Monday 2 November 2009

Professor Nutt and why politics has such a bad name

You may have heard that the government has just sacked a Professor David Nutt over his views on drugs. He was their leading scientific advisor on drugs and gave a lecture and wrote some articles where he put forward the view that the laws needing amending.

He pointed out some facts and gave his educated opinion, saying things that many people agree with, like cannabis is not as dangerous as alcohol or tobacco. However you look at it, the hard numbers or the percentages, this is clearly true - more people die of alcohol related illnesses and accidents than they do of cannabis, and we all now that tobacco is a killer. Yet these are both not only legal, but huge sources of income for the government. Surely that warrants some kind of public debate?

Of course giving lectures and writing papers, and having an opinion is what eminent professors do all the time, so it shouldn't have come as a surprise to the government, but they've decided to have a hissy fit that he spoke against them.

I don't think they expected such a huge backlash as this, with scientists from many other branches of science speaking out. It's not just Professor Nutt that they're angry about, it's the governments position on all sorts of science, which over the years they've had a very dubious view of. They seem to see the truth and hard fact of science as something that they can be used to support their position if they agree and which they can ignore if it doesn't support them.

They have, on several occasions chosen public opinion over the hard facts of science. They've allowed alternative medicines to be given a veneer of respectibility by setting up 'regulatory bodies' for magic water and sugar pills as well as the National Homeopathic Hospital, they've been spending our National Insurance contributions on quacks and charlatans of every hue not because it could be proved to make people better, but because public opinion supported it.

In the drugs debate, having set up a panel of experts to advise them, they ignored their advice and decided to reclassify cannabis as a class 'B' drug - because public opinion was against it.

You'd hope that the government would once in a while NOT give way to public opinion, because let's face it 'public opinion' is actually newspaper opinion, and the public's opinion is only worth having if they're sufficiently well-informed about an issue. I'd much rather have the opinion of intelligent, educated and experienced academic experts about issues of a scientific nature than whatever the Daily Mail says, thanks all the same.

But then governments aren't about policies any more, they don't even have a theme as such. Basically they'll do whatever you want them to do, and be whatever you want them to be. Labour used to have a really good manifesto, but the guts of it were taken out with 'clause 4' which promised to secure for the workers the means of production, but they dropped that, because the press didn't like it.

I'd like to see, for a change, a politician in power stand and up and say that he doesn't care what people think, the evidence-based policy is the only sensible choice and so that's what he's going to do. Have some principles in other words.

2 comments:

  1. I think a politician with principles is a borderline oxymoron. Insofar as a politician's political career is concerned, public opinion is the only thing that keeps him employed. It sucks, to say the least. Anyway, good post! I think this issue is one that's deserving of more attention than the media cares to give it.

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  2. Lets hope the Government pays as much attention to it's newly formed "religious expert" advisers as it does to these real experts.

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