Excellent post, Dave. That’s how I remember it too.

So why do they waste our money on the kind of TV campaigns (like the one currently showing) where they spout all sorts of scare allegations about cannabis use that are not backed up by any scientific reality?

I suspect the likely truth is that Alan Johnson wanted to avoid a protracted and informed public debate with Prof Nutt about cannabis and believed that could be accomplished by being macho and dismissing the professor.

It explains why the Home Secretary deplored the professor’s passing comparison between the respective risks of horse riding and ecstasy while avoiding all mention of the steep rise in alcohol related deaths since the early 1990s:
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=1091

“The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said alcohol-related fatalities among all adult age groups in Britain more than doubled from 4,144 in 1991 to 8,758 in 2006.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jan/26/drugsandalcohol.society

“The total number of deaths in road accidents fell by 7 per cent to 2,946 in 2007 from 3,172 in 2006. However, the number of fatalities has remained fairly constant over the last ten years.”
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1208

Mel describes the Prof’s crime in the following terms;
“It was because he was playing politics and undermining government policy. As the Home Secretary said yesterday, it is for an adviser to advise and a minister to decide. An adviser cannot then step into the public field and campaign against government decisions”.

But as Nutt himself says;
“I gave a lecture on the assessment of drug harms and how these relate to the legislation controlling drugs. According to Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, some contents of this lecture meant I had crossed the line from science to policy and so he sacked me. I do not know which comments were beyond the line or, indeed, where the line was”.

Now by all accounts Nutt is a clever bastard, according to wiki he is a neuropsychopharmacologist specialising in the research of drugs which affect the brain and conditions such as addiction, anxiety and sleep. He is a professor at the University of Bristol heading their Psychopharmacology Unit. He also holds the Edmond J Safra chair in Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College, London. Nutt is a member of the Committee on Safety of Medicines, and presides over the European College on Neuropsychopharmacology.

Yet Nutt doesn’t know where this arbitary line is – only control freaks like Johno and top churnalists like Mel can see it.
Perhaps we should be grateful to both of them for their remarkable vision?

Excellent article Dave. I accidently worked for the National Treatment Agency for a bit after working for a Drug Action Team for an age and to compare pot in any even vague analysis with crack & smack is unbelievably erroneous. As mentioned – he wasn’t saying anything apart from it’s bad, but not as bad as fags & booze. Unbeleeeeevable.

Details of the numbers of drug-related deaths in 2006:
http://www.tdpf.org.uk/MediaNews_FactResearchGuide_DrugRelatedDeaths.htm

With those comparisons, the minister is looking really silly.

what? you think that a bottle of red impairs your functioning more than “a night spent assembling Rizlas”? You really think you could get stoned nightly and function daily? Not if your job requires you to put one neuron in front of the other without tripping over.

I know booze does more harm, fags kill more people, but even in moderate doses weed scrambles your brains and incapacitates more than either, I think that needs remembering in all this “cigarettes are worse than weed” talk

Well LE, I do know for certain that I can’t get pissed nightly and function daily, which is why I try not to drink heavily in the week.

[5] So, in total, 2,423 drug related deaths occur each year (once we exclude booze and fags from the equation)- the break down is as follows;
Heroin and morphine 713
Methadone 241
Cocaine (including crack) 190
All amphetamines 92
(of which MDMA/ecstasy) 48
Cannabis 17
Gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB) 7
All benzodiazepines 177
Zopiclone/Zolpidem 39
Barbiturates 17
All antidepressants 336
Paracetamol (including compound formulations) 287
Codeine (non-compound formulation) 60
Dihydrocodeine (non-compound formulation) 96
Aspirin 22
Tramadol 81

The grand total (2423) equals less than half of deaths from alcohol (6,627) and a figure that would take some 35 years to reach the annual toll associated with tobacco related deaths (86,500) – yup, Johno really got his priorities right in sacking the opinionated Prof?

@A&E charge nurse – plus, and here’s fun – the National Drug Treatment Monitoring System (NDTMS) didn’t even recognize booze as a drug until last year so any figures before that relating to treatment wasn’t err..what was it now err..i’ve got it here somewhere…err…recorded! Brilliant.

It’s the old one about how to reduce crime? Don’t answer the phone – job done, next!

[9] He, hee – you couldn’t make it up – I dread to think how Johno and top churnalists like Mel will react once they realise the Prof has made another school boy error?

One question is if it were legalised, would people still stop taking it as they became boringly middle-aged and conventional?

