Nutt Sacked By Johnson: A Victory For Ideology Over Evidence

While I was mid-upgrade, Professor David Nutt was sensationally sacked as the chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs by the home secretary, Alan Johnson. The news was broken by BBC reporter Mark Easton, who has been following conflict between science and politics that has been simmering ever since the government ignored scientific advice to reclassify cannabis as a Class B drug.

I'll be blogging in much more depth about this as events continue to unfold, but it's worth making one point very clear about the relationship between science and the public, because a lot of people writing about this topic haven't picked up on it yet.

Alan Johnson did not employ Professor Nutt, whose position as an advisor was voluntary and unsalaried. However, Professor Nutt's research was to some extent publicly funded. Anyone who has ever submitted a research proposal to the UK research councils will know that it is the duty of any publicly-funded scientist to disseminate their findings to the, er, public. Not only that, but it is expected that (where possible) modern research proposals including some attempt at wider public engagement with research.

This point needs to be made clear because of the reason Alan Johnson has given for the 'sacking', and the reason Gordon Brown has given for supporting his Home Secretary.

Alan Johnson gave his reasons in a rather bad-tempered interview with Sky's ubiquitous hack Adam Boulton thus:

"[He] crossed the line between offering advice and then campaigning against the government on political decisions". "

The problem here is that if there's a way of speaking out publicly about drugs without it being 'political', I'm damned if I can find it. You could of course say the same thing about many other subjects, depending on your views: climate change, evolution, pharmaceuticals, whatever.

The point is that many fields inform (or rather should inform) government policy; but I don't see the government sacking the entire staff of the British Antarctic Survey for trying to raise public awareness of climate change. You cannot gag scientists in hot-topic areas from speaking out. Indeed, it's their public duty to do so.

Gordon Brown went somewhat further:

"I think Alan Johnson made the right decision because we cannot send mixed messages."

Now, nobody hearing Professor Nutt speaking about the government is going to confuse him with a Labour minister, so the problem that Gordon Brown is referring to is the problem of a senior scientist publishing and publicizing research that contradicts the government line. In Gordon Brown's world of control freakery, such dissent is not to be tolerated.

Gordon didn't stop there, but came up with this glorious mangling of the concept of evidence-based policy:

"We have to take a broader view in the round that was more than just the scientific advice. It's about the effects on young people that drugs are harmful and not acceptable."

Well, great, except that the effects on young people are actually covered by the scientific evidence. Scientific evidence which Parliament's own Science Select Committee summarized thus: "We have found no convincing evidence for the deterrent effect, which is widely seen as underpinning the Government’s classification policy." Indeed, when Cannabis was downgraded to Class C, use actually fell. That just leaves us with the "not acceptable" part of that quote which of course is, ultimately, what this is all about.

Indeed, for Labour to be appealing to the need for clarity at this stage is a bit rich, as Dame Ruth Runciman of the UK Drugs Policy Commission pointed out:

"We do not believe the credibility of the current system or the clarity of message has been enhanced when, in just the space of seven years, five home secretaries have sought one way or another to address the classification of cannabis."

If this was a debate about evidence, Nutt will still be at his post and the findings of the Science Select Committee would not have been ignored. That they have, and that the best reason Brown and Johnson can give is some garbled version of "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that" speak volumes.

A picture speaks a thousand words, and the following graph (produced by the Science Select Committee) showing the ranking of legal and non-legal drugs by harm caused (both individual and to society) versus their classification, sums up
the absurdity of the situation far better than another three hundred words of waffle from me.

Stare at it, and marvel.

Perhaps the most appropriate response was relayed to Iain Brassington at the British Medical Journal:

"I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy and have therefore lost confidence in your ability to make decisions as Home Secretary. I would therefore ask you to step down from the Government with immediate effect."

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Apologies for the quick summary post, but I've spent the last four days rebuilding layscience.net. I hope you like the redesign, and I'll be writing a bit more about new features in the coming days.

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