Not science but garbage

Dixon

All true but beside the point. Nutt was an unelected adviser on a very narrowly defined remit. Policy is the responsibility of elected administrators formed upon the basis of a breadth of considerations, of which Nutts kind of narrow specialism can never be more than a small ingredient.

In order to become an "expert" it is commonly the case that a person has an almost autistically circumscribed narrowness of focus in the first place. Nutt illustrates this by his Asperger style conduct in television interviews where, among other things, his thoughtless, tactless bull-in-a-china-shop way of conveying his views expresses a near complete numbness to the humanly emotive dimensions of the topic.At the very least he is an arrogant klutz.

Pot Head

I've taken loads of E's and they haven't done me any harm. I rode a horse once and fell of and broke my leg.

Stephen Green

A major problem is that there is a widespread misconception that a statistical analasys is based on science. In fact there is no causal link that is demonstrated by statistics. Many so called scientists make a good living out of producing reports of one form or another (e.g. epidemiological) which are deeemed to be based on science but in fact are based on the researcher's existing prejudices.
A prime example is the constant stream of contradictory advise on diets.
No - scientific proof based on cause and effect requires more that sitting in front of a computor and playing about with dubious research data and a spread sheet : but, of course, that would be too musch like hard work and might produce results tha that were against the interests of the relevant research funding quango and that would never do. So back to the statistics and the ever available supply of grants so as to keep the wolf from the door.

Lupus Lungfish

This whole classification debate is irrelevent. I'v never met anyone who steers clear of a drug because its class 2 rather than class 3 or whatever. The profs right in his assertion that the real dangers lie on the shelves of your local off license. The booze and fags are far more habit forming and dangerous than smoking the odd joint or popping the odd pill. Of course its all relative to the quantity you choose to imbibe, snort or smoke etc. Good drugs awareness education in schools would be a step in the right direction.

Neil Craig

You are wrong on this Melanie. Professor Nutt did not say that canabis, or anything else was 100% safe but that it & ecstasy killed far fewer (several orders of magnitude fewer) than cigarettes & alcohol & slightly less than horse riding. That is simply the fact.

That it is unknown whether psychosis is increasing/reducing/unchanged shows that any effect canabis is having is, at worst, marginal.

It should not be the state's function to ban things unless the damage is unequivocal & substantial.

We have seen that "independent" government advisors are selected, promoted & knighted not for their accuracy but for giving the advice that is wanted. The examples of Sir David "by 2100 Antarctica will be the only habitable continent" King & Sir John "Iraq has WMDs pointed at us" Scarlet shows the problems of such "advisors.

I believe you have previously commented on the disgraceful statement by Professor Hulme in the nomenklatura's paper that it is right for scientists to change the facts as they "rub up aganist" politicians. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/mar/14/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange
That is what Professor Nutt has refused to do & a practice you should support even if you don't like his conclusions. I suspect it has cost him his knighthood.

Baron Pipin II

In a free country, handguns should indeed be as freely available as swimming pools, and not because they kill fewer kids than the water filled holes in the gardens. That’s how it was in this country not that long ago. Misuse it, however, and one spent life inside a harsh prison, or lost life altogether. The reason it’s no longer so is, partly, that we find it unacceptable to really punish anyone for anything except for an unseen victim crime – speeding etc. Punish in a sense that the miscreant feels a lot of pain. (Sounds so barbaric, doesn’t it?) We’d rather get pain inflicted upon ourselves by allowing the gradual erosion of freedoms and liberties. If we’re not careful we’ll end up having none of the latter, but plenty of pain.

Anon

Stephen Green has little understanding of the funding process. The majority of academic research scientists are on short-term contracts, funded by externally-awarded grants. 100% of their salary comes from the grant. No grant = no salary (typically around £23k by the way), and hence redundancy. The grant funding success rate is currently at 20%. A gravy train it isn't.

Lungfish

Its also probable that our latest Afghanistan expedition has resulted in more deaths due to the increased supply of heroin. It would be difficult to prove or quantify but it maybe that the huge quantities of the stuff coming out of Afghanistan may actually destroy more lives here than the Islamofacists ever could.

Dave

@Stephen Green: That may be the stupidest thing I've ever read on this blog.
And that's really saying something.

Baron Pipin II

Are we or are we not but free agents guided by our belief system, moral values etc. The Government or its agencies could and should warn us of the danger of drugs, but in the end it should be up to every one of us to decide whether to imbibe alcohol, smoke cannabis, snort cocaine or whatever. Not old enough to buy drinks laced with opium, smoke cannabis etc. on offer at the turn of the last century. The vast majority of people didn't because they knew that if they got harmed they were on their own, no help available except from few charities. Today, the ‘free at the point of delivery’ NHS steps in and patches one up regardless the cost, no questions asked. If one commits a crime whilst under the influence of drugs, the punishment doesn’t hurt. Our criminal justice system has become vacuous of punishment. The aim of the enlightened prison system ceased to be retribution as the core reason for its existence. It's restorative justice, now. It restores the miscreants to whatever it was he got sent down for, i.e. drug taking or dealing in this instance, in no time at all.

Being shielded from the harmful consequences of our misguided personal decisions by the numerous agencies of the state ready to step in and bail us out, and without the fear of pain that an effective criminal justice should impose, the barrier to entry into drug taking has been lowered to the point where millions take the risk.

Lupus, my esteemed leader, how could you? Schools teaching about the danger of drugs? The kids know more about it than you, me and the rest of this blog. Shouldn’t schools just stick to educating the young to read and do sums? Kids go for it, in large part, because of the above. Also because in this new epicurean age aided by rights, and no responsibilities, the nirvana of an instant, low cost, albeit transient ‘happiness’ cannot but attract.

PS What have done to our institutions anyway? Schools teaching about sex, drugs, the Armed forces policing and re-building, prisons re-educating, Governments compiling families’ shopping lists…

Kevyn Bodman

Baron Pipin II

Hear.Hear.

(To both your comments.)

Lungfish

Baron- I don't think teaching kids the hard and sometimes gruesome facts about over-indulgence is a bad thing. Even if 20% of them take some notice. The danger is that the other 80% will rush out and want to find out what all the fuss is about!.

Alex Creel

Melanie, you apparently don't understand how scientific investigation works. How can you describe the Dunedin study as 'the best study on the relationship between cannabis and psychotic disorders'? Did it take into account the international variations in strengths of cannabis? The wildly varying frequency with which users consume the drug? The social context and other external factors contributing to poor mental health among under 22's? For instance if Dunedin has a high level of youth employment / deprivation and a high level of mental illness surely the blame can't be levelled at cannabis alone? Studies are not only peer reviewed but have to be contrasted with studies with contrary findings in order to find an average result...no doubt that would be a 'less successful' body of evidence in your eyes.

Charlie

Why does everyone get into this discussion assuming that Nutt is perfectly sane and not perhaps embroiled in a psychotic disorder?

Jez

Pot Head;

Then you must know of some, if not many friends / old associates that have completely changed, lost the plot or 'worse' through long term drug taking.

By that i mean smoke, sniff, amphetamine or tablets.

The big one's; Heroin and Crack seem to have a 100% pass rate regarding life destruction. This across the board for all within the takers immediate vicinity.

Saying you don't know anyone changed by this phenomenon, then you must be fibbing or too damaged to notice.

Lucy Burgess

If it's garbage, Melanie, how come several other distinguised scientists on the panel agree with him? How come the Govt's Chief Scientific Adviser, Prof. Beddington, agrees with him?

Just because another study throws Nutt's conclusions into question, that doesn't make them wholly wrong, still less 'garbage'.

I would respectfully suggest that you have a poor understanding of the scientific process. Science moves forward as a result of engagement between conflicting views. A single study, even if it's very authoritative, doesn't render previous work 'garbage'.

I'm a biochemist. I work in with lots of biochemists, chemists and pharmacologists. All of us have read Nutt's papers. While most of us aren't convinced he's dead right on the detail, everyone agrees that his general conclusion - that cannabis and ecstasy are generally safer than alcohol, and indeed horse riding - is absolutely sound.

Augustus

Lucy Burgess, what about elephant riding?

Frankie

lucy burgess: cannabis and ecstasy safer than alcohol? you must be joking. It takes an awful lot of alcohol, over a long period of time, to scramble your brains permanently, but it need only take one - maybe the first ever - bad trip, and you are never the same. Having worked in the mental health/substance misuse fields for many years, I have seen this so often.