Would they continue to take only small quantities if it was available in packets of 20 in every Tesco’s and cornershop?

And if they did carry on taking it in large quantities as they became older and unhealthier, what would that do to the numbers?

It pretty much takes concerted effort to kill yourself with drugs before forty, and the opposite to stay alive past 80. In between is the domain of health statistics.

Here is Knutt’s list of drugs in order of dangerousness;
1. Heroin
2. Cocaine
3. Barbiturates
4. Street methadone
5. Alcohol
6. Ketamine
7. Benzodiazepines
8. Amphetamine
9. Tobacco
10. Buprenorphine
11. Cannabis
12. Solvents
13. 4-MTA
14. LSD
15. Methylphenidate
16. Anabolic steroids
17. GHB
18. Ecstasy
19. Alkyl nitrates
20. Khat
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/nov/02/david-nutt-dangerous-drug-list

Why isn’t alcohol a class A? and tobacco seems to be little more than a paltry class B?

Nutt Said “I do not know which comments were beyond the line or, indeed, where the line was”.

He’s not very good at distinguishing ‘artificial distinctions’, is he?

[12] I think there’s a widespread acceptance that, if alcohol were newly invented, it would be a Class A drug. And the same for nicotine.

So why is it the case that not only is no political party, however big or small, calling for the production of a plan to wean HM Treasury off the taxes it receives from these drugs, but there is no lobby whatever – comparable to the deep green lobby for compulsory veganism – for such a plan?

Given the deep doo-doo Johnson has dumped Labour in with scientists and doctors, is it not high time there was?

I completely agree with the Knutter though. Smack, crack & charlie should be consistently stated as being the drugs only a complete numbnuts would take and all the others (depending on quantity obviously) should be classed differently.

On a sort of social problematic scale – crack is off the charts – habits of £100k a year are quite common. Most users snowball – take smack & crack together as crack only lasts about 10 minutes before wearing off. The chances of catching a crack dealer are virtually none existent as no-one ever gets caught with it because they’ve cained it. Smack tends to get bought in a bit more bulk – something for the weekend, Sir? so much easier to catch addicts, suppliers etc.

E’s are pointless. Pot irrelevant. Methadone’s a toughie – the term ’street methadone’ is erroneous – it’s very rare for people to get addicted to methadone without being a smackhead first so the ’street’ aspect is just buying your mates’ prescription.

The argument of certain drugs being ‘gateway’ drugs is well developed and kinda makes sense.

I don’t know if Nutt’s strayed into areas where he shouldn’t have been going but it’s a similar thing to the recommended weekly booze limits – 28 for blokes & 21 for lasses or 21 & 14 – can’t remember. They’re just figures plucked out of the ether so if you’re gonna base classification on something, well, I guess deaths is as good as anything really.

Although booze deaths by misadventure, stupidity, violence, drink driving etc can’t really be quantified (as per drug deaths).

Bottom line – stay the hell away from crack & smack and if you wanna try the rest – have fun & be safe.

Dave,

I was going to say that you can probably function better after a couple of glasses of wine than you could after a couple of joints*, but of course the units aren’t commensurate

* was is the cool way of referring to jazz cigarettes nowadays?

Luis Enrique wrote:

“what? you think that a bottle of red impairs your functioning more than “a night spent assembling Rizlas”? You really think you could get stoned nightly and function daily? Not if your job requires you to put one neuron in front of the other without tripping over.”

When I was in my twenties I could pretty much get drunk or stoned nightly and still function daily. Now I could not do neither. Which is precisely why I do not get drunk or stoned every night.

“I know booze does more harm, fags kill more people, but even in moderate doses weed scrambles your brains and incapacitates more than either

Not really more than alcohol, in my experience.

‘* was is the cool way of referring to jazz cigarettes nowadays?

Joint will do.

There are all kinds of fun or silly variations but (Camberwell Carrot, doobie, coner) but ‘joint’ is a timeless classic.

I take it use of the word ‘blunt’ would immediately mark me out as a boring old fart?

a&e charge nurse,

The grand total (2423) equals less than half of deaths from alcohol (6,627)…

I fear your figure for alcohol is somewhat out of date (it’s from 2005) – although it appears to be widely quoted in recent news articles.

National Statistics says there “were 8,724 alcohol-related deaths in 2007, lower than 2006, but more than double the 4,144 recorded in 1991″.

Quite right ukliberty [20] – I’m sure there must be an unimpeachable source for these stats somewhere, but what ends up on ANY death certificate can involve a certain amount of guestimation?

The curmudgeonly Dr Crippen illuminates the issue here;
http://nhsblogdoc.blogspot.com/2009/03/death-certificate-lottery.html

Does anyone know if anybody in Parliament has ever introduced a private members bill advocated some form of legalisation or decriminalisation?

I know we’re signed up to the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and most – or all – following international treaties on drugs, and this removes some room to manoeuvre, but surely someone must have introduced some sensible drug policy initiates at some point.

Perhaps, in time, EU legislators will introduce a more rational system although right-wing Latvians, and Mel Phillips will probably fight against it?

[21] I’m sure there are some doctors who will give smoking as a cause of death to any corpse which they knew to be that of a smoker, even if they were run over by a hovercraft! (It is otherwise difficult to understand why smoking kills twice as many smokers to-day as it did a generation ago…)

Posted this on the other thread on Nutt already, and I though it worth posting here as although its not immediately or entirely relevant, something similar is bound to come up.

Heroin can be produced incredibly cheaply, likewise cocaine and marijuana, so to can alcohol and cigarettes.

For example, Peruvians aren’t rich, yet they can afford coca which grows quite easily all over the world, and basé is easy to make if you have some petrol and something alkali to drive the cocaine out of solution. Basé is about 40% pure and you can smoke it if you want.

The refining into cocaine would probably as easy as making paracetamol. If you want crack then cook up the cocaine hydrochloride you mix it with an alkali like bicarbonate of soda and you’re away.

The stors not too dissimilar for Heroin, and its even easier for weed.

Heroin and Cocaine are expensive because they’re illegal, Alcohol and Tobacco because they’re taxed.

I happen to think most of the dreadful things about drugs lead from their illegality. Their expense is certainly one of them.

The beauty of legalisation is that you know who your addicts are and you can control the price, and so demand, far more easily.

Alcohol and tobacco are expensive because they cause a lot of harm and these externalities can be taxed (and then taxed some more, but that’s another story). Heroin and Cocaine are expensive because criminal gangs can extract a rent from their production and distribution, rather than this money being used for something useful, like drug treatment or education, it is used to buy islands in the Bahamas. Great work moral majority.

Nutt was not arguing this, but I don’t like people saying drugs are expensive or inherently harmful in ways which they are not.

[24] how about this one?
Lets say somebody with a serious drink problem gets pissed and frequently falls over.
A head injury finally leads to a serious brain haemorrhage – the subsequent rise in intracranial pressure kills the patients (it is noted on C/T scan that there is both acute and chronic bleeding) – the patient also suffers coagulopathy due to years of alcohol abuse.
http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/77186911.html

Should the death certificate simply record acute subdural haemorrhage or should it highlight alcohol dependency as a contributing cause as well?

Not to worry. All these apparent contradictions and perplexities in Home Office policy – and in working out the cause of death for death certificants – will soon be resolved if the Tories are elected to government:

“Business is poised to gain much greater sway over Whitehall under a Conservative government, with corporate ‘big hitters’ being drafted in to help shake up departmental spending and transform the civil service culture.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/be968f2a-c72b-11de-bb6f-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1

Well, got to find jobs for all those redundant and superfluous bankers somehow.

@25 – err..all perfectly sensible but can I just be an absolute prick as per my moniker – hmm, drug treatment does not work in any way a professional manner. It’s taken on an air of counselling – which I tend to agree with personally. I don’t think treatment can occur if the patient is unwilling and they lead incredibly chaotic lifestyles. It’s a really legally tricky set of circumstances – if a smackhead ODs then is there blaim? I guess it’s similar to the assisted suicide thingy.

I accidently spent ages doing a report for the NTA and the conclusion of which was ‘drug treatment’s a bit shit in some places and abstinence is a bit idealistic – harm minimization please’. It all depends on what you want to do when you find a smackhead or junkie of anything really. It does seem kind of seem odd that the unhidden grouping of those addicted to prescription drugs or readily available drugs is overlooked – therefore it’s not really a ‘health’ thing but a social problem; from that it can be assumed that it’s the anti-social nature of how they’re traded.

The alcohol stats are complete bollox. 8500 booze deaths per year? Multiply it by 8 and I reckon we’re getting somewhere. There’s a few studies of prevalence stats out there and you can judge it yourself now everyone has to recycle their bottles – some people are drinking fantastically serious amounts of decent booze in their homes and it’s gonna be the heart attack that kills them, sober.

Anyway – good on Nutt for saying the bleedin obvious.

Via Schroedinger99 This suggests that Alan Johnson really does not have a leg to stand on re #DavidNutt’s sacking. Looks like he stuck to the Code of Practice for Scientific Advisory Committees. Hmmmm, http://bit.ly/3MMVnm

Slightly o/t. But, how can you ‘accidentally’ write a report?

“good on Nutt for saying the bleedin obvious.”

According to this letter in Monday’s Times from Richard Garside, Director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College, London, the lecture by Professor Nutt’s conformed with official guidelines:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/science/2009/11/david-nutts-controversial-lecture-conformed-to-government-guidelines.html

As presented, the professor’s lecture in July, which incurred the wrath of the Home Secretary, was given by the professor in his capacity as Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College, not in his capacity as chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. The decision to sack Professor from his part-time and unpaid advisory post is starting to look very much like a crass attempt at academic censorship.

Alan Johnson is looking more and more daft over this.

For reference, this is the Code of Practice for Scientific Advisory Committees:
http://www.dius.gov.uk/office_for_science/science_in_government/strategy_and_guidance/~/media/publications/F/file42780

This is all because Johnson has gone native and failed to sack the real culprit: Mandie Campbell, a protege of the infernal Lin Homer.

Ultimately, the least that needs doing to sort out the Home Office (if its abolition is never finished) is a near clean sweep of senior civil servants: they’re an exceptionally politicized bunch. There will never be any sensible policy whilst these people are briefing against the truth from inside.

[26] Why shouldn’t a contributory cause go on a death certificate? However, I suspect that it would be far more likely to if the deceased were of no fixed abode than if they were an accident and emergency charge nurse!

26, you should know as much as anyone that paperwork in itself can become political.

Excellent post, Dave

@20, I believe a blunt in modern parlance is cannabis mixed with cigar tobacco and rolled in a cigar tube.

Lor’ bless us, the heavens have moved.

Even the Telegraph is now saying that Alan Johnson – as well as Chris Grayling, his shadow, who supports his decision to sack Prof Nutt – “should also have had the uneasy feeling that they had lost the argument.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/6488025/Sketch-Drugs-adviser-is-harder-Nutt-to-crack.html

The real politic of this is surely that people are not generally banged up for five years for smoking cannabis, dropping pills or snorting powders. As well as being more likely to die or get ill from alcohol you are probably more likely to be arrested or imprisoned for its direct and indirect harms which are many – often around drunk driving and drunk violence rather than supply of restricted products.

Though even there you could well get arrested, charged, fined or imprisoned for supplying underage, or without a licence, or outside permitted hours, or in a wreckless way to drunks.

And to be fair cigarette smugglers and “pushers” can also find themselves on the wrong end of the constabulary and the customologists.

And to continue being fair there is an antisocial element from some parts of drug culture – the physically addictive sector – and crime and there are certainly some links between the suppliers of dope and Es and LSD, new very nasty party drugs, and of whizz, coke, crack and opiates. Between little dealers and big gangsters. And also between casual use of drugs and an often horrendous and murderous supply chain.

Any executive and legislature and policers and judgers don’t just have to weigh up cold hard scientific fact on “harm” – which often isn’t as cold and hard and factual or uncontested as scientists or indeed politicians tend to make out. Scientific facts i.e. data can often begat several competing theories. And the theories are not themselves facts. They gain and lose popularity and they may be made monkeys of by the passage of time, new data or better thinking.

The politicians and the judges etc must also consider social contexts, crime and disorder, parliamentary politics i.e. can they get things through, and also public palatability. And it is arguably their decisions about enforcement and the practical results of those decisions that really matter.

Professor Nuttsacks originally made his remarks about E and horseriding in February. That was surely a fairly serious category error? He could have also linked drug use in some arcane way to banana production in the Dominican Republic, to driving motor cars, or to deaths by dog poo discarded in parks in the UK. A pet subject.

Professor Nuttsacks, having got away with that, seems to have repeated his remarks with bells on late last month. He was, ahem, riding for a fall.

However we may feel about drugs, legalisation, policing, enforcement, pony riding we must surely feel some sense of empathy with politicians lumbered with an unhelpful “expert” pushing personal views? In the real world most of us who are or have been managers or Trustees or indeed participants in democratic parties would be likely, I feel, to deal with Professor Nuttsacks or his equivalent in a similar way to Mr Johnson.

