Independent Science Adviser sacked for giving Independent Science Advice

Professor Nutt

Meet Prof. David Nutt. Until yesterday, he was the unpaid chair of the Home Office’s Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). His sacking by Home Secretary Alan Johnson shows just how far removed policy-making is from the real world, and is a nightmare for anyone who wants Government to be informed by cold, hard, facts – instead of whatever happens to pop into a politician’s head.

The ACMD does pretty much what it says on the tin. Established almost 40 years ago, it brings together independent experts from fields such as psychology, policing, medicine, narcotics, psychiatry, and social work. The experts don’t take their cues from the Daily Mail or the Guardian, nor are they supposed to care what politicians think. Their reports are based on the evidence of how to minimise the harm that drugs cause. They take into account addiction, crime, societal harm, personal health – anything you’d care to imagine.

“If the Government continues to publicly humiliate and dismiss advisers with whom it disagrees, it will be left with – at best – well-meaning yay-sayers. Independent science advice will be replaced with a conspiracy of idiocy.“

Show me the evidence

Evidence base

Why is this important? If it’s not stating the blindingly obvious, drugs policy touches upon many areas of public life. Policies on crime, health and social care are all part of the mix. You could make the case based on the health aspects alone – perhaps the main reason why people are concerned about drugs is their potential health risk. Cigarettes, for instance, cause 5 million deaths a year worldwide. Nearly 3000 people died after taking illicit drugs over the last year in the UK alone. And just in Scotland, £180m is needed to treat addicts. Drug use and abuse costs both money and lives; it is a public health issue.

The BSE crisis was an example of a public health issue where the Government ignored the evidence, for political expediency. The MMR/Autism hoax was an example of where the media did the same. Both cases highlighed the dangers of sticking with prejudice over science; people will suffer, and die. It is possible to do immense harm, even when your intentions are noble.

That’s why we want to have people like David Nutt giving well-researched, independent advice to the Government. Except, it seems, the Government doesn’t really want to listen to them.

Bad habit

In 2007, Cannabis was a Class C drug. The Government – reacting to hysteria about mega-strong skunk’s potential to cause schizophrenia – asked the ACMD to review the classification. A year later, after a thorough investigation, the ACMD wrote back. They told the Home office that, based on the research, Cannabis should stay in Class C. The Government, In their wisdom, decided to bump it up to Class B, based on – well, not much, really. Just vague noises about ‘uncertainty’ and ‘erring on the side of caution’. If you want to ‘err on the side of caution’, just make everything Class A and be done with it. That way, people can be sure that the classification system has nothing to do with harm at all.

Reefer madness!!1

There was significant concern from scientists at the time, at what they saw as Jacqui Smith riding roughshoud over sound scientific advice. And then it happened again in February 2009.

The ACMD, after carefully considering all the evidence, recommended that ecstasy be downgraded from Class A to Class B. Again the Government rejected their advice, citing the fact that they did not want to “send a signal to young people … that [the Government] takes Ecstasy less seriously”. Currently, the ’signal’ to young people is that heroin is as safe as ecstasy, as they’re both in Class A. Now that’s dangerous.

Horse shit

Nutt, to his credit, wouldn’t let this one go. He saw the Government’s refusal to listen to expert advice as pandering to media hysteria, and published his now infamous paper “Equasy”, where he dispassionately compared the very real health risks of taking Ecstasy to the similar risks of horse-riding – both of which are dangerous leisure activities. One is legal, one isn’t, and that skews our perception in spite of the facts. The paper is short, simple, and well worth reading.

Unsurprisingly, it generated a media shitstorm. Which illustrated Nutt’s point perfectly. He wrote that public arguments about the relative risks of drugs are “occurring in an arcane manner … reminiscient of medieval debates about angels and the heads of pins”.

Slightly more surprisingly, but still sadly predictably, then-Home Secretary Jacqui Smith attacked Nutt in the Commons the next day. She claimed he was ‘trivialising the dangers of drugs‘, and forced him to apologise. I feel like I’m banging my head against a brick wall, but his whole point was that horse-riding and ecstasy-taking are comparable. As much as anything, Smith was trivialising the dangers of horse-riding. She and much of the media saw ecstasy as ‘worse’ because it was illegal, which is – and I’ll be frank, here – stupid. The legality should be based on its harm, not vice-versa.

The episode was a dark moment for evidence-based policy. Here was one of the country’s most powerful politicians calling upon one of her top scientific advisers to apologise for writing a scientific paper that was published in a peer-reviewed journal. A paper which, when you compare her comments with what Nutt wrote, it seemed that she hadn’t even bothered to read.

Captain Johnson insists "world is flat"

And now we know it gets worse. This week, Nutt gave a lecture entitled “Estimating drug harms; a risky business?“, where he pointed out that cannabis was much safer than, for instance, alcohol. The new Home Secretary then forced Nutt out of the ACMD. For stating the obvious. For continuing his independent work as an academic working in the field of drugs policy. For doing his job. For saying something which he saw as supported by the evidence, but which contradicted the Government’s policy.

It came literally days after the Government claimed it was “committed to the provision of independent scientific advice” when responding to a report which said scientists should not be “criticised for publishing scientific papers or making statements as professionals, independent of their role as Government advisers”.

The rub

What is the point of having independent science advice, if you’ll only listen to it when it agrees with your prejudices? The answer, in some ways, is obvious. Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker said it best, in a debate while he was defending the Government’s prostitution strategy: “You pick the evidence which, in the end, backs your argument”.

Sometimes, Government seems to want to use ‘evidence’ as a fig-leaf. They’re happy to use it to argue for the policies they want to back anyway, but ignore it when the truth is uncomfortable, or doesn’t fit their prejudices. Look at how they exagerrated the figures on sex trafficking – figures subsequently blown apart by a media investigation.

The Home Office couldn’t really keep Prof. David Nutt around. It was either sack him, or admit that the department’s drug policy is based on moral panic and media pandering, instead of sound evidence. The Government took the easy way out, rather than taking a good hard look at their continuing hypocrisy – saying that they base their policies on the evidence, but only actually doing so when it suits them.

This dismissal could have far-reaching consequences. If the Government continues to publicly humiliate and dismiss advisers with whom it disagrees, it will be left with – at best – well-meaning yay-sayers. Independent science advice will be replaced with a conspiracy of idiocy.