Baron Pipin II

Lupus: As always, I bow to your judgment (no irony here). Even if one were to accept that it should be a part of the curriculum, how much time does one need to hammer the message through. An hour, a week, two terms? Once, years ago, in a distant neck of the woods, a doctor demonstrated the evil of hard drug taking in about 15 minutes. It hasn’t left my Alzheimer infected brain yet. A cute fluffy rabbit was brought in and passed through the audience that took to the soft, adorable pet in the same way we, too, adore any creature that’s soft, adorable and seemingly defenceless . The rabbit was then fed cream laced with heroin. It took little time for the poor creature to start convulsing. Holding the dead animal up, the doctor said to the stunned audience something like: ‘That’s what you can expect, too. Only your dying will be more prolonged, and painful’.

Barry

Anyone remember the Gary Larson cartoon about what a dog hears? "Blah blah blah blah blah Fido blah blah blah blah".

New version - what a teenager hears: "Blah blah blah blah blah blah Drugs are safe blah blah blah blah blah".

al Mackenzie

Just to say I totally agree. Cannabis should be reclassified - upwards - so there is no more mealy inded vagueness.

Alex Creel

Frankie, the difference being its socially acceptable and entirely legal to drink yourself prostrate every day of the week but there's still a notion of danger for those dropping pills. Tell which is more likely to produce long term dependency and damage? I've long since given up the class A's but I'm regularly steaming!

David Raynes

Professor Nutt has a long history (out there to be found via Google) with a small cabal of others, of deliberately trying to blur the distinction between legal & illegal drugs, a track which, if it was successful could only lead to the normalising of the use of the other drugs, with ultimately legalisation of some or all of them and an increase in total use and total harm. Professor Nutt presents the argument around cannabis and the advice the government got, from those on the ACMD and those (as equally qualified as him)-outside it, as being clear, a simple black or white decision. This is very far indeed from the truth and profoundly unscientific. It is misleading of the public he chose to serve. The ACMD was not unanimous, Professor Nutt's body langauge when that was put to him on BBC News 24, was very telling. A visual embodiment of the word "squirm". Other advisors such as the National Director of Mental Health or Professor Robin Murray (who has said Professor Nutt played fast & loose with the statistics) do not agree with him. In the recent debate Professor Nutt has not explained the evidence the ACMD heard about the changing nature of some cannabis, the lack of CBD (believed to be an anti-psychotic). So in my
view Professor Nutt has been unscientifically selective to validate his own noisiness on what was a marginal decision. Government had to be, was right to be, cautious. Yes they should have explained why they ignored the ACMD on the narrow point of classification rather better. Perhaps that will be the one good thing to come out of this affair. The Professor could though, choose his words more wisely, young people make life changing decisions about taking drugs against a backdrop of culture and media comment. Those who speak about such things should if they care, choose their words carefully. A 13 year old, first time pot user, is not reading the small print of scientific meaning. Those badly affected by cannabis in early teens have their lives and propects profoundly changed, they never achieve their human potential and become what used to be called " Blair's Feral Youth"

On the matter of scientists agreeing with Nutt, certainly there was some initial circling of wagons against a perceived external enemy, some have backtracked now as the full facts become known. Others, such as Blakemore have been collaboraters with Nutt in the unscientific "Delphic Analyis" (to which many scientists allegedly did not even respond), which went into producing Nutt's own harm index.

There is no doubt that the reclassification of cannabis by a government that downgraded it (effectively admitting to an earlier mistake by David Blunkett) has angered liberalisation activists. Maybe Professor Nutt deliberately engineered his shoot-out with government-who knows? He has now apparently got a rich sponsor to support his views, we will be able to see his true colours in coming years. Nobody will need to pay any attention whatsoever.

Actually he has already had more attention than he deserves, he was not Chairman of the ACMD at the last cannabis review and his vote carried no more weight than any other individual.

roger in florida

The endless comparisons between alcohol/cigarettes on the one hand and dope/narcotics/speed on the other are really tiresome. People smoke fags and drink all their lives and suffer some effects at the end, all the while leading productive and happy lives. We have an epidemic of speed (methamphetamine)use across the US, but particularly in the West. The images of 25 year old wrinkled, toothless hookers offering $20 BJs after a couple of years of meth use are indicative of the damage this drug causes. It is matched by crack and heroine addiction. These drugs are life destroyers in a way that fags/booze are not (although they are bad enough). Marijuana is an entry drug, the evidence of that is overwhelming, legalise it and you will find that what is accepted soon becomes acceptable and then encouraged.

