Random bottles of alcoholCopyrighted imageA menace to society?Our current policies to control drugs and alcohol are having ‘disastrous results’, because they are made by politicians rather than scientists.
This is the hard-hitting view put forward by The Open University’s recently appointed Visiting Research Professor of Social Policy and Criminology, David Nutt.
In his first lecture at the OU’s Walton Hall campus in January, the former head of the Government’s Advisory council for the Misuse of Drugs said: “There is no correlation between harms of drugs and control.”
He added: “We currently have a decision-making process about drugs based on political expediency. I am sure we could do much better if scientists took over.”
Professor Nutt and colleagues have developed a Cause of Harm Index compiled by scientific experts (see below), which compares the harms done to individuals and to society by individual drugs, including tobacco and alcohol.
By this measure alcohol is more harmful than most of the drugs which are now currently illegal and responsible for the deaths of 8,000 people in the UK each year.
By contrast drugs like cannabis, ecstasy and mephedrone, which the scientific evidence suggests are all much less dangerous, are much more strictly controlled. Mephedrone was recently made illegal despite evidence that it may have encouraged a drop in consumption of a much more harmful drug, cocaine.
But current drugs legislation also discourages medical research which holds out hope for relieving suffering, Professor Nutt said.
He heads a team investigating a promising new drug treatment for cluster headaches, an intractable condition which causes its victims so much agony that some commit suicide.
But because the drug in question is psilocybin, classed as a Schedule 1 drug (the most restricted) it has taken his team eighteen months to clear the regulatory hurdles before they can start work.
Other Schedule 1 drugs may offer hope to sufferers from alcohol addiction, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and other serious conditions. But with regulatory hurdles including a licence that costs £6000 a year “almost no-one researches these drugs”, Professor Nutt said.
Ironically, Schedule 1 drugs are not necessarily the most dangerous – heroin at Schedule 2 is less restricted than cannabis which is Schedule 1. They classed as such because they are currently seen to have no medical use.