A Sledgehammer to Crack a Nutt

This government is not fond of people who disagree with them. Witness the Serious Organised Crime Act (Socpa), the swingeing restrictions on protesting within audible distance of parliament. The government do not like to hear voices of dissent, and especially when those voices join together in a chorus. So with the growing consensus of outrage amongst the scientific community over the treatment of independent scientific advisors, the government must be feeling a whole new wave of nausea and legislation coming on.

In the early days of Blair, Peter Mandelson laid claim to the secularism of Labour: “We don’t do god,” he said. Unfortunately, secularism is not the same as objectivity or fairness. As time wore on what became increasingly apparent was that while the government may not ‘do’ faith it also doesn’t ‘do’ facts or truth. In fact, it doesn’t ‘do’ anything that doesn’t fit the template of policy (and sometimes it just doesn’t do anything at all). Science is about seeking answers, and government, like its incestuous sister PR, is all about hiding them to protect the grand plan / the status quo / the public from themselves.

Now, however, Labour and the Tories are very publicly at odds with some scientists – and if there’s one thing that people in search of ‘the truth’ are not good at doing it’s keeping quiet. So after the government decided to ignore his advice, Professor David Nutt, the leading authority on the harmful effects of drugs, decided to give an academic lecture on the topic (which happens to be his specialism) at a university. Alan Johnson accused him of political lobbying and fired him. If an academic lecture constitutes a political action then the nation is being secretly run by the universities. I for one am relieved by this revelation, for a moment I had thought we were being run by a bunch of fanatics in Westminster.

The government’s drugs policy (and that of the Tories – they’re fairly interchangeable on ‘law and order’) can be summed up as follows: all drugs are bad, except the ones we get large amounts of tax from.

Let me tell you a story – it may seem completely fatuous at first but bear with me… I once went to the hospital for a test. On my appointment card I was told to drink two pints of water an hour before the test. I am a very small person with a very small bladder. Suffice to say it was the closest I have yet come to a near death experience. When I asked the doctor (a scientist) why I needed to drink so much water prior to the test he laughed and said I didn’t need to – the NHS had decided that because most people don’t drink enough water generally they would overstate the amount necessary and ‘simplify’ the instructions to ensure they got the results they needed. This taught me a couple of very valuable lessons:
• Those in authority will tell you whatever they need to to achieve a result;
• Those in authority will assume you are an incorrigible moron unless proven otherwise;
• I should never drink two pints of water and then travel to hospital via a road with one of the largest concentrations of speed bumps in London.

Now here are two statements:
1. Drugs such as cannabis, LSD and ecstasy are statistically less dangerous to your health than alcohol and tobacco
2. The money you spend on cannabis, LSD and ecstasy is likely to go to morally reprehensible people (possibly even more morally reprehensible than the government).
Those two statements weren’t too difficult to understand were they? Then why is it that the government thinks that the general populus is too stupid to be able to hold both statements in their head at the same time and weigh them against each other to make a decision?

Alan Johnson said that in firing Professor Nutt he was bending to the will of the people – that the people think drugs are bad. However, Johnson also thinks those same people are too stupid to be able to understand even basic science.

I for one am sick of being patronised and being spoon-fed half-truths, spin and soundbites. If the leading expert in the field tells you something you don’t want to hear you have every right to disagree with him (granted on non-scientific grounds – moral, political, whatever… and that’s the big problem, no-one from the government has yet explained what their grounds are…). But you don’t have the right to stifle his voice and to punish him for exercising his democratic right to freedom of expression.

I can handle conflicting ideas, I think most people can. This government may treat us like children and that may make us behave like them at times, but there is still one vital difference between the taxpayer and children: children can’t vote.

Related posts:

1. Let’s Not Have an ‘Evidence Based’ Drugs Policy
2. The Spice of Life