Lupus Lungfish.

Baron- The bunnycide experiment would seem rather pointless to me. The medical man must have dosed the poor critter up to his floppy little ears in the stuff. Thats like holding a man down and tipping five litres of home brewed moonshine down his throat and explaining to onlookers that booze will kill you. If you eat too many baked beans it may kill you, its the quantity not necessarily the substance that'll plant you six feet under. I recently calculated that if you laid all the death sticks I'v smoked end to end they would stretch over three miles- I therefore don't expect to be getting my letter from the Queen!

mike

"Marijuana is an entry drug, the evidence of that is overwhelming"

Really ? Go ahead and produce it then. No intelligent person actually believes there is any connection between marijuana and other drugs other than the fact that they are supplied by criminals.

Derek BLADES

So Alasdair Palmer reports that "most psychiatrists and psychologists think the incidence of [schizophrenia] is increasing, or at least constant."

I have yet to hear of a psychiatrists or psychologists who believes that one of the mental conditions they purport to cure are not either "increasing at an alarming rate" or "far more widespread than generally believed" Like fraudsters in any walk of life they have a vested interest in expanding their customer base.

What I find odd here is that some psychiatrists or psychologists only claim thjat the incidence of the condition is "constant".

Charlie

Melanie, why don't you read David Nutt's article in this week's New Scientist? You'll find his thinking to be rather more subtle than you think it to be.

And why don't you accept, as you demand others do, that the fact that you disagree with the moral implications of someone's findings doesn't stop you from being wrong?

roger in florida

Mike, 7.49pm
Believe that your pot smoking is harmless if that comforts you, but rest assured there isn't a crack whore, heroin junkie or coke snorter who didn't start with marijuana.
So look forward to a great future and have a nice day.

Simon Denis

I'm rather with Miss Phillips on this one. Nutt is far too keen on grand standing for a supposedly disinterested nerd. Moreover, in my own experience it has rarely been the boozers who have ended up in the gutter as a consequence of their habit and frequently the junkies. Whatever the exact psycho-chemical properties of cannabis, one thing is for sure - that alchohol has been aculturated into western society. We don't sit in lavatories surreptiously introducing it into our veins. We swill it publicly in a variety of ancient forms - beer, wine, eaux de vie - and according to a number of customary restraints as to time and place. Nutt, peering Gradgrind like into his test tube, completely neglects the wider historic context of these things. Indeed, even were it to be proven that cannabis is less harmful than alchohol, I would still ban the former and maintain the latter in the name of that context. Could it not be that all societies which survive operate some restrictions? Islam banned booze and permitted hashish. Us? The other way about. Allowing both is the area of peril.

Jez

It all starts with Ganja, guys.

Simple fact.

What level that person takes it, is actually only down to them - but the origional fact remains.

daniel maris

Melanie - Why not go an tap Delingpole on the shoulder and lecture him. Or indeed Cameron (that didn't half look like DC out of his head in a field in that film that Guido had on his website).

Whether Nutt is right or wrong is a bit beside the point. The question is really whether criminalisation of drug taking and the hundreds of millions of pounds put into law enforcement is a sensible use of resources. I would much prefer the 30 police officers smashing into a house where they are growing cannabis plants to be relocated to walking some of our more desperate estates. Of course I am sure the officers are much happier with the mock heroics of breaking down doors and wouldn't relish tackling teenage tearaways - but there you go!

Mike

Are you aware that Dunedin is the home of Otago University? The town has a massive student population and so, given the KIWI propensity for getting completely legless on alcohol and the easy ( legitemate ) purchase of 'party' drugs, the results of any survey done in Dunedin may not be quite so applicable to other towns.

JH

If you want to see the effect of alcohol on society take a walk through any British provincial town at midnight on a Saturday (or alternatively go to your local A&E dept).

And incidentally, stating that enjoying the occasional spliff will turn you into a crack whore is just plain crazy talk. If you're over 25 and have never smoked dope you're a very, very unusual individual.

