The row in Britain over the sacking of Professor David Nutt, until last week the head of the head of the government’s Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) shows little sign of abating: two members of the Committee have quit in Nutt’s support, and there’s talk of a mass resignation when the Committee meets on Monday. The reason for all the hoo-hah: Nutt’s public argument in a lecture (and a subsequent article) that the government had overstated the dangers of cannabis (as well as other drugs, like LSD or ecstasy), and that an evidence-based approach that prioritised harm reduction would see tobacco and alcohol as higher priorities. As he argued in his article,
I think we have to accept young people like to experiment, and what we should be doing is to protect them from harm at this stage of their lives. We therefore have to provide more accurate and credible information. We have to tell them the truth, so that they use us as their preferred source of information. If you think that scaring kids will stop them using, you’re probably wrong.
This was anathema as far as Alan Johnson was concerned, who promptly sacked Nutt on Friday last week, arguing that
Professor Nutt chose, without prior notification to my department, to initiate a debate on drugs policy in the national media … accusing my predecessor or distorting and devaluing scientific research. As a result, I have lost confidence in Professor Nutt’s ability to be my principal adviser on drugs.
More or less the entire UK scientific community is now up in arms about Nutt’s sacking: thus for example Lord Krebs, former head of the Food Standards Agency:
I thought it was an appalling decision and totally inappropriate … it will send shockwaves through the scientific community and make it more difficult for the government to recruit the best people to help with scientific advice to underpin public policy … not one person … has been other than horrified about it and feeling that this called into question the whole validity of the government’s approach to independent scientific advice.
While I don’t disagree with Krebs (and see also this interesting critique of government policy by a former Home Office civil servant), there is one dimension to all this that is inescapably political rather than scientific: the need to provide Alan Johnson with some kind of face-saving exit strategy that also safeguards the place of science in the policymaking process – and, ideally, nudges the UK towards an approach to drugs control that is at least slightly more sane.
Right now, after all, we have a situation in which the Serious Organised Crime Agency trumpets that its work has “sent cocaine prices soaring” – but the actual effect is that dealers’ profit margins are increasing, while the product they sell becomes less pure and more dangerous; in which Portugal’s strategy of decriminalising all drus has proved “a resounding success” according to a recent independent study – but other European governments don’t want to know; and above all, in which countries like Mexico, Guinea-Bissau and Afghanistan carry the can for OECD governments’ refusal to face facts, and slide ever closer to becoming hollowed-out or outright failed states.
So how to start to reorient drugs policy – given that, as Alan Johnson has just demonstrated so clearly, politicians manifestly feel unwilling or unable to persuade the public of the need for a more rational and effective approach?
Well, start with something Dominic Nutt said in an interview with the BBC (quoted on the NYT’s Lede blog):
With drugs particularly we have to educate the public about the harms of drugs, we have to give a very clear message which is based in science, and if we don’t do that, we’re wasting our time. So there’s no point in having drugs laws which are meaningless or arbitrary — just because politicians find it useful and expedient occasionally to come down so-called hard on drugs — that’s undermining the whole purpose of the drugs laws.
And just as we took out from party politics the regulation of interest rates and gave that to the Bank of England, surely what we should be doing regarding drugs laws is taking them out of party politics, setting up an independent committee that decides on drug harms, ranks drugs … and then puts that into legislation.
Now while the example of Bank of England independence on interest rates is clearly apposite, it’s actually not the best example. For that, we need to turn to the government’s less well known Committee on Climate Change, which was set up under the Climate Change Act 2008. The Committee’s key job is to advise the government on the level at which the UK’s ‘carbon budgets’ should be set (and they’re legally binding, by the way); it also monitors performance against them and reports back to Parliament annually.
This was a hugely smart move by the government. The implied logic is that while the case for tackling climate change is clearly compelling, it’s always going to be difficult for politicians to make progress if they’re constantly fighting a rearguard action against howls of outrage from various special interests. What the Committee does, then, is to leave it to the experts as far as the target-setting goes – and allow policymakers to concentrate on the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’. (As David Steven and I argued in a report we did for DFID earlier this year, the real need now is for some equivalent body at the global level – but that’s another story for another time.)
Now, if the government could engineer itself into a similar place on drugs policy, it would be in a far more defensible position, even if here the howls of outrage come from the Daily Mail rather than from industrial lobbies (“Fatuous, dangerous, utterly irresponsible – the Nutty professor who’s distorting the truth about drugs“). But how?
Well, the one comfort I draw from the current situation is that there are two highly effective – and rational – individuals who haven’t played their cards yet, and who can be expected to inject some soothing wisdom into the debate when they do.
The first is Sir David Omand, former Permanent Secretary at the Home Office and Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator at the Cabinet Office, who’s been charged by Alan Johnson with undertaking a review of the ACMD’s work to report by early 2010. Since his retirement, Omand has been a leading – and deeply sane – voice on counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation. (Back in January last year I saw him opposite Liberty’s Shami Chakrabarti on a conference panel, and was struck by the fact that they agreed with 95% of each other’s analysis.) Moreover, as Ron Suskind observes on his website, Omand is given to straight talking when policy clearly results in perverse outcomes – a helpful skill, you might think, in the current context.
The other is Professor John Beddington, the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser. Beddington has been a sure-footed operator in his first couple of years in post, steadily raising the profile of scarcity issues while prodding government to use its scientific advisers more effectively – and indeed sticking up for Dominic Nutt back in August this year, when he came under attack from then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. While Beddington has sensibly been keeping his powder dry so far, he – like Omand – has the advantages of (a) being ideally placed to pour oil on troubled waters while (b) being very much an independent thinker – who recognises the need for evidence-based policy that supports rather than works against its stated objectives.
So, could Omand and Beddington between them engineer a policy set-up that actually bolsters the place of the ACMD in the policy process? True, the signs aren’t auspicious at the moment. But I wouldn’t put it past them…
