Anybody who has ever smoked a spliff will have been feeling rather righteous this week. Professor David Nutt was forced to resign following his comments suggsting that certain illegal drugs were less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco. In the aftermath there has been a great deal of public acrimony between scientists and politicians, largely presented in terms vituous scientists dutifully drawing conclusions from the evidence, ranged up against politicians who have been contaminating the issue with, um politics.

The watchword throughout this all has been ‘evidence based policy’. For people who have long believed in legalising soft and/or hard drugs it is an appealing rallying cry, quite simply because the evidence of hazard for a number of substances is somewhat thin on the ground. Indeed in the past few days a full 6k or so people have joined a facebook group calling for Professor Nutt’s reinstatement and for an ‘evidence based policy’ on drugs.

Meanwhile the governments failure to follow the advice of scientists over the reclassifiction of cannabis several years ago has once again been brought to the fore. Nutt was quoted in the Telegraph as saying:

“Gordon Brown’s government is the first in the ACMD’s 37-year history to ignore our advice. Have we got worse scientists? No, in fact we are more rigorous than ever, which means there must be something else happening and it is a political decision.”

A political decision? Heaven forbid. You could be forgiven for thinking, from Nutt’s deep aggrevation that the government had ignored scientific advice for the first time in 37 years, that the scientists themselves had stood for office and been elected by the people.

Indeed, while I would support drug legalisation, I have always seen the notion of ‘evidence based policy’ as rather silly. Of course one can talk about ‘evidence backed policy. One might suggest that where the government wishes to achieve particular aims they might look to evidence to see if those aims should be achieved. But the idea that policy can be ‘based’ on evidence – especially in the way this idea has been articulated regarding the drugs debate – goes a step further. It suggests that we approach the science and the empirical data as though it were a magic 8 ball that can give us a yes/no on the case for legalising certain drugs. Quite simply, you cannot get an ought from an is.

Those who, like me, support drug liberalisation, but who have jumped on the ‘evidence based’ bandwagon would do well to ask themseles a coupe of questions.
A) When I first decided weed should be legal, had I studiously considered the empirical evidence?
B) If data did demonstrate a substantial health risk would I switch my support to criminalisation?

In my case the answer would be no to both. And this is because I support liberalisation on grounds of personal Liberty. Central to the question of drug legalisation is the role that the state, and the role of criminal law within society. To pretend – now that the evidence is on our side – that legalisation is simply a matter of good science, is a cowardly flight from politics.

“The spice extends life, the spice expands consciousness, the spice is vital to space travel.” At least that’s according to Virginia Madsen in the opening monologue of David Lynch’s cult classic, Dune. In reality, Spice does not extend life, it does not expand consciousness and, unless NASA has come up with some new propulsion technology they’ve yet to divulge, it is not vital to space travel. Spice just gets you high. A mixture of herbs and chemicals sealed in a space-age bag, it is sold in head shops and on the internet as a legal alternative to cannabis. Now I have to admit, until a few hours ago, I had never heard of Spice. It could have been a made up drug. Like cake. But with the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs today calling for the concoction to be banned, Spice has been all over the news.

It could be that Professor David Nutt, chairman of the advisory council, had some bad acid at Woodstock. Or it could just be that he’s a confused individual. The same man who earlier this year said ecstasy is “no more dangerous than horse riding”, today recommended banning Spice on the grounds that it can cause “paranoia and panic attacks.” Much like alcohol can cause vomiting, embarrassingly over-affectionate behaviour, singing at unreasonable volumes and the odd knifing outside a pub. Indeed it was Nutt himself who, only in 2006, posed the question that teeth-grinding ravers have been asking themselves for decades: “Why is ecstasy illegal when alcohol, a considerably more harmful drug, is not?” Sound reasoning, but a confusing message.

The government has flip-flopped on the issue of drugs over the last few years, knocking cannabis one letter down the alphabet, then upgrading it again when they realised it might send a few kids crazy. The message, however, from governments around the world, ever since the US spearheaded a campaign of hysteria best demonstrated by the film Reefer Madness, has always been consistent. Drugs are bad. Professor Nutt’s approach to the legality of recreational substances, be they smoked, sniffed, snorted, swallowed or injected into the eyeballs, is actually refreshingly nuanced. What’s confusing about his latest soundbites, however, is that he actually thinks banning Spice might help.

There is no doubt that, like alcohol and tobacco, illegal drugs have side-effects. From being unable to get a stiffy to becoming a stiff, they range from the mildly irritating to the genuinely dangerous. Banning drugs, however, has never proved a successful deterrent. Gordon Brown’s justification for the reclassification of cannabis this year was not just that the new stronger strains could cause mental health problems, but that it was a “gateway drug”.

Cannabis is a gateway drug. It’s not a gateway drug because kids taking their first toke behind the bike sheds immediately feel like racking up a line of coke, anymore than someone drinking their first pint wants to nip to the toilets for a wee and a fix of heroin. Its potential as a gateway drug arises because dealers selling cannabis will often sell harder drugs. And if they don’t sell harder drugs, chances are they know someone who does. It is precisely cannabis’s illegal status that opens a gateway for users to this black market and provides access to drugs they might not otherwise encounter. Needless to say, if cannabis were legal, if it were sold in shops, taxed, regulated by the government and removed from the streets, parks and schoolyards, the gates would be much easier to close.

The war on drugs, like the war on terror, is unwinnable. Decades of paying corrupt and bankrupt governments in Latin America to destroy coca plantations upon which the livelihoods of some of the poorest depend, of boarding boats and border checks, of funding the Taliban and locking up teenagers for committing the victimless crime of recreation, have failed to make a dent on supply or demand. Banning a substance will not prevent its use. If there’s a market for it, it will be bought and sold, whether the government permits it or not. As it stands, the main market for Spice, which has similar effects to cannabis but is more expensive, is people who are willing to pay a little bit more for their fun to avoid breaking the law. It is possible that banning it will reduce its use. But only because, with its main selling point removed, people will choose to smoke cannabis instead.

The answer to the most harmful effects of drugs, then, cannot be in prevention. It has to be in cure. Only through legalisation, regulation, and legitimate licensed sale, can the majority of drugs be made safe. If one accepts that people will smoke cannabis or take ecstasy regardless of the law – and they will – then surely it is preferable for those users to know the strength of the weed they’re puffing or exactly what’s in the pill they’re popping. The argument that legalising it will increase its use falls flat when one looks at the Dutch example. Amsterdam’s famous coffeeshops are packed with foreign tourists, but less than 3% of Dutch people over the age of 11 smoke weed themselves. Compare that to just under 30% of Britons aged 16-24 and 14% aged 25-34 who smoked it in the last year alone.

That does not mean that we should make highly addictive substances, like heroin and crack cocaine, that have the potential to destroy communities, freely available. But there is no sense in turning users into criminals, pushing them under the radar, beyond the pale and beyond help. Portugal’s move to decriminalise drugs in an effort to manage the problem is the perfect example of the way to approach the issue. The British government’s hysteria was a bad trip from the start and Professor Nutt’s call today to make Spice illegal is another misguided step on a road that’s going nowhere. Spice might not extend life, expand consciousness or facilitate space travel, but it gets you high. Unlike Spice, banning it will have very little effect.