No advice allowed - unless we agree

The Home Secretary's decision to fire the chairman of his independent advisory body on drugs Professor David Nutt is certainly in keeping with this government's intolerance of sensible decision-making or effective PR management.

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) was set up to provide evidence on the risks associated with drug-taking to assist with policy-making.

Sadly successive home secretaries have been reluctant to take on board any advice that does not fit with pre-existing policy. However, going as far as to actually sack the ACDM chairman is something new.

The government line that Nutt had overstepped the mark in his criticisms seems to be gaining currency, but it doesn't bear scrutiny.

Home Secretary Alan Johnson claims that Nutt was sacked "because he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy."

But when we look at what Nutt actually said to spark his ejection, we find nothing more than a proportional attitude towards the risks associated with various activities, legal and illegal.

Unless Johnson feels that any public disagreement with government policy, even in such measured tones as those of the good professor, constitutes "campaigning" it's difficult to see this statement as anything but a "my way or the highway" approach to his independent advisers.

Most of us hope that the role of advisers goes beyond simply telling ministers how right they are.

No-one is saying Johnson was obliged to do what his chief drugs adviser told him, least of all Nutt, but that's hardly the same thing as saying the chief drugs adviser should not speak and inform the public of the evidence before him.

Two more ACDM board members have resigned over the affair. They state that if the chairman of an independent body can be sacked for saying politically inconvenient things then it no longer has any independence.

Many commentators think it likely that when the remaining 28 members of the ACMD meet next Monday they will use this occasion for a mass resignation.

All of this speaks to the incompetent way that Johnson has dealt with a council that he claims to respect but that he has not even bothered to meet since being appointed home secretary.

One of the most dangerous knock-on effects of this sacking is that it will curtail other independent bodies' ability to properly advise the government.

It could help to reinforce the culture that these bodies are for window-dressing rather than practical work.

That's bad for democracy but it's also bad for the government itself, which has just signalled that it wants yes-men not evidence-based policy-making.

As Nutt said, if government ministers wish to have a drugs policy based on moralism, then they have that right, but they should not expect the scientific community to provide evidence that does not exist in order to back them up.

The role of people like Nutt is to provide advice without the day-to-day pressures of realpolitik that have to take account of the press and public feeling.

The fact that Nutt has been sacked despite being more in tune with the public mood than the government demonstrates the overwhelming power of the right-wing press over this government.

When he presented a set of factual statements about the actual risks of drug-taking he had every right to expect to be listened to.

The government is not under any obligation to take that advice on board, but to shoot the messenger is a very public signal that this government's drug policies are not for turning - no matter how misguided.

While it is distressing to see a scientist persecuted for citing evidence, the case of Nutt is an opportunity to reassess where we are going with our approach to drugs in this country.

We should be asking whether prohibition works and whether doling out greater and greater punishments has any deterrent effects.

The government's so-called drugs education is so laughable as to be counter-productive.

Certainly for anyone who's never come into contact with illegal drugs, the government-sponsored Ask Frank agency might put you off the idea, but for the majority of the population the propaganda is so paper-thin that it makes the snippets of good advice "Frank" might give out suspect.

It's telling that drugs policy comes under the Home Office, where the focus is on incarceration, rather than health, where the focus could be on treatment and prevention.

The focus of the debate and the policy has remained firmly upon punishment, even though decades of this approach has proved pretty ineffective.

There is no evidence that raising the classification for cannabis would reduce the number of people smoking it, although there is evidence to suggest that if you raise the penalty for dealing cannabis you encourage suppliers to stock more lucrative drugs at the same time, because you may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.

Once in prison it is a tragic irony that regular drug testing actually encourages offenders to use drugs like heroin over cannabis because heroin flushes out of the system extremely quickly. This means that with warning you can provide a clean sample, but traces of cannabis will stay in your system for some time, making its regular use in jail far more risky.

However, the government is unlikely to stop the use of regular drug testing because the tabloids would announce that it is being soft on drugs, despite the fact that the current approach encourages the take-up of more dangerous substances.

When cannabis was downgraded from class B to C it was the first time in history that any drug had been downgraded on such a scale.

It was a brave decision that caused much hand-wringing and regret within government circles. It is the unforeseen outcome of this decision that has hardened the government to any arguments for liberalisation of the drug laws.

Decriminalisation of drugs is not an option that this or any future government seems likely to consider, but Nutt was not arguing that case.

He simply wanted a realistic assessment of the risks involved in drug-taking and it was this attempt to develop a sense of proportion that was his cardinal sin.

The evidence says that cannabis is less harmful and addictive than tobacco or alcohol, but this is not a government-approved fact and therefore even stating it makes you a "campaigner against government policy."

Regrettably Nutt's sacking will cast a shadow over this government's ability to receive unbiased scientific advice, even if it wasn't going to listen to it anyway.