Recently sacked UK drugs advisor: “We ignore scientific evidence at our peril.”
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 11:35 am | By: Radical Russ
(New Scientist) IF THERE is one thing that politicians can and should do to limit the damage caused by illegal drugs, it is to take careful note of the evidence and develop a rational drug policy. Some politicians find it easier to ignore the evidence, and pander to public prejudice instead.
I can trace the beginning of the end of my role as chairman of the UK’s official advisory body on drugs to the moment I quoted a New Scientist editorial (14 February, p 5). Entitled, fittingly enough, “Drugs drive politicians out of their minds”, the editorial asked the reader to imagine being seated at a table with two bowls, one containing peanuts, the other the illegal drug MDMA (ecstasy). Which is safer to give to a stranger? Why, the ecstasy of course.
I quoted these words in the Eve Saville lecture at King’s College London in July. This example plus other comments I have made – such as horse riding is more harmful than ecstasy – prompted Alan Johnson, the home secretary, to say that I had crossed the line from science to policy. This, he said, is why I had to go.
But simple, accurate and understandable statements of scientific fact are precisely what the advisory council is supposed to provide. Why would any scientist take up some future offer of a government advisory post when their advice can be treated with such disdain?
The results of a government inventing its own reality and acting on it can be seen in the appalling consequences the George W. Bush presidency had for world peace, the environment and human rights. The message for the British government is a simple one: don’t exclude rational argument in order to exploit a visceral public response. Politicians have to win the hearts and minds of their electorate. If your policy is informed by an underlying moral imperative, be open about what that is, and don’t try to disguise it with a veneer of pseudo-science. We ignore scientific evidence at our peril.
David Nutt, professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, was chairman of the UK government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs until he was dismissed last week by the UK home secretary
It’s a message President Obama needs to hear as well. He promised to return us from the George W. Bush presidency’s disdain for rational thought and scientific evidence. Obama promised to base our policies on sound science with respect to global climate change and other issues. But stubbornly, this administration’s drug czar is still out parroting the completely unscientific falsehood that “the raw cannabis plant is certainly not medicine”. Obama himself is laughing off the notion of marijuana legalization as having any economic benefit to cash-strapped states, despite the rational analysis by many prominent economists. And despite the evidence of reduced social farms in the Netherlands, Portugal, and other countries that have experimented with drug decriminalization and tolerance, Obama continues to push a federal policy that relies heavily on interdiction and incarceration.
For over a century now, every time hard scientists, social scientists, economists, and policy experts gather to take a rational and scientific look at marijuana policy, they recommend decriminalization and tolerance or they recognize medical usage of cannabis, from the 1894 British East India survey to the 1942 Laguardia Commission to the 1972 Shaffer Commission to the 1999 Institute of Medicine study. Cannabis can no longer be the exception to the “we believe in science” rule!
Topics: advisory council on the misuse of drugs, David Nutt, Decriminalization, Drug Czar, drug policy, George W. Bush, human rights, London, New Scientist, Portugal, President Obama, United Kingdom
More to the point:
The Guardian (a good, reputable, mainstream British daily newspaper)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/07/bad-science-nott-drugs
Saturday 07 Nov 2009
It’s pleasing to see, in the storm of commentary over Professor David Nutt’s sacking as the government’s chief drugs adviser, that everyone outside politics now recognises the importance of scientific evidence in devising laws. But a strange reasoning twitch has appeared, in the arguments of politicians and rightwing commentators. Science can tell us about the molecules, they say, about their effect on the body and the risks. But policy is separate: a matter for judgment calls on social and ethical issues. Only politicians, they say, can determine the correct way to send out a clear message to the public. It is not a matter for science.
This is wrong. Alongside research into the risks of drugs, lots of work has also been done on the deterrent impact of different laws, classifications and levels of enforcement. As every piece of research has its own imperfections (and nobody has yet conducted a randomised controlled trial on drugs policy) you can make your own mind up about whether you find the results compelling.
One strategy is to compare different countries. A World Health Organisation study from 2008, published in the academic journal PLOS Medicine, compared drug use and enforcement regimes around the world. It was clear: “Globally, drug use is not distributed evenly and is not simply related to drug policy, since countries with stringent user-level illegal drug policies did not have lower levels of use than countries with liberal ones.”
Alternatively, you can compare drug use between states within one country, if they have very different enforcement regimes, as when parts of the US liberalised their laws a few decades ago.
In 1976 Stuart and colleagues found that cannabis use in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was not affected by reductions in cannabis penalties, when compared with three neighbouring communities which kept penalties the same.
In 1981 Saveland & Bray looked at national drug use surveys from 1972 to 1977 and found cannabis use was higher in “decriminalised” states, before and after changes in the law. When they looked at rates of change, although cannabis use was increasing everywhere, the most rapid increase was in the states with the most severe penalties.
In the same year, Johnson and colleagues used survey data on high school use and found decriminalisation had no effect on attitudes or beliefs about drugs. These studies are old, but only because the liberalisations they rely on for data happened a long time ago.
Another line of evidence comes from “before and after” studies, when laws are changed. Cannabis use in the UK dropped after cannabis was moved from class B to class C. Prohibition of alcohol in the US from 1920 to 1933 is the most famous example: alcohol use fell dramatically when prohibition began, and the price of alcohol rose to 318% of its previous level. By 1929 this initial impact had begun to wear off and rapidly: alcohol consumption had risen to 70% of pre-prohibition levels, and was still rising when prohibition was repealed, and the price had fallen to 171% of pre-prohibition levels. This reversion to old patterns of use occurred despite escalating spending on enforcement, up 600% over the same period. There are many more examples.
This is not an unresearchable question. There are other factors at play in all of these studies, and if they are not sufficiently rigorous for the government, or a brief informal dip into the literature is not enough, (it shouldn’t be) then they should commission more research: because it is a tenet of evidence-based policy that if you discover a gap, you commission work to fill it.
This work is important for one simple reason. If you wish to justify a policy that will plainly increase the harms associated with each individual act of drug use, by creating violent criminal gangs as distributors, driving the sale of contaminated black market drugs, blighting the careers of users caught by the police, criminalising three million people, and so on, then people will reasonably expect, as a trade-off, that you will also provide good quality evidence showing that your policy achieves its stated aim of reducing the overall numbers of people using drugs.
I think we should do away with those “social farms” altogether.
apparently science means nothing if our political officials refuse to listen. it doesn’t matter if 80% of the public votes yes on an issue anymore. if there are enough corrupt rich bigots opposing us. the incarceration of innocent people will continue.
Well even though Obama has been less than impressive on this front maybe sen. webb’s commission will open his eyes at least to the debate.