'I am a Scientist! You Will Obey!' Professor Nutt speaks again

Many readers will recall my various clashes with Professor David Nutt, the noted Neuropsychopharmacologist and former Chairman of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs. 

His opinions were eventually judged so bizarre and embarrassing, even by a Labour government that winked at the covert decriminalisation of supposedly illegal drugs, that he was removed from that committee.

I suspect they were worried that he was drawing attention to the establishment's covert acceptance of drugs in our midst. I suspect that many more serious people on the drugs decriminalisation side view the Professor as an embarrassment. I wouldn't blame them.

He has enjoyed the notoriety ever since, becoming a bit of a hero to many decriminalisers.  I've attacked him for it. And now, in an article on the Guardian's 'Comment is Free' site
he makes a direct attack on me. Actually, this isn't the first time. Last December he gave an interview to The Guardian in which he assailed me for my alleged 'baseless alarmism' about drugs.

I have responded to the Professor here in the past and here and here and also here.

Now I must do so again. It is important that Professor Nutt's contributions to the drugs debate are judged on their merits, not protected from proper analysis by his scientist's white coat.

Professor Nutt's latest 'Comment is Free' article is as cavalier with facts as his claim on the radio that 160,000 people were subject to criminal sanctions for cannabis possession. The majority of them ( as I have shown) were not punished at all, merely given unrecorded warnings without legal force.

The problem with the Lancet report that began our quarrel  is that it is a curious hybrid of natural science and social science, known as 'Multicriteria Decision Analysis' . Measurable chemical or physical factors such as 'intrinsic lethality', and physical damage,  are assessed in the same document alongside such things as Family adversities, 'Extent to which the use of a drug causes family adversities—eg, family breakdown, economic wellbeing, emotional wellbeing, future prospects of children, child neglect'.

Or 'International damage, Extent to which the use of a drug in the UK contributes to damage internationally—eg, deforestation, destabilisation of countries, international crime, new markets'; or 'Community - Extent to which the use of a drug creates decline in social cohesion and decline in the reputation of the community'; or 'Loss of relationships. Extent of loss of relationship with family and friends'. In effect, it claims to consider, in the same package and with the same objectivity, both stomach ulcers and deforestation, sociology and also psychology, chemistry and neurobiology. That is the point I strove to make. In the weighting of all these things against each other, some subjectivity must be involved. The claim that science has somehow established that one drug is more damagaing than any other is, to say the least, questionable *on scientific terms*.

I also pointed out that the report didn't seem to take into account the difference made to alcohol's impact by the fact that it is legally on sale, whereas most of the other drugs examined are at least technically illegal. Decca Aitkenhead (no political ally of mine) made the same point in her interview.

By omitting these facts Professor Nutt gives the impression that the clash was one between a cool, objective scientific mind and a raging tabloid hack. This is highly misleading.

Finally, but very significantly, Professor Nutt asserts 'the BBC issued a statement saying that they would not use him [me] again.'

They issued no such statement. This is pure fiction.  His account of my subsequent encounter with the 'Feedback' programme is also misleading in several significant ways.  I didn't protest about 'censorship'. I complained about having been attacked at length on air on a supposedly impartial station, without being given any opportunity to defend myself. And I had to make very considerable efforts to secure the fair hearing that I eventually received.

I can only hope that Professor Nutt's science is better than his journalism. But if he wishes to claim that his scientific standing gives him some special right to pronounce on this subject, it would seem to be incumbent on him to use the most basic scientific method in his own work –  factual accuracy.