Rob

"Its also probable that our latest Afghanistan expedition has resulted in more deaths due to the increased supply of heroin. It would be difficult to prove or quantify but it maybe that the huge quantities of the stuff coming out of Afghanistan may actually destroy more lives here than the Islamofacists ever could"

Not necessarily. The huge amounuts of the stuff coming through is very pure compared to the stuff that used to come through from the "Golden Triangle" region a decade ago.
Since then street prices have fallen dramatically meaning addicts don't need to steal as much. Also, while purity can be a cause of overdoses, it also means there's less garbage cut in it, making it healthier.

G.Mullins

Professor Nutt was funded by the West Australian Government to come to Fremantle as a key note presenter at its bi-annual Harm Reduction/drug legalisation Drug and Alcohol Authority Symposium. Supposedly an education forum for the massive network of drug and alcohol field workers, Nutt set about not only minimising the harms of cannabis and ecstasy but promoting them.He claimed that ecstasy is being used by therapists to treat PTSD in Europe and that cannabis should be used as treatment for cannabis withdrawal paranoia and panic attacks - what he should have pointed out is that these episodes are horrifying and last many years after the first attack.Nutt did not declare his conflicting interest e.g. that he sits on the advisory boards of several international pharmaceutical companies.Now I wonder why that would be!

Mike

JH at 12.24
I appear to be a very,very unusual individual; my wife just thinks that I am strange. It was not for lack of opportunity that I did not take try a spliff. One of my pals at university was a frequent user, he is now a highly regarded professor at an English university. Apart from a strange taste in music, he is fairly normal. I'm not sure what this means other than that there are no simple answers to drugs and their use.

mike

"Mike, 7.49pm
Believe that your pot smoking is harmless if that comforts you, but rest assured there isn't a crack whore, heroin junkie or coke snorter who didn't start with marijuana."

This is nonsense. Clearly you do not understand how widely available Prohibition has made heroin in the UK. Since it is undetectable in the body after less than 48 hours, people subject to workplace drug testing often stick to powders and avoid marijuana - which is detectable for momnths.

I note you have not accepted my challenge to produce credible evidence for your assertion that cannabis of itself poses a risk of addiction to other drugs.

i So look forward to a great future and have a
i nice day.

Very kind of you - best wishes to you also. I am nearly 60 years old now, so quite how much future I have is anybody's guess.

workie ticket

I think Simon Denis @ Nov 9th,9 11:00pm is spot on. Cultures and societies tend to adapt to and tolerate a particular recreational drug - in our case alcohol - and theres probably good reason for this. In our culture more people do alcohol and so more damage is done. It might be that on an individual level alcohol is more damaging than cannabis, although the cannabis the media types were brought up is probably a different animal to the high strength skunk that has become much more common in recent years. On an individual level though from my own experience the two seem much of a muchness. Ive known alcoholics at work who have killed themselves with it but Ive also seen potheads who cant function seriously in any social or work situation.

JH @November 10th,12:24am says 'If you're over 25 and have never smoked dope you're a very, very unusual individual'

I dont think we are as rare or unussual as you think. Ive passively smoked plenty of it and it gives me such a bad head but I've always loved beer and never been tempted - I've always thought alcoholics make better company than potheads.

I think the empirical evidence shows that an alcohol fuelled society is far more successful in every respect than a cannabis fuelled one and, as Mr Denis says is lacking in context. He wasnt told to consider the wider context but he chose to apply narrow scientific findings to the non-scientific picture and deserves a good slapping down in return.

Jez

Mike;

Let's leave the 'University' statements out of it unless it's studied 'data' collated from one of these places, could we please?

"I've a mate, of a mate that lectures at Oxford and he's a crack addict..." Doesn't actually cut anything i'm afraid.

There are quite a few people that i've seen with my own eyes that are shell's of the people they were before they embarked on long term drug abuse.

You know one that hasn't. So what.

You are not going to seek out the local Ice dealer (most, most probably) if you had not in the past touched any other drug.

Baron Pipin II

workie ticket:

weird or not I may be, but I’m well over the three scores and abit, and I haven’t tried any of the more esoteric stuff that we are debating. Not a pinch. What irks is that tobacco users pay for their addiction through their noses. If only a fraction of the annual £10bn got diverted into research we should have been able to come up with a less damaging, and perhaps less habit forming substitute.

Steve Rolles

Melanie

There are certainly different views amongst scientists on the assessments and ranking of drug harms. Debating these, and critiquing and testing others' findings is an essential part of the scientific process and how the debate, and human knowledge progresses.

