Quality | 2009.01.10
Simon Jenkins: Who will cure ministers of illiberal headline addiction?
The recession does not exonerate ministers from idiocy. The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, is about to reject the recommendation of her official advisers to remove the clubbing drug, ecstasy, from the same harm category as heroin and crack cocaine.
She may be putty in the hands of her advisers on curbing civil liberty, but sternly resists all the blandishments of reason in the matter of narcotics. Her spokesman told the Guardian that since "ecstasy can and does kill unpredictably, there is no such thing as a safe dose".
This apparently was enough to keep it a class A drug, carrying a sentence of up to seven years imprisonment for consumption, and life for dealing.
Last year the same Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs recommended that cannabis remain in class C, since the evidence did not support a change to class B. An embattled Gordon Brown, eager for plaudits from the tabloid press, pledged that he would make just that change. He has yet to do so, perhaps moved by the ridicule hurled at him from drug experts, his own medical officers and the Medical Research Council.
A second overturning of its advice would render the committee largely pointless. Its chairman, the impeccable pharmacologist David Nutt, has fought a long and lonely campaign for regulatory sanity. His task is to assess and combat harm, the statutory purpose of drug classification - as opposed to that political cliché, "to send a message". The idea that teenagers across Britain are waiting on tenterhooks for a "message" from Brown and Smith is ridiculous.
The justification for regulating drugs can only be the harm their use imposes on individuals and the community. We allow people to abuse themselves with food, drink and tobacco and take risks with sport and travel, albeit in some framework of regulation. A Lancet study last year classified 20 mind-altering substances by personal and social harm. It put ecstasy at the bottom, well below alcohol and nicotine.
Not only is it disproportionate to impose life sentences on those dispensing the millions of pills consumed annually in Britain\'s pubs and clubs, it is stupid. Since the law is unenforceable the market in a potentially harmful substance is left unregulated. Ecstasy has none of the quality controls applied, for instance, to prescription amphetamines. Smith is the pushers\' ally.
Most ministers - indeed, some home secretaries - admit on leaving office that