David Nutt, a British neuropsychopharmacologist specialising in the research of drugs that affect the brain was Chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) when in 2009, he was dismissed by the governement for his positions on drugs.
The 30th of october 2009, on a Friday evening, David Nutt was working in his office of the division of neuroscience and mental health in Charing Cross hospital when he received an enigmatic phone call from the Home Office urging him to read his mails. He obeyed immediately, and opened the mail that Alan Johnson, then Home secretary, had just sent to ask him to step down from his position of Chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). It is hard to say what the country’s leading expert on drugs could have felt at that moment : anger, incredulity, disappointment? David Nutt was certainly shocked, for everyone knows that breaking up with someone via mail is the summit of rudeness. However, the professor was probably not very surprised, for this decision sealed the tragic issue of a drama in two acts.
As far as he could remember, everything started in July 2007, when Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith was reviewing whether to return cannabis from a class C status where it was put in 2002 to a class B status. On the 7 May 2008, Smith confirmed that cannabis in the UK would again be classified as a class B drug, despite the Advisory Council’s recommendation. Paradoxically, the same month, David Nutt was appointed chairman of the ACMD. The less that we can say is that this decision is puzzling. Nutt is a prominent figure in drug policy reform famed for his corrosive statements on the government’s position as well as a provocative media figure. Having took over the post in november, it didn’t take long to the “drug star” to spice things up between him and the Home Office’s secretary. In January 2009, he wrote in an academic journal that ecstasy was no more dangerous than an addiction to horse riding, that he provocatively-and humorously, to be honest- named “equasy”. The point was to recommend that ecstasy was downgraded from class A, an advice that was immediately vetoed by Jaqui Smith in the name of the precautionary principle. At that point, both went on their high horses: The professor accused the government of making a political decision-how dare they!Politicians taking political decisions!- and the home secretary dramatically exploited the pain of the parents who had lost a child because of ecstasy to win the battle. How she manage to get the strong minded professor making a public apologize is a mystery to me.
But the government should have known that things were not over. In October, the Centre for Crime and Justice studies published a paper version of a lecture the professor held in July at the KCL. On this occasion, David Nutt initiated a debate on drug policy in the media, during which he reaffirmed his views about drugs classification and accused ministers of “devaluing and distorting’ the scientific evidence by their decision last year to reclassify cannabis. Which from the comparison of the government as a ‘quasi-religious character reminiscent of medieval debates about angels and the heads of pins!’, or the catchy assertion that giving ecstasy to a stranger is safer than giving them a peanut made the new Home Office secretary, Alan Johnson, enrage the most, no one can say. What we know is that he immediately decided to end this chaotic relationship with the mediatic professor. He took this sudden decision on his own, without even advising the minister of science or the chief scientific adviser. For it was Alan Johnson’s absolute right to sack David Nutt. As much as it was the professor’s absolute right to criticize the government’s decision to dismiss the ACMD’s advice. And there is no such thing as being right. Eventually, the two men’s emotions took over rationality and their confidence of being right turned into arrogance. In the days following the professor’s dismissal, David Nutt and his supporters, the governments but also the journalists, the opposition, and members of the scientific community furiously debated in the media and added their stone to an edifice based on this paradox itself rooted in the intrinsic difference between science and politics.
Before all, it must be said that Alan Johnson’s argument that he sacked David Nutt because of a problem of trust is perfectly receivable. The home office secretary perceived the relationship with the chairman and the ACMD almost as an exclusive and a private one. On November 2nd, when faced to the attacks of the parliamentary opponents urging him to rationalize his treatment of independent scientific advisors, Alan Johnson made clear that David Nutt was chair of ‘his’ advisory committee and shouldn’t have campaigned through media appearances against decisions he and his predecessors had taken. As usual, it is this introduction of a third element in the relationship that created a feeling of betrayal. Even once the controversy had burst, Alan Johnson himself made few statements in the media but instead organized discussions with the ACMD on an internal level. To Johnson, things were clear : the drug expert had been appointed to collaborate with the government by providing advice; he had been appointed a role that he, theoretically, accepted to perform. But the government had in fact let the in the sheepfold, for he was a very powerful, public and unmanageable source of critic. His behavior demonstrated a poor understanding of how politics is working, and therefore a collaboration with him was no longer appropriate. This argument is receivable, and justifiable.
But at the very moment when Alan Johnson took the decision of sacking David Nutt, he made some strategical mistakes which provoked the controversy in the way they demonstrated a poor awareness of the scientific values and the science policy issues. First of all, the home secretary proceeded without the mediation of the science minister Lord Drayson and the chief scientific advisor Professor John Beddington, which role is to make the connection between the scientific community and the government. When the Science minister received a Google Alert the next day that announced Nutt’s dismissal, he legitimately felt upset and betrayed. With this arrogant attitude, the Home Secretary put him in front of a dilemma : how could he possibly defend the way government used scientific advice when his own advice as a science minister had niot been requested? Alan Johnson had played according to his own rule and now it was Lord Drayson and John Beddington’s role to face the media. The exercise was even more perilous than they had expected. On one hand, they both admitted that there were concerns among government advisors and acknowledged the necessity of a consultation with committees and at the same time denied that this incident was significant and could reveal an underlying problem in the way government used scientific advice.
If they could have had their say on the matter, they would have certainly prevent Alan Johnson from blaming Nutt’s classification and positions of sending a ‘wrong message’ to the public. In 2006, a report from the Science and Technology Committee already criticized this argument as being incompatible with the government stated commitment to evidence-based policy. Alan Johnson’s statement revealed the weakness of the government’s conception of classification, where the class of a particular drug is used to send out a signal to the public even though the primary objective of the classification system is to categorize drugs according to the comparative harm associated with their misuse. Because of this nuance, the ACMD would always produce evidence that contradicts the government policy, based on an arguable precautionary principle and shaped in conformity with an assumed public opinion. By saying that the message sent by the ACMD is “wrong” because it contradicts the its policy, the government becomes suspect of doing what professor Debbie Epstein called ‘policy based evidence making’. Let’s be clear. Alan Johnson has never asked any committee to design supporting evidence. But on one hand, he states that he cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy, and, on the other hand, blames David Nutt for not collaborating with the government in the making of a unified message. The extent to which a scientific adviser can or should adopt a politic behavior thus depend on the camp he chose.
After receiving the mail on Friday, David Nutt quickly put himself together and did what he does best in this type of situation: campaigning in the media with a style of his own. Days after days, almost hour per hour, the mythic narrative of a hero on a quest for truth fighting the irrationality of the powerful was written in the media, such as this article’s title shows : “Politics vs. science – from Galileo to Professor David Nutt”. As in a good epic tale, the hero was supported in his quest by some brave characters such as the senior chemist Dr King who resigned from the ACMD almost mediately after Nutt’s dismissal. Les King became the herald of the ex-chairman’s cause, claiming everywhere that a scientist had been shut down for telling the truth, for providing evidence that were not going in the government policy’s direction. However unifying such a populist rhetoric may be, it remains absolutely inconsistent, for Nutt’s dismissal actually gave his view even more publicity. As this latter prophesied that the ACMD would collapse without him and that the scientists would now flee the government like pest, it seemed like the whole scientific community was about to raise in a mass protestation against the authoritative behavior of the government.
A mischievous mind would say that it was nothing more than a cloud in a cup of tea, a chew bone for the media, a good occasion for egocentric scholars to hear their own voice and for institutions to expose their shopping list of claims. If David Nutt’s support was not the army he claimed to have on his sides, what is sure is that the number of his detractor who entered the public arena was close to zero. Robert Murray for instance who was one of David Nutt’s rare opponent in the debate, declined my request for an interview with the excuse that he was ‘trying to keep out from policy issues’. And yet, some crucial points would have most definitely deserved being raised, such as the legitimacy of the ACMD’s classification system which had previously been questioned in 2006 by the Science and Technology Committee’s report which also pointed out the lack of transparency of the body.
Why didn’t David Nutt’s opponents, and not even Alan Johnson, raised those points? Because it is no one’s interest to undermine the idea that science is a legitimate source of information. And that is the greater paradox of our story. Indeed, to implement their policy, what politicians need is legitimacy, and nothing more than evidence can grant legitimacy to a policy. This is strategical, but not only : it is likely that since the BSE scandal politicians are really conscious of the crucial importance of implementing a science-based policy. But the problem is that evidence-based policy is nothing more than a chimera. First, because the ideology of evidence is incompatible with the natural inclination of the political process to want to secure the best outcomes. And second, because scientists is not and will never be an unquestionable source of information. Drug policy in particular has to take into account social factors as much as scientific evidence, and it is arrogance of the ACMD to assume that their scientific evidence is the sole legitimate source of information upon which drug policy’s decisions are made. It is important to recall that both points were raised in 2006 in the report of the Science and Technology Committee about Scientific advice, risk and evidence based policy making, but their advice wasn’t heard nor followed. In order to work on a rational basis, politicians should have the courage to defend their politics-based policy which run counter the evidence base, and science advisers should acknowledge the limits of their expertise. David Nutt and Alan Johnson, in their individual arrogance and incapacity to lower their guard, were in fact reenacting on a small scale a conflict of a bigger dimension.
In the end, it is very hard to say who, from the advisors or the government, won the war. The scientific community with the Nutt case most certainly won the media hype battle. As for The government, it finally soothe the controversy by producing a new version of the Principles of Scientific Advice to Government and even managed to insert a point stating that no act should to undermine mutual trust; a point which is impossible to quantify and thereby allows it some flexibility in its relationship with advisers. In the end, the real looser of this conflict is the rest of the society, successively patronized and manipulated, but never heard.