Having a moral or political position on drug policy and law is fine. But cherry picking from the body of scientific research and analysis to fit around that view - and condemning others (as mad/immoral/corrupt/garbage etc) others whose findings don't fit that view is wrong, dangerous and profoundly anti-science.

David Raynes: you say that:

"Professor Nutt has a long history (out there to be found via Google) with a small cabal of others, of deliberately trying to blur the distinction between legal & illegal drugs, a track which, if it was successful could only lead to the normalising of the use of the other drugs, with ultimately legalisation of some or all of them and an increase in total use and total harm."

Wouldn't the prohibition of alcohol and tobacco the equally logical outcome of that analysis? Are you calling for that?

Henry Sidgwick

Derek BLADES, It is wrong to call psychiatrists frauds. Very little is understood about how brains work and how they sustain minds. Psychiatrists are well aware that they are mere "empiricks", to use the old term of abuse: they note regularities and correlations between behaviour and treatment, and, where a treatment is found to work more often than not, with greater benefits than drawbacks, they prescribe the treatment to alleviate suffering. They do not claim to be able to do more, but the continue to work with other neuroscientists to improve their understanding and practice.

Mike in Kiwiland

Jez at 10.45

I'm sorry I didn't realise that you define what can be said here.

I make two points: I have no personal experience of people going to the dogs because of drugs. I can only cite one of the few cases I know about; you obviously move in more exalted circles and have other experiences. I am now more informed, thank you. These conflicting experiences underline my feeling that drug taking and outcomes are not simplistic issues. Unfortunately governments think (if that's not an oxymoron)in black and white.

Secondly, research and surveys are notoriously prone to distortion, especially if the results don't meet the expected outcome, Aren't the Nutt findings an example of this? If a national law is to be passed then any research must be credible and representative of the population as a whole. In the case of Dunedin Melanie quotes from research done there. I simply point out that, here in NZ, there is a serious drink problem with the population as a whole, and students in particular. Combine that with legal sales of party drugs and the illegal, but ready, availability of cannabis and 'P'methamphetamine there are many variables that have to be included in the interpretation of the data. Alex Creel (at 2.03) and others emphasise this point. An isolated student body (and Dunedin is isolated) may not be representative of what goes on in, for example the streets of Toxteth or Esher.

daniel maris

I think someone should also play devil's advocate here...

Surely one can also make a case for a variety of drugs.

Certainly nearly all the jazz greats were heroin addicts. I think that's more than a coincidence.

Most of the great writers and poets of the last 200 years were dependent on alcohol, nicotine and other drugs.

Dance (including classical ballet), cinema, football and many other sports are riddled with drug use.

Religious experience has often been associated with drug use.

I think a good philosophical case can also be made for the bacchanalian spirit in society, as a safety valve. Societies that clamp down on all drugs e.g. Saudi Arabia don't seem that pleasant.

Also, it seems to me that legal drug use (cf Michael Jackson) is often substituted for illegal drug use. I am sick of film and rock stars telling us they are "clean" when all they mean is they are clean of street drugs and are now dependent on drugs supplied by registered medics. Presumably Melanie has no problem with legal drug use. Well I do. I don't see the moral difference between being a slave to a street drug and being a slave to a legal drug.

Jez

Hi Mike in Kiwiland,

Firstly.

"I make two points: I have no personal experience of people going to the dogs because of drugs... Unfortunately governments think (if that's not an oxymoron)in black and white."

a. i don't know what oxymoron means.

b. You're a kiwi. How much of smack problem has Oz got? The pastime regarding (parts of) their youth (to a certain extent) is not to have a spliff / chill, but to kane' 5 or 6 cones and crumple up on floor for the night.... or have ten scooners of VB, 5 cones' and smash the sh8t out of something.

In regads to NZ i haven't been, so i cannot comment.

Drugs damage pal.

Secondly.... wtf?

Tablets (E's), in a moderate amount, may actually be the exemption to the rule but Smoke' (Ganj, Skunk, Weed etc) blows minds. I've seen it.

Amphetamine's- brain frying material.

The rest- it's a tight rope... with the big two; H, Crack (and Crystal Meth, i suppose) 100% life crushers.

If it's a 'trend thing to be in' then do it a bit and tell 'war stories' when you're older (e.g. the Nulab clowns who legalise, because 'they know'). The lower echelons, do a bit, hold tight, lose grip and then the rest pick up the pieces.

