University of Bristol

David Nutt, a professor of pharmacology who was forced to resign on Friday as the head of an independent panel of experts set up to advise the British government on drug policy, accused Prime Minister Gordon Brown of overstating the dangers of cannabis and ecstasy to impress voters and suggested that drug laws should be written by scientists, not politicians.

Last Thursday, in an opinion essay on The Guardian’s Web site (which was adapted from a lecture published on the Web site of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies), Professor Nutt had argued against the government’s decision to treat cannabis as a more dangerous drug. The next day he was asked to resign by Alan Johnson, the British home secretary.

In a letter to The Guardian published on Monday, Mr. Johnson wrote that “Professor Nutt was not sacked for his views,” but “because he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy.” Mr. Johnson also took issue with the arguments in a satirical essay Professor Nutt wrote earlier this year for the Journal of Psychopharmacology, in which he mocked media hysteria over the risks associated with taking ecstasy by pointing out that more Britons die while riding horses each year than taking ecstasy. In terms of danger, he wrote, “there is not much difference between horse-riding and ecstasy.”

In an interview with the BBC, Professor Nutt said that the problem was not his behavior but that Mr. Brown’s government had decided to increase penalties for the sale of cannabis and ecstasy, despite evidence that both drugs are less harmful than alcohol and tobacco. Professor Nutt claimed that “this is the first government that has ever, in the history of the Misuse of Drugs Act, gone against the advice of its scientific panel.” Government ministers, he charged, “are making scientific decisions before they have even consulted with their experts.”

Pressed to accept that his role as a scientific advisor was merely to present evidence to the politicians who then set policy, Professor Nutt suggested that perhaps the solution was to change the equation and remove politics from the process entirely. He told the BBC that drug policy should be set the same way interest rates are set, by experts:

[T]here are some aspects of science which should not be subject to petty party politics and I think the drug laws are one of them. […] 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.

In an interview with Britain’s Channel 4 News on Monday, Les King another member of the advisory panel who quit in protest after Professor Nutt was forced out, agreed. Mr. King said:

Drugs classification has become a political football, because the Home Office is taking more recognition of what it thinks public opinion is than the scientific advice it receives from the advisory council. I don’t necessarily think that the public is always well-informed, and I’m not suggesting that the government is always taking a consensus view on public opinion, but rather certain sections of the public, and certain sections of the public view represented by certain sections of the media.

On Monday, Professor Nutt told Nature.com: