The sacking of Professor David Nutt (cf) from his role as chairman of the British government’s Advisory Council on the “Misuse” of Drugs has provoked much comment, but none, I think, so chuckleheaded as that by AN Wilson yesterday, in which he trots out Hitler and the Spanish Inquisition to prove that science is not to be trusted. His argument is not only cod-historical, however; it is methodological too:

The trouble with a ‘scientific’ argument, of course, is that it is not made in the real world, but in a laboratory by an unimaginative academic relying solely on empirical facts.

Oh yes, that is the trouble with scientific arguments! Which is why we need a government that is, by contrast, superlatively “imaginative” and utterly contemptuous of “empirical facts” to save us from ourselves.