England's chief drug adviser fired over claims. Fair?
Professor David Nutt, England's chief drug adviser, has been sacked a day after he claimed in a paper that alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than many illegal drugs, including LSD, ecstasy and cannabis.
Arguing that some "top" scientific journals had published "horrific examples" of poor quality research on the alleged harm caused by some illicit drugs, the Imperial College professor called for a new way of classifying the harm caused by both legal and illegal drugs.
"Alcohol ranks as the fifth most harmful drug after heroin, cocaine, barbiturates and methadone. Tobacco is ranked ninth," he wrote in the paper from the centre for crime and justice studies at King's College, London. "Cannabis, LSD and ecstasy, while harmful, are ranked lower at 11, 14 and 18 respectively."
Nutt clashed with Jacqui Smith when she was home secretary after he compared the 100 deaths a year from horseriding with the 30 deaths a year linked to ecstasy.
Richard Garside, director of the centre for crime and justice, said Nutt's briefing paper gave an insight into what drugs policy might look like if it was based on the research evidence rather than political or moral positioning. "I'm shocked and dismayed that the home secretary appears to believe that political calculation trumps honest and informed scientific opinion. The message is that when it comes to the Home Office's relationship with the research community honest researchers should be seen but not heard," he said.
My question to you: Do you think England's chief drug adviser, Professor David Nutt, deserved to be fired?
full guardian article
Arguing that some "top" scientific journals had published "horrific examples" of poor quality research on the alleged harm caused by some illicit drugs, the Imperial College professor called for a new way of classifying the harm caused by both legal and illegal drugs.
"Alcohol ranks as the fifth most harmful drug after heroin, cocaine, barbiturates and methadone. Tobacco is ranked ninth," he wrote in the paper from the centre for crime and justice studies at King's College, London. "Cannabis, LSD and ecstasy, while harmful, are ranked lower at 11, 14 and 18 respectively."
Nutt clashed with Jacqui Smith when she was home secretary after he compared the 100 deaths a year from horseriding with the 30 deaths a year linked to ecstasy.
Richard Garside, director of the centre for crime and justice, said Nutt's briefing paper gave an insight into what drugs policy might look like if it was based on the research evidence rather than political or moral positioning. "I'm shocked and dismayed that the home secretary appears to believe that political calculation trumps honest and informed scientific opinion. The message is that when it comes to the Home Office's relationship with the research community honest researchers should be seen but not heard," he said.
My question to you: Do you think England's chief drug adviser, Professor David Nutt, deserved to be fired?
full guardian article
Tags: adviser, chief, drug, england's, fired, professor david nutt
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Mark Huckabee on -
Absolutely NOT. What he said was completely correct. There *might* be good moral or cultural reasons for having some laws but that does NOT change the numbers. They are what they are and people should be aware of them. What he said was correct maybe not politically-correct but it was factually correct. People need to get over a lot of their biases and take a good hard look at the numbers and only then make thier decisions.
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Permalink Reply by sAm on -
I totally agree with Mark. The reason many of today's drugs are illegal is not due to scientific research but misguided paranoia that resulted in the general population buying into misconceptions about the drug.
Take cocaine for example. "The dangers of cocaine abuse became part of a moral panic that was tied to the dominant racial and social anxieties of the day. In 1903, the American Journal of Pharmacy stressed that most cocaine abusers were “bohemians, gamblers, high- and low-class prostitutes, night porters, bell boys, burglars, racketeers, pimps, and casual laborers.”"
Not only that but MDMA (Ectasy) was used as a therapeutic drug prior to its use as a recreational drug.
Just because it's illegal doesn't mean the reason for it being illegal is correct.
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Permalink Reply by Mark Huckabee on
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The problem with Ecstasy is that MDMA is very good at opening up barriers within your system. The most important of these is the blood-brain barrier. MDMA somehow stretches open holes in this barrier that allow larger than normal molecules to pass across from the bloodstream to the brain. If something else has been mixed into the Ecstasy (intentionally or not) it can get carried across. This is much more dangerous than the drug itself. There's an article about it here.
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Permalink Reply by Kevin on -
I agree with what Mark said. It all comes down to money and the tobacco and alcohol industry have it. If your local pot dealer had a lobbyist things would be very different.
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Permalink Reply by stephanie on -
What he said is true because drugs are illegal.If they were how many of us would die.
i think he has ben sacked as he is not allowed for his position to open any gate to the cartel.
The main current problem is people want to use drugs as tribes uses the initial plants to the passage from teenage to adult.The point is pretending to be civilized and clevest , our society use it as a consumable.
Result : we don't handle it!
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Permalink Reply by Mark Huckabee on
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You are right that many tribes used these drugs as a rite of passage to manhood and as a way of communicating with the spirit world. We instead use them for recreation and as an escape from reality. These are very different uses! But alcohol and tobacco can be used this way too and they cause huge amounts of suffering. What he did was try to put it on a research-oriented, quantified basis rather than looking at it through our cultural lens that has been shaped for us by large corporations and religious conventions. He ran afoul of people though who are not willing to take these blinders off.
As far as the cartels: they only exist because there is money to be made. Make the drugs legal and taxable and the cartels will disappear overnight.
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Permalink Reply by stephanie on
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Governments can't agree :ask yourself what alcohol and tobacco are made of (fruits, plants etc..)but most of the hard drugs spread worldwide are made in labatories with chemical substances that can damage human.
Why do human need to add to what nature gives ?
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Permalink Reply by Mark Huckabee on
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Marijuana is hardly processed at all (basically just dried). It certainly has less processing than tobacco. Cocaine is made from coca leaves. It undergoes processing but nothing more significant than what is done to grains to produce alcohol. Opium is made from poppies. Again, the processing is less than what is done to produce alcohol. Only newer drugs like meth, ecstasy, and LSD are truly synthetic (i.e. not closely related to natural products).
The difference is mostly cultural not scientific.
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Permalink Reply by Mark Huckabee on
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Here is an example of how these differences are NOT scientific:
Marijuana is illegal in the United States largely because of racist anti-Mexican sentiment in some Western states during the early 1900s. It had absolutely nothing to do with any scientific analysis of the harm it could cause to the American public. When Montana outlawed marijuana in 1927, the Butte Montana Standard reported a legislator’s comment: “When some beet field peon takes a few traces of this stuff… he thinks he has just been elected president of Mexico, so he starts out to execute all his political enemies.” In Texas, a senator said on the floor of the Senate: “All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff [marijuana] is what makes them crazy.” This article gives a more complete history of these events than I can include here.
The same type of political and corporate machinations have influenced most of our other drug laws.
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Permalink Reply by stephanie on
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I agree for cocaine unless it is often cut with sh... !Never tried but have been told.
I think of all the victims: have you ever tried just to drive a car after any of these or seat on the front seat !
I'm on the side of those who have seen friends dying of it, who have been scared by gangs, who doesn't to buy or sell any.
After prohibition,I suppose US Gov decided to legalise alcohol again, did it stop anybody making money on it ?
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