The interesting case of Professor Nutt

Towards the end of the last year some of us in the cannabis law reform campaign began to feel they had a new hero in Professor David Nutt and perhaps in some ways they did. To recap – assuming you’ve been away with the fairies for the past few months and missed it – Prof Nutt was the head of the government’s Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) until he fell out with Alan Johnson the present Home Secretary because of – amongst other things – the government’s  decision to ignore his evidence based advice not to move cannabis from class C to class B in the Misuse of Drugs Act.

The really good thing for us law reformer types in all this was that the whole Prof Nutt episode blew a hole in the drugs policy. Whereas before we all knew the cannabis policy was based on ignorance and bigotry but couldn’t prove it, now we can because it’s been confirmed by Alan Johnson himself who sacked Prof Nutt not for misleading the public as such, but for undermining the government’s objectives by encouraging an informed debate. Drugs policy as it applies to cannabis is now on record as not being evidence based, but rather based on some oddball judgement of politicians.

So far so good as far as UKCIA is concerned. The whole basis this site is founded on is one of spreading information about cannabis. We have always believed that the one thing a policy of prohibition ultimately cannot stand is an informed debate with people asking difficult questions. Prohibition demands centralised control of information, a strict adherence to the “line”; drugs are bad and using them for anything other than medical reasons is also bad – there can be no exceptions apart from alcohol and tobacco, especially alcohol which isn’t really a drug apparently.

So it was with very great interest we noticed two and a half stories featuring Prof Nutt over the Christmas/New year break.

First the half story, which is only a half story because non of the mainstream media picked up on it. It was all about the Sun – that gutter press junk sheet which pretends it’s a newspaper was forced by the Press Complaints Commission to print a retraction  about a story it published concerning Prof Nutt’s son

FURTHER to your article about photographs of me on my Facebook site, (November 14) I would like to make clear the pictures were not posted by me and while I had been drinking I was smoking a rolled-up cigarette which did not contain cannabis as the article insinuated. My younger sister Lydia was not intoxicated, so was not drinking under age. My older brother lives in Sweden where it is custom to use a sauna followed by a ‘romp’ in the snow in winter. He was neither drunk nor under the influence of intoxicants. Innocuous photographs were taken out of context in an attempt to discredit my father’s work.

Of course, this retraction was printed in a typically low profile way on the letters page.  Justice of sorts, but of course the damage was already done and that foul little hate rag had played it’s part in damaging Prof Nutt’s reputation. In typical fashion of course, the retraction wasn’t reported anywhere else either and would have gone unnoticed had it not been for a blog report, so once again the new “alternative” media proves itself a valuable source of news and information.

So to the two big stories about Prof Nutt and the first is, well, just plain worrying.

We’ve been hearing about his ideas for a “safer alcohol” for some time now and it seems Prof Nutt is charging ahead with the idea. Now in his defence it has to be admitted that, government drugs policy apart, alcohol is really the big drugs problem we have. Every day we hear stories  about alcohol fuelled violence and degradation,  the massive cost to all of us via the NHS, children being brought up in dysfunctional families caused by heavy drinking and so on. Despite the best efforts of the Daily Mail and suchlike, the horror stories about reefer madness are daily eclipsed by our love affair with the bottle.

So Prof Nutt has an idea: Replace the dreaded booze with a safe recreational drug which you can take loads of, get nicely mashed and then “turn off” by popping a pill so you can drive home safely.

The interesting thing about all this is the way the press is covering Prof Nutt’s work into this ideal sounding recreational drug. Take for example the report in The telegraph on Boxing Day

The synthetic alcohol, being developed from chemicals related to Valium, works like alcohol on nerves in the brain that provide a feeling of wellbeing and relaxation.
But unlike alcohol its does not affect other parts of the brain that control mood swings and lead to addiction. It is also much easier to flush out of the body.
Finally because it is much more focused in its effects, it can also be switched off with an antidote, leaving the drinker immediately sober.

The whole tone of the report was supportive, there was non of the moral hand wringing over “drug abuse” you would normally expect, no doubts murmured about the risks of exchanging a traditionally made substance which mankind has been producing for millennia with a concoction based on mother’s little helper. This report wasn’t the only one in recent times and all have been in this vein – if that’s a good way of putting the approach to a drug story.

The idea that we know enough about how addiction works is laughable, not to mention the assumption that there is in fact only one mechanism for addiction which is clearly wrong. In any case the idea of a government approved recreational drug which we can all take as much as we like of with no risk of a downside is a little too close to Brave New World’s Soma for comfort.

To really complicate matters, although this drug hasn’t been licensed in any way shape or form Prof Nutt was shown injecting it into another ex-member of the ACMD, Dr John Marsden  on a recent Horizon programme about alcohol use. The Horizon page is here and the programme is available for download (probably illegally) easily enough as google shows.

What is going on here? It seems odd that research of this kind into a drug designed not for medical uses but simply for safely getting off your head is being reported so uncritically by a media normally so venomous toward such things. This is even more odd when one considers the type of drug apparently being considered for such use, the track record of Vallium type drugs aka benzodizepines is hardly good and frankly the idea that they are even being considered in this way for this type of use seems totally off the wall, a bit too off the wall in fact, something isn’t at all right.

Needless to say this has created some discussion on cannabis law reform boards where, as has already been mentioned, there is a great deal of respect for Prof Nutt.  One poster summed up suspicions quite neatly

Guys he is only faking this to make us reconsider our views on alcohol and the general drugs debate! If people start thinking about alcohol in terms of a drug it puts things more in perspective and highlights the ridiculousness of the whole war on drugs!

You have been had!

I tend to go with that assesment. In any case I can’t in all honestly see the brewers switching to the mass substitution of alcohol with benzo’s in the near future apart from anything else, the idea is plainly absured.

So to the third and frankly more believable story about Prof Nutt: His new drug advisory body is called the  Independent Council on Drug Harms and is reported on the Centre for Crime and Justice website here:

The dismissal of Professor Nutt for simply discussing the scientific evidence base in his professional capacity as a Professor at Imperial College made clear the need for an independent body to evaluate and report on the scientific work on both legal and illegal drug harms.

Tens of thousands of people have shown support for the stance that Professor Nutt has taken. Many across the scientific community have also expressed support. We hope that you will all show support, in the first instance, by joining the ICDH (Independent Council on Drug Harms) mailing list, and also by offering to make a donation, of whatever you can afford, to support the work of the ICDH. Barring the small administration fee that is taken by PayPal, all of the money that you donate will be used to set up and continue the work of the ICDH. In the New Year we will be establishing a ‘Friends of ICDH’ mailing list and anyone offering a donation will receive notifications of the work of the ICDH and associated matters.

So he’s serious about creating a rival body to the ACMD and UKCIA wishes him well.

Now while Prof Nutt has been treated as something of a superhero by some of us on this side of the debate, it’s perhaps important to remember that his advice to the government wasn’t that cannabis should be legalised, but that it should be kept as an illegal class C drug. It’s also important to keep in mind that the move to class C was something a lot of us on this side of the fence didn’t actually support. We saw the original reclassification as at best irrelevant and at worse a way of making what had become a failed law workable, indeed it’s very telling that the move back to B wasn’t actually accompanied by a return to the old class B penalties.

Perhaps the biggest criticism UKCIA can make of Prof Nutt is his willingness to accept inadequate data gathered by less than scientific means on which to base his recommendations and assessments. As a case in point as we’ve mentioned before the 2008 review of cannabis potencies was based on samples seized by police, with no data sampling methodology at all. As this blog noted a year ago the nearest the ACMD got to accepting the weakness of their data was this comment:

For operational reasons some forces chose to send in material from only one Borough Command Unit or from one of several forces collection points. Some forces experienced internal logistics problems; others were very enthusiastic and sent in everything received during the trial period.

This sort of slap-dap approach to data isn’t in the least scientific, yet at no point has Prof Nutt accepted this weakness in his studies. Of course, to do so would have undermined the government policy to a far greater extent than his later criticisms did, so perhaps he was just trying not to rock the boat, but it’s strange and doesn’t really add up. For someone who puts such a high value on science it simply doesn’t make sense for Prof Nutt to accept such compromised data. The old adage is still true: garbage in, garbage out. Perhaps now he’s free of the yolk of government policy and the need to uphold the twisted values of prohibition, he will be able to be more open about the dismal lack of solid data the drugs policy is actually based on.

Against that criticism of Prof Nutt, to his credit he’s upset the prohibition supporters something wicked and that can only be a good thing. One such regular voice on the prohibition side is Andy Parrot, based at Swansea university Prof Parrot regards himself as a world expert on MDMA or ecstasy. He recently published an opinion piece in “Addiction today“. Addiction today has the strap line “Reclaiming lives. For life” and it has an agenda of strong support for prohibition and seems  strongly opposed to law reform of almost any kind. It’s also opposed to the present drugs policy of methadone maintenance  and has the NTA and AMCD firmly in it’s sights – the idea of heroin maintenance had it in fits of outrage recently of course.

Andy Parrot’s blog writings about Prof Nutt are, as always, totally damming. In a way which is perhaps typical of people keen to promote their one sided view of things he lists a whole string of dangers attributed to cannabis over the years without once balancing his argument by referring to studies which do not support his view. To prof Parrot the issue is clear cut, cannabis is a highly dangerous (even toxic) substance which must remain strongly prohibited for the good of society. There can be no room for doubt in Prof Parrots view, the issue is black and white, good and bad.

It’s this certainty verging on a faith that Prof Nutt has done so much to undermine and for that he deserves our gratitude. UKCIA wishes him well with his new group and we will be following developments closely over coming months.

Prof Nutt has a Twitter page here which should keep us all updated on his efforts.