That OK?

daniel maris

I don't think there's any argument about street drugs damaging people - but so do mountaineering, rugby, motorcycling, strobe lights, driving, legal tranquilisers, painkillers and stimulants, fatty foods, noisy rock concerts, and a whole load of plants that are not illegal...a long list.

The question is to what extent the state should be seeking to protect people from themselves. I think maybe we do owe that to children, but certainly at 18 and above, I think we might just have to leave people to make these decisions, whilst giving them as much information as possible. Criminalising the use seems rather silly to me and causes a lot of heartache all around the world. Look at what the illegal drugs trade has done to Mexico. Some of the cities are virtual war zones.

David Raynes

Steve Rolles (of the Drug legalisation lobby group Transform) asks me:

INSERT:
David Raynes: you say that:

"Professor Nutt has a long history (out there to be found via Google) with a small cabal of others, of deliberately trying to blur the distinction between legal & illegal drugs, a track which, if it was successful could only lead to the normalising of the use of the other drugs, with ultimately legalisation of some or all of them and an increase in total use and total harm."

Wouldn't the prohibition of alcohol and tobacco the equally logical outcome of that analysis? Are you calling for that?
END INSERT.

Answer. Steve, no it would not. You are playing the same futile game as Professor Nutt. Our society is where it is with tobacco & alcohol (though not all are in respect of alcohol particularly). Tobacco harmful for everyone, alcohol, in in other than very modest quantities, harmful for everyone. Because we have those substances embedded and normalised within our culture does not make it right or sensible, in personal or social harm terms, to argue as you do, for legalisation of every other possible substance that humans might conceivably want to use-(awful word) "recreationally".

As you know I take no moral stance on drugs, I focus only on public health and societal well being. I am against any further normalisation of the use of any drugs, legal or illegal, I am for any reasonable effort to reduce the harms of all drugs legal or illegal.

Professor Nutt has been outed, he has become a legalisation lobbyist, his selective presentation of the facts, the history and the evidence around cannabis is an absolute disgrace. He should be ashamed to call himself a scientist. What he has done is in my view profoundly unscientific.

The pressure in government to reverse the Blunkett downgrading came from the health and education sectors. The way Nutt presents matters, those concerns do not exist.

I am very confident that he will not shut up in coming years and months, his true colours will no doubt become clearer.

The final silliness from Nutt and his fellow travellers is the suggestion that Drug classification should be left to a small group of scientists to decide, free of any other influence or opinion, free of the views of parliament. What arrogance.

In Nutt's Brave New World, he apparently invents a substance to replace alcohol in society. To be delivered no doubt by his friends in the pharmaceutical companies? Perhaps he will call it "Soma"?

The man is simply terrifying in his eccentricity.

daniel maris

David Raynes -

I don't disagree with you that the Nutty Professor should butt out of politics (along with the judges, rock stars, mullahs and sundry other interlopers).

However, on a point of logic what you say does not follow, even using your starting premise. Because if there were a recreational drug that was LESS harmful than tobacco and/or alcohol which, if legalised, people would use as a substitute for tobacco and/or alcohol, then clearly if your only concern is public health, you should legalise that drug.

But my more fundamental objection to what you say would be that there has to be a rational basis for law and sentiment cannot be allowed to rule. If you are a public health prohibitionist who wants to ensure people give up the age old practice of intoxicating themselves with mind altering substances then ban alcohol and tobacco as well.

However that is based on a very narrow view of humanity. A complete health and safety culture could make of this wonderful life a grey straitjacket of experience. I think it is positively good that people get drunk every now and then in a bacchanalian spirit, despite the fact that people will suffer injury as a result. But I'd rather have an excess of drink at Christmas than a health and safety manual thanks.

Steve Rolles

but David (ex-drug enforcement HMS customs)

if, as you claim, prohibition reduces the health and social harms associated with a particular drug, why don't you advocate it for all drugs? Why should it matter that alcohol and tobacco are established drugs? Wouldn't the scale of observed harms make the case for prohibtion stronger rather than weaker, using your logic?

If banning them reduced use, why not advocate it and reduce the total harm? I'm not playing games - youre just not making sense.

You either ban all drugs because you they cross a threshold into are unacceptably risky, or you don't. I'm sorry, but you cant have it both ways.