http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14823806

THE ECONOMIST
Drugs policy
Blinded by science

Nov 5th 2009
>From The Economist print edition
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), Dr 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 Dr 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 Dr 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 Dr 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 Dr 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, Dr 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
Dr 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.