socialmedian: An overhaul of drug policy? Politicians still just say no

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An overhaul of drug policy? Politicians still just say no | Simon Jenkins

Source: guardian.co.uk Society

Nov 03, 2009

Summary

Fear of perceived attack from the rightwing press has prevented serious discussion. The time has come to break the taboo

Even Alan Johnson must know his sacking of David Nutt was a mistake. The boast that he was being "big enough, strong enough, bold enough" to make such decisions was a gift to the gods of hypocrisy. If he was that big and strong he would have ignored Nutt and not pretended that an academic lecture on drug classification constituted a "public campaign" against him. Nutt's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs had been humiliated by Johnson and his colleagues and rendered virtually useless. Leave the guy alone.

It is not the mistakes politicians make that matter, but why they make them. The Labour government's drugs policy must qualify as the worst confection of unreason even in Whitehall's copious canon. This is not for want of advice or research. Few subjects have been more rigorously investigated, not least by Nutt and his collapsed committee.

We know the differential impact of narcotics on the brain. We chart the evolution of schizophrenia

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