Discuss.

@39, taking ecstasy and riding horses are both slightly, but not very, dangerous pursuits that people engage in for fun. They’re completely comparable.

Oooh, Sunny’s removed the “edit your comment” widget. Not sure I approve of that.

Anyway, was going to add – 150 years ago horses were indispensable to the way we lived our lives, so not comparable to recreational drug use (same now for driving cars) – but now it’s a minority, 100% recreational pursuit, just like drug use.

Chris @39,

Firstly, on what grounds does ’society’ (or whoever) assert the right to determine what I may not put in my body?

Secondly, in what way is the comparison of the risks of horse-riding to the risks of the consumption of Ecstasy a category error? Nutt could indeed have compared (not “linked”) it to the risks of participating in “banana production in the Dominican Republic, to driving motor cars, or to deaths by dog poo discarded in parks in the UK”, or any other activity. As I understand it his point was about public understanding of risk, and what activities are acceptable despite their risks, to get us to think about why some activities are acceptable and some or not, so we make the right decision on the right grounds.

(Now, there is some disagreement about whether he has his facts right about the risks of Ecstasy, but it doesn’t obviate the broader point.)

@31 – well you know, you get a bit bored in your job, throw a few applications out there, have a few interviews (some of them pure comedy – the best one was where I accidently answered a set question with ‘err..you what?’) and then accidently get a job that looks alright on paper. Then after about a month when people have got used to you and you’ve got used to them you kinda realize it’s a complete waste of time, effort, imagination, hope and so to get out of the office it makes sense to wander around the treatment agencies in the region. During that time you meet a lot of practioners, junkies, families, staff and over the course of 6 months produce a load of maps, charts, stats, inferences, opinions and conclude that drug treatment can’t really be centrally driven by the NHS and really should link in with other agencies. At which point the regional manager of the NTA steps in and says – cheers lad but we can’t be publishing this as it may affect our budgets for the future (+£300 million form 2006 – 2007 – I shit you not) so they politely file this (modesty forbids) well researched report in the bin.

At which point I accidently tell them to shove their job up their arse and get the fuck out of dodge. Something like that anyway.

What with the Home Office being previously declared “unfit for purpose” and now the current mess, the prescription above by James D @33 makes a lot of sense:

“Ultimately, the least that needs doing to sort out the Home Office (if its abolition is never finished) is a near clean sweep of senior civil servants: they’re an exceptionally politicized bunch. There will never be any sensible policy whilst these people are briefing against the truth from inside.”

what? you think that a bottle of red impairs your functioning more than “a night spent assembling Rizlas”? You really think you could get stoned nightly and function daily? Not if your job requires you to put one neuron in front of the other without tripping over.

From extensive personal experience, yes, I do think that. Of course, it rather depends on how many rizlas I assemble, and how much of exactly what I put in them… I certainly couldn’t function properly if I were necking a bottle of red every night, but I seem to manage just fine with a few mild spliffs every night.

Dosage matters, and your mileage may vary.

I know booze does more harm, fags kill more people, but even in moderate doses weed scrambles your brains and incapacitates more than either, I think that needs remembering in all this “cigarettes are worse than weed” talk

Well, granted, tobacco isn’t strongly psychoactive, but I know for a fact that booze inhibits both my hand-eye co-ordination and impulse control far more severely than weed does. People vary quite dramatically in their response to different drugs – some people get pissed on a half of shandy, others can down two bottles of Rioja with no obvious effects. It’s rarely a good idea to generalise from personal experience in such matters.

@45: The word “accidentally” doesn’t mean what you appear to think it does!

Some commentators have ascribed the kind of power to the right wing press that top churnalists like Mel Phillips could only ever dream about.

According to this analysis Johno, Straw, Clarke, et al, are shit scared of the likes of Mel, and always have been, whenever the issue of more humane drug legislation arises?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/03/nutt-johnson-drugs-rightwing-press

@48 – probably. I also accidently got a rather nice compo package (seriously, I thought that if you quit a job you got nowt but in the nether world of more money than sense and/or constructive dismissal) so that was nice. I would strenuously argue that the National Treatment Agency is not a suitable vehicle for substance misuse amelioration but strangely no-one’s talking about that. Pot reclassification – how unbelievably irrelevant (unless of course a twatty copper with a chip on their shoulder decides to arrest you for having an ounce on you or something and then it’s almost career over in some walks of life – outrageous!).