More “what to do about drugs” confusion this week, perhaps we’re getting closer to the collapse of the present system than some are prepared to admit.
It’s regrading time again, having just been through that debacle with cannabis it’s time for another go. At the heart of the confusion this time is what to do about “ecstasy”, whether it should be in class A alongside Crack and smack or in the lower class B, along with the soon to be upgraded cannabis but still above the “mad cow powder” ketamine. The advisory body – the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) – exists to advise the government on the ranking of drugs according to their harmfulness and is fully aware of what most pill heads know – ecstasy simply isn’t comparable to crack or smack.
Actually, rather embarrassingly it’s been ranked one of the least harmful drugs out there by a study conducted by Professor Nutt of the ACMD back in March 2007 – discussed in this blog back in may this year
Click for larger version (lancet website) . The more harmful drugs are on the left, the less harmful on the right and you can see Ecstasy there almost on the extreme right, way below booze and fags, even apparently below cannabis.
Tellingly the police were quick off the mark to oppose any such change. The fact that police feel they have a central role in influencing social policy should be worrying, but then prohibition is an enforcement lead policy, it’s not about anything else really. Anyway, this was Tim Hollis, chief constable of Humberside Police and the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) lead officer on drugs, well known for his extreme prohibitionist stance.
The government of course isn’t concerned with silly concepts like facts, it’s far more concerned with “sending out messages” about the “unacceptability” of some drugs (but of course not alcohol, oh no) to people who blatantly find them acceptable. Being all about sending messages, sound science has no place in the drugs debate as far as this government is concerned and it has apparently already ruled out a classification change no matter what evidence is presented. Despite this, the ACMD, being composed of scientists, tries to present a sound argument for debate. You have to admire them for trying.
The trouble is, the ACMD is trying to argue a scientifically sound case on the back of very dodgy studies which can hardly be called science. Before I go on, I’d better explain that remark.
Science demands one thing and one thing only: The ability to measure the thing you’re studying. If you can’t measure it, you can’t do science on it, end of debate. If you do a study of something without valid measurement, that study is not scientific.
It doesn’t matter how thorough your analysis seems to be, how qualified or respected the people doing the study are, if the data isn’t there the old adage of “garbage in/garbage out” holds firm. It is painfully obvious that, when it comes to illegal drugs, the data simply is not there to produce a proper study worthy of being called “scientific”.
Any figures for ecstasy use we may have are no more than a guess really. We do know that a lot of people take it, but how many take how much? Not a clue, not really. The only way we could find out is by taking proper statistical samples both from the general population and from amongst the user group. This is the root of the problem, this proper statistical sampling can’t be done, for obvious reasons prohibition prevents it. Hence we have at best only a vague idea of of how many people are taking how much. To be honest even the users don’t know how much they use because they don’t know the doses in the pills or the strength of the powder they’re snorting or mixing into their vodka and orange.
But perhaps the biggest reason this is dodgy science is because “ecstasy”, as such, doesn’t exist. “Ecstasy” is a generic name which covers a range of chemicals better described as simply “pills”.
An ecstasy pill under a sane regime would be a known dependable dose, say 60mg of specifically MDMA. If that were the case we could use the term ecstasy, but it’s not a sane regime.
Under prohibition no-one knows what the pill or powder contains let alone how much. A pill might contain some MDMA – actually it might contain quite a lot with 180mg in a single pill not being unknown, but it might contain one of the related chemicals such as MDEA or MDA. Or it might contain something very different like PMA or ketamine or it might be a cocktail, or it might be a dog working pill or an outright fake. How can anyone seriously gauge the safety of a product like that and pretend to be using science to do so?
Interestingly the ACMD has “heard evidence” that “ecstasy” (whatever it actually is) nowadays often comes as a white power just like cocaine, speed and ketamine. This seems to be news to everyone, except presumably the people using it who will have known about this for ages. Reality check: This is supposed to be a “controlled drug” remember and this is a debate about how to frame the present law so as best to “control” it. Stop laughing at the back.
Here we go from the sublime to the ridiculous as hospitals are reporting that people are taking overdoses of “ecstasy” thinking they were taking cocaine.
