Reality A Bitter Pill In Drug Politics

[User]

Edmonton - Politicians hate it when experts shine the light of truth on supposedly unimpeachable government ideology.

The British government had a hissy fit when its top drug policy advisor suggested the U.K.'s drug classification system doesn't make sense.

David Nutt had the temerity to question the government's decision to bump marijuana into a more dangerous drug category. And he had the nerve to state publicly that tobacco and booze are more dangerous than pot.

So it was off with Nutt's head ... figuratively speaking, of course. While Britain doesn't chop off people's heads anymore because that's .well, backwards ...it's having trouble refashioning drug policy for the 21st century.

Nutt was the chair of Britain's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Two of his colleagues on the panel have reportedly resigned, complaining that the government is pressuring the council to politicize drug policy issues.

IGNORED ADVICE

One wonders why the U.K. has a drug advisory board if it doesn't really want any advice.

"We cannot send out a message to young people that it's OK to experiment with drugs and to move on to hard drugs," declared Prime Minister Gordon Brown. "We have to send out a message to young people that it's simply not acceptable."

What has Brown been smoking? Drug policy experts don't go around promoting drug use. The braver ones, however, do point out the absurdity of the world's drug laws. The ones that do the most damage - -- booze and tobacco -- are legal and often the drugs that do minimal harm, like marijuana, are characterized as substances that will lead you down the inevitable path to hard drugs and eventual death.

Nutt, who is not at all nutty, despite what the British government believes, has proposed that all drugs -- legal and illegal -- be classified according to their harm.

That would mean, presumably, that tobacco and alcohol would be at the top, her*oin and coc*aine would be in the middle somewhere and the least dangerous drugs, like pot, would be at the bottom.

But science and politics have never mixed well, which is why neither Britain, Canada nor the U.S. are in a hurry to place controls on drugs that are proportional to their harm.

"Our laws have nothing to do with health considerations or pharmacology," says Benedikt Fischer, a drug policy expert at Simon Fraser University. "It reflects politics from 100 years ago."

Earlier this year, actually, Fischer sat on a panel with Nutt on this very issue at a drug conference in Vienna.

"He's a very credible, internationally known scientist," says Fischer. "I was quite surprised to read that ( he'd been fired ). I always thought that the British at least still had that much respect for science."

Canada doesn't have a drug advisory council but it could sure use one to push the envelope a bit on drug policy reform. On the other hand, if we did have such a panel and someone on it as outspoken as Nutt, "he'd be gone pretty soon," quips Fischer.

Meanwhile, science and reality continue to make our drug policy look foolish. Several years ago, the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse released a study on the costs of substance abuse.

In 2002, more than 37,000 Canadians died from tobacco use and another 4,000 died from booze-related causes. In contrast, less than 1,700 Canadians ( .8% of all deaths ) succumbed from illegal drug use.

Politicians would rather shuffle an inconvenient scientist out of the way than confront the truth.


NewsHawk: User: http://www.420magazine.com/
Source: Edmonton Sun (CN AB)
Copyright: 2009 Canoe Limited Partnership.
Contact: mailbag@edmsun.com
Website: Edmonton Sun
Author: Mindelle Jacobs

[fatigues]

This is the first story on Dr. Nutt that I have seen published in a North American paper. Hopefully, others will see this on the wire and the story will spread.

For those keeping track, this is published in the Edmonton Sun - hardly a liberal paper - and in the most conservative province in Canada, no less.