The Nutty Professor 2

Drug control is one of the more messy fields of integration of science and policy, and is certainly up there with climate change and the mechanics of Boris Johnson’s hair. The post from yesterday demonstrated how complex the science-policy interface can be, with respect to David Nutt’s dismissal from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs after pushing for his evidence to be used to guide policy reform in drugs control. Throughout, I made the assumption that his science was rigorous enough, not to avoid challenge, but to at least be of value to policy and decision-making processes. My current commute to and from Leicester is mind-numbingly boring. To offset this, on the way home I read his infamous co-authored paper from 2009, published in The Lancet for an analysis conducted into the relative harms of drugs in the UK. What I read about was a series of poorly-conducted analyses, and statements that didn’t seem to fit their results or were vague, meaningless and unsupported.