Hospitals in London and elsewhere in the country are reporting an increase in admissions of drug users who have overdosed on MDMA, the main ingredient of Ecstasy, after buying what they believed was cocaine.
“MDMA, the main ingredient of Ecstasy”, and this is the Times, a supposedly quality paper.
Now cocaine is supposed to be more dangerous than ecstasy… sorry, it doesn’t make sense, how much charlie are people hoovering up for heavens sake if they’re overdosing on ecstasy thinking it was cocaine?
But the point has been well made in reports that because different drugs are coming in the form of white powders in plain wraps sold in dark corners from people who probably don’t know what they’re selling, the users end up taking the wrong drug.
Isn’t “control” a strange word when governments and their advisers use it to describe drug prohibition?
Actually, away from the imaginary world politicians seem to inhabit when it comes to drugs, it’s worth taking a retrospective look at the rave culture and to see what prohibition has done to it over the past 20 years or so. In the beginning – a generation ago now – was the “second summer of love”; the Acid House explosion. Based around the use of MDMA (with perhaps low doses of LSD and cannabis in the chillout room) this whole scene was far removed from the destructive heroin scene or the violence of alcohol fueled nightclubs. The workings of prohibition have chipped away at that distinction as over the years ever more repressive laws have been introduced to try to kill it off. Twenty years down the road here we are still talking about it, but things have changed horribly.
Nightclubs are supposed to be “drug free” places now, but of course they aren’t. All that’s really happened is a vibrant musical sub cultural scene has been all but destroyed and turned into an excuse to get off your head and as mashed as possible. People on the front line – the users – are probably more uninformed about what they’re actually taking now than they ever were, because despite all the school education, despite Frank, a packet of white powder scored from a dealer in a dark corner is just a packet of white powder that gets you wrecked.
The ABC system is supposed to rank drugs according to their harmfulness. Fine, in theory, but the regime it applies to is designed to blur all these distinctions. Drugs under prohibition are just drugs, not specific chemicals with specific rituals associated with their use, just drugs.
So where are we going? The ACMD itself has accepted the classification system needs a good review. It accepts that legal drugs booze and fags are more harmful than most illegal ones. Yet it doesn’t make the case for a fundamental change in the law, it doesn’t even own up to basing it’s research on bad data. Where we’re going is probably where the prohibitionists want us to go, that place where there are just drugs, all equally illegal.
So what of the ACMD advice? We saw all this flawed science recently with the cannabis debate. It’s surely normal for a scientific study to outline the sampling methods used and the errors they may expect from such a sampling regime and the reason for those errors, but that wasn’t done with the cannabis data and isn’t being done now with “ecstasy”. It can’t be done, so attention isn’t drawn to it or the cause of it.
At the time of the cannabis review the ACMD accepted their data on potency and purity was weak but made no explanation or fundamental criticism of the basic reasons behind this weakness. The same applies to the “ecstasy” review.
It’s hard to understand how they as scientists can publish reports without drawing attention to the limitations of their data and the reasons for these limitations. Just to accept these difficulties as the ACMD seem to do as some kind of “natural state” is close to deception. These are harsh words, but is there any other explanation?
The ACMD even continue to promote the misleading idea that the illegal drugs are in some magical way “controlled”, despite knowing next to nothing about either the trade in them or the way they are used prior to doing what little research they can actually do, usually based on police seizures. Of course, if a drug is actually controlled, this information would be known.
The only conclusion to draw from this is that the ACMD are complicit in promoting a regime – prohibition – they know to be flawed and in doing so giving it a veneer of respectability only eminent scientists can provide. The fact that the government is stupid enough to reject this respectable veneer can only hasten the end of the present regime. Will it be frying pan to fire?
And all this is absent any measure of the cost/benefit of prohibition (er:control). To manage, one first needs a baseline. And that means ‘to measure’ ‘to quantify’ and write it down with a date beside it. Sounds simple enough… the fact it has never been done is evidence ‘of abject policy failure’ as no intended improvement can be mooted without a baseline. Against this, the pretense of ‘sending messages’ is laughable if only it wasn’t so damnably damaging. The only message it sends is ‘we have a boondoggle but dont worry, the grift is ok at any expense…’