David John Nutt
British psychiatrist and neuropsychopharmacologist specializing in the research of drugs that affect the brain and conditions such as addiction, anxiety and sleep. In his opinion one of the major methods to combat drug addiction is to separate production and dissemination of scientific evidence about drugs from political influence.
Questions
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What should be in the Internet age and growth of online communities informational methods to combat drug addiction? What do you think, what means will be most effective today, and how the state should behave in order to successfully affect the suffering of drug addiction and to conduct prevention among healthy population?
I set up the launch of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD) because I feel passionately that drugs policy needs to be based on the best available scientific evidence. Crucially, the production and dissemination of this scientific evidence needs to be entirely independent of political influence. The government cannot think logically about drugs. The moral dimension is at the heart of the problem, because the science is clear. We've done the science. The paper in the Lancet tells us the relative harm of drugs. What the last government has done, systematically, is pretend that there's a science that we need to be concerned about, with drugs like cannabis and ecstasy, which is the justification for doing what they did making cannabis class B and keeping ecstasy class A. And that's immoral. Because the science does not direct policy making in that direction. But why are we still arguing about the science? Because people don't want to argue about the real issue. When the government decided to keep ecstasy as class A they said it's because we don't know what it might do in the long term. But when we say to the government, 'But we do know that alcohol kills you now, and is killing millions of people in the long term, why aren't you doing anything about that?' they ignore the question. And that's what I find offensive.
