Was Alan Johnson Right to Call for Professor Nutt’s Resignation?

Civitas, 3 November 2009

Many prominent scientists are currently up in arms over the Home Secretary’s call for Professor David Nutt to resign as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) for having publicly criticised the Government for not accepting its advice that cannabis should not be up-graded from a class C to a class B drug.

Those complaining suggest the Home Secretary’s call smacks of high-handed suppression of Professor Nutt’s freedom of expression. Others claim it threatens to deter scientists from agreeing to act on government advisory councils in future. I cannot see how either claim is warranted.

In agreeing to chair the ACMD, Professor Nutt had signed up to a code of conduct which he had apparently breached by publishing the offending article without first having notified the Home Secretary.

Professor Nutt had previously been warned about making such public criticisms, which he had earlier done in criticising the Government’s decision to retain ecstasy as a class A drug. On that earlier, occasion, he had chosen to apologise for claiming ecstasy to be less dangerous than horse-riding.

It is not unreasonable for governments to expect their advisers to refrain from criticising policies that have been formulated after they have been consulted, as was suggested by Lord Young in a letter in yesterday’s Times.

If Professor Nutt was so vexed with the Government for not accepting his Committee’s advice, then he should have resigned from that committee out of lack of confidence in the Government. He should not have publicly criticised the Government’s decision and then waited for it to call for his resignation out of lack of confidence in him.

As to whether, by calling for Professor Nutt’s resignation, the Home Secretary will put off scientists from being willing to serve on advisory councils, I cannot see why there should be thought to be any real danger of this.

The ACMD had given its advice to the Government and its reasons for it. The Government had chosen not to accept that advice. All this was in the public domain. If members of the ACMD could not live with their advice not being accepted, then they should have resigned and criticised what they took to be the Government’s folly.

Government are not, nor should they be, required to accept the advice of their advisory councils.

As it happens, Professor Nutt and the committee he chaired seem to have been singularly blind to the dangers of cannabis, especially that potent form of it known as skunk. In estimating how harmful it was, Professor Nutt wrote in his offending article that the ACMD concluded that there could not be a strong causal link between cannabis use and psychosis, because the use of skunk had dramatically increased in the decade ten years, whilst the reported incidence of schizophrenia had fallen. Professor Nutt wrote:

‘When we were reviewing the general practice research database in the UK from the University of Keele, research consistently and clearly showed that psychosis and schizophrenia are still on the decline. So, even though skunk has been around now for 10 years, there has been no upswing in schizophrenia. In fact, where people have looked, they haven’t found any evidence linking cannabis use in a population and schizophrenia.’

However as was pointed out last week by Professor Robin Murray, professor of psychiatry at the Maudsley mental hospital in South London, in denying there to be evidence of a strong causal link between the use of skunk and psychosis, the ACMD appealed to evidence that was not reliable and had disregarded evidence that was.

The unreliable evidence which the ACMD cited in claiming the incidence of schizophrenia to have declined in the last decade was a study of diagnoses of the condition made by GPs in their surgeries. Of such GP diagnoses, Professor Murray observes: ‘we know that GP records in schizophrenia are far from accurate.’

The reliable evidence of a causal connection between skunk and psychosis which the ACMD had apparently ignored comes from Professor Murray’s own patch, south London, ‘where the incidence [of schizophrenia] doubled between 1964 and 1999’, and where the scale of production, sale and consumption of skunk is known to be exceptionally large.

As was pointed out in a heart-rending letter in today’s Times by the father of a teenage girl brutally murdered in 2006 by ‘a paranoid schizophrenic with a cannabis habit stretching back a decade to his early teens’:

‘Parents and teachers need support as they exercise their duty of care in alerting children to the dangers of this habit-forming drug. The publicity surrounding the reinstatement of cannabis to Category B gave them this… Professor Nutt seems determined to undermine their efforts.’