NUTT’s in “MAY NOT” ROW

While I was away in London last week, the most interestingly developing story was that of the sacking by Home Secretary Alan Johnson of Professor David Nutt. A psychiatrist and long-time researcher into alcohol and drug abuse, Nutt was chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. The ACMD – no longer 31-strong since others have resigned in sympathy – is an NGO made up of scientists and other experts in the field.

From 1971 (when it was enacted) until 2007, the Misuse of Drugs Act had always followed the ACMD’s recommendations in the way recreational drugs were classified. Indeed, in 2004, the then Home Secretary David Blunkett followed ACMD advice and downgraded cannabis to Class C, carrying lesser sentences for possession and dealing. The so-called drugs czar, Keith Hellawell, disagreed and accordingly resigned. But since Gordon Brown became PM, the ACMD has been sidelined. Former dope-smoker Jacqui Smith restored cannabis to Class B (the then chair of the ACMD, Sir Michael Rawlins, immediately stood down). Then, in February, she overruled the ACMD’s recommendation on ecstasy.

Last month, Prof Nutt wrote a paper, Estimating Drug Harms, for the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at his academic base, King’s College London. The newspapers picked up on the press release, particularly Nutt’s personal reclassification of various addictive substances, including alcohol and tobacco. That he ranked these respectively fifth and ninth – as against amphetamine at eighth, cannabis eleventh and LSD fourteenth – got the commentators steamed up. It was also brought to the attention of Johnson who duly sacked Nutt by email.

I couldn’t find Nutt’s full list anywhere in the press, so finally called up the CCJS document which you can read here:

http://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/estimatingdrugharms.html

And here is the table Nutt constructed to reflect his view of the comparative harm that various substances cause:



To read this chart, I suggest copying it onto your desktop and then zooming in

Since his sacking, Nutt has been very visible and very voluble. Clearly he senses a ministry that may be confidently kicked when it is down. He has said that the Brown government has “systematically undermined” the work of the ACMD; that politicians “distort” and “devalue” research evidence (and in this he includes those opposition politicians like Ann Widdecombe and shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling who have supported Johnson’s action); that ministers drastically overlook the “time-bomb of alcohol”. An ally, former ACMD secretary Jeremy Sare, referred to “pesky irritants like scientific evidence”. Those who will lambast the government with any material they can get have written scornfully of successive Home Secretaries’ self-trumpeted desire for “science-based” decisions that are then disregarded.

If only to be not on the same side as the likes of Melanie Phillips, one would not be attacking David Nutt. But the issues are not clear-cut. Defending his decision, Alan Johnson wrote to The Guardian that Nutt “cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy”. On the face of it, that seems reasonable enough. But Johnson also described Nutt’s “horse-riding analogy” – Nutt had earlier pointed out that a hundred people a year die in incidents while on horseback, as against thirty linked to ecstasy – as “a political rather than a scientific point”. Well, so is Johnson’s earlier thrust.

It is understandable if advisers feel angry and frustrated when their advice is not taken. Equally, ministers have to administrate and make policy choices and they cannot be hidebound by the apolitical advice of non-political analysts. How helpful is it for Nutt to compare drugs that are illegal with drugs that are not and are deeply embedded in the culture? If ministers were going to act on all recreational drugs – including nicotine and alcohol – in an equal manner, they would not want to start from where we are. The gradual marginalising of cigarette smoking has been highly controversial and, in some quarters (think David Hockney), very unpopular. What politician would be rash enough to embark on such a path with booze?

But then it seems absurd to many that cannabis, ranked by ministerial fiat as Class B, can attract five years in jail and/or an unlimited fine for, as Nutt puts it, possession of sufficient for one joint. In practice, no one, I would suggest, gets five year for such insignificant possession. But, as a matter of good public policy, the statute book should not be packed with penalties that are never going to be handed down.

And experience and anecdotal evidence supports Nutt’s contention that cannabis is “significantly less harmful than alcohol”. Take into account accidents and incidents and fights that have arisen out of drunkenness, along with the liver disease that is rapidly growing in our booze-sodden culture, and alcohol clearly has many more victims than other – perhaps all other – addictive substances on Nutt’s list.

Do we want recreational drugs decriminalised? Which companies would start to dominate the capital investment in such a new free market? What kind of a culture would develop in Britain if many or all recreational substances were decriminalised before other countries followed suit?

On the other hand, the illicit drug market is a notably nasty one, dominated by laundered money and brutal gangs. Many people who think they are snorting coke are imbibing no such thing. What does it do to your body to ingest Harpic or some other noxious chemical? How damaging is skunk? Maybe a proper commercial trade in these drugs would clean them up.

It is often argued that taking cannabis inevitably “leads on” to hard drugs. I always thought this fallacious. The connection between dope and heroin is simply that they are apt to be offered by the same suppliers because they are both illegal. If cannabis is downgraded, it is in practice psychologically and physically separated from coke and crack and the rest. It cannot be insignificant that, while cannabis was classified as C rather than B, its use among teenagers declined, according to the government’s own figures.

So the whole issue is complicated and prone to the taking of none-too-consistent positions. Nutt told The Observer that he thought the ACMD could well become “unviable”. There have been some resignations among its members but rather fewer than Nutt would probably have hoped for. As the days pass, his martyrdom will be forgotten and Alan Johnson will get on with his other tasks until the election. There are, one feels sure, very few votes in drugs policy.

But there are some interesting ideological ramifications, or so it seems to me. In very broad terms, the left has always favoured regulation, the use of law and governmental powers to protect the vulnerable and keep the rich and powerful in their place. In its extreme form, that becomes state dictatorship and oppressive interference in private matters. The right clings to the free market, deregulation, getting government out of people’s lives, even where some go unsupported to the wall. In its extreme form, this becomes a breakdown of law and the spread of pre-revolutionary anarchy.

Paradoxically, right-wingers are more likely to advocate fierce rules for others, particularly concerning their private lives (sex and drugs, for instance). And people on the left tend to be those who want less regulation in some fields, notably those of recreational drugs (which left-wingers perhaps are more liable to use) and, say, the internet which left-leaning rather than right-leaning libertarians are given to look upon as romantically free and outlawish.

With its stern, son-of-the-manse puritanism (small ‘p’), the Brown government not only wants more regulation of drugs and the internet, it also is almost as deregulatory in instinct, when it comes to capitalism, as the Tories. All of which goes to reinforce the opinion that most of us former Labour-voters have entertained about successive Blair and Brown governments: that (with a few exceptions) it’s been much like living under Thatcher and Major.