft drugs is distinctly unscientific. Any proper comparison of the risks involved can be made only with similar levels of consumption. But, clearly, the general level of consumption of illegal drugs is very much lower than that of alcohol or tobacco. So Nutt is not comparing like with like. No one disputes the immense harm done by alcohol or tobacco. But the crucial point is that the damage done by illegal drugs kicks in at a far lower level of individual consumption. If people have a pint of beer or a glass of wine once a week, this hardly causes any health problems. But according to Professor Parrott, if people take ecstasy every weekend, this causes low moods, fatigue, disrupted sleep, mid-week depression and other ailments. In any event, the fact that tobacco and alcohol are dangerous does not alter the risks posed by illegal drugs. One might as well say that you run more risk of a car accident than being murdered. So what? Does that mean murder should be regarded as any less serious? But the way Nutt assessed the risks posed by all these substances is even more questionable still. For he invented his own drug classification system, for which he asked 77 psychiatrists to grade the harm done by a range of illegal drugs as well as alcohol and tobacco. Only 29 replied - far too few for a reliable assessment - so he asked other medical experts to give their views. But we don't know what kind of doctors these were. Chest physicians, for example, would very likely put tobacco at the top of their list of harmful substances. In other words, this was surely a deeply subjective and thus unscientific way of collecting evidence. Moreover, his classification system did not assess the actual harm done by a drug, only how it compared to other drugs in the same category. At a stroke, this shifted ecstasy from being one of the most harmful to one of the least harmful drugs, and downplayed the risks of psychosis and other damage associated with cannabis. In addition, by including alcohol and tobacco in the same classification system, Nutt gave the impression that the very notion of illegal-drugs was irrelevant. He thus undermined not just the classification of one drug or another but the very idea that drugs such as cannabis or ecstasy should be illegal at all. Similarly, his recent remarks have given the impression cannabis and ecstasy aren't very harmful. This helps create a culture of social acceptability for illegal drug-taking, which will lead more young people to try them and get sucked onto the drug escalator. It is hard to think of a more irresponsible position for a governmental drug adviser. In continuing to whip up a storm against the Government, Nutt has also claimed that it ignored the advice of the Advisory Council not to upgrade cannabis to category B. But the Council had actually been divided on this issue. When this was put to him on BBC News yesterday, Nutt was visibly winded and started spluttering and stammering before admitting that this was indeed the case. In fact, the Council has long been in thrall to the drug liberalisation lobby. Indeed, a furious Professor Parrott previously accused it of deciding to downgrade ecstasy without properly considering the scientific evidence about its damaging effects. The idea that this commotion is about a conflict between science and politics is thus quite wrong. In the field of drug policy, science has been in part corrupted by the climate of opinion in which the dangers of illegal drugs have been deliberately minimised. This is part of a trillion-dollar global campaign to legalise drugs - in which certain pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest, since they stand to make a huge amount of money from the sale of cannabis, ecstasy and other drugs if they were to be legalised. With virtually the whole of the drug-related voluntary sector succumbing to the siren song of the legalisers, the whole discourse around drug policy has been changed to 'harm reduction', the camouflage for legalisation. For a long time, the Home Office has supinely gone along with this. Now, for once, it has fought back. For this small chink of sanity, Alan Johnson deserves praise. With the Advisory Council and its supporters piling on the pressure, he must hold his nerve.Fatuous, dangerous, utterly irresponsible - the Nutty professor who's distorting the truth about drugs
Last updated at 8:47 AM on 02nd November 2009
More from Melanie Phillips...
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MORE NUTT
>> MONDAY, NOVEMBER 02, 2009
Briefly, for those who believe Professor Nutt is a genuine scientist who was martyred for uttering objective truths about drug use, I recommend this articleby Melanie Phillips. Hat tip to Marky.
There isn't the space on this blog to analyse why he so richly deserved the sack, but from what I've seen so far of the BBC's continued coverage this morning , you won't see it there. And for the record, though I am not a scientist, I do sit on a body which contains many experts on drugs (working in both academic fields and rehabilitation) who have markedly different views from Professor Nutt and his fellow government cronies. What they have been saying has been a huge matter of concern to my committee for years. But its views are consistently ignored by the BBC.
NUTT OUT (PART2)
>> SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 01, 2009
The BBC is rousing itself today into a highly-predictable frenzy of indignation over the aftermath of Professor David Nutt's justified sacking as head of the government drugs advisory committee.
As a Biased BBC reader has pointed out, the pro-cocaine culture at the BBC is both illegal and has demonstrable victims. Now the BBC journalists are whipping this story up as if it were entirely a matter of academic freedom, when in reality, Professor Nutt and his associates are wet liberals who are as wrong in their analysis of drug-taking and its impact as our chums at the Met Office are about so-called "climate change".
The real scandal here is that for years, the corrupt government of Blair and Brown has stacked so-called advisory committees with their own cronies and poodles. When their pigeons come home to roost, they don't like it. Chances of the BBC investigating that? Zero.
Not Amused
For me, humour can overcome certain political views if it’s funny enough.
The assumption that everyone will automatically agree is still irritating , but I can put that aside if there’s a good laugh in there.
Did anyone see how miffed that Mark Steel fellow was when Ian Hislop called him a Stalinist on HIGNFY ? He was definitely bovvered.
The thing I’m not so sure about is the stupid Anne Frank joke from the ubiquitous David Mitchell who I usually quite like. His attempted joke drew acomplaint on Feedback which was briefly and peremptorily dealt with, below several letters praising other programmes.
He thought an amusing example of something very ridiculous was the idea that someone whose need to keep quiet was a matter of life or death - would ask for a drum kit. Ha very ha.
The fact that we all know Anne Frank’s terrible fate makes this not one of the occasions where the humor justifies the content.
QUESTION TIME?
>> SATURDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2009
I see that the BBC's strange version of political 'balance' was in evidence again in this week's edition of R4's Any Questions? It was time for an appearance by UKIP (Marta Andreason, the former chief accountant of the EU,now an MEP for UKIP), so who is lined up against her? The ridiculous (but fanatic europhile) Charlie Faulkner, Shirley Williams (ditto) and from the Tories, one of the last remaining europhile MPs Kenneth Clark. Not only that, they chose an audience from Cambridge University that, judging from its reactions, was also madly pro-EU. Predictably, the three panellists had a joint love-in about how wonderful the EU was, while Andrea - though giving as good an account of herself as possible in the circumstances - was pushed to the margins. According to my sums, parties with eurosceptic policies amassed almost 60% of the vote at the June elections, not 25%.
The BBC, of course, loves the idea of liberalising the drug laws, or better still, making hard drugs legal so that the boys and girls at White City can have oodles of their favourite white powder and waccy baccy. So when Alan Johnson - under pressure from dear Gordon - sacks Professor David Nutt for over-stepping his brief and lobbying to have cannabis re-classified (again) as a class 'C' drug, there's no question where their loyalties lie.
The whole row is cast as a matter of freedom of expression and opinion, with batteries of experts wheeled out to say a) that Professor Nutt is a jolly good all-round egg and scientist who should be allowed to say what he wants, and b)the government is being repressive. Naturally, in support of the good professor in the BBC's coverage are charities such as Drugscope and Release, which for years have been pressing for legalisation of all kinds of drugs, and who believe that methadone is a 'cure' for heroin addiction.
But what's completely missing from the equation is any consideration that Professor Nutt and his colleagues have been a joke for years because the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs - which he chaired - has been hijacked by liberals like him. Also, that - although Alan Johnson has actually done something right for once - the whole of the government's policy towards illegal drug use is a shambles, and it is they that caused the current climate of ill-judged and highly dangerous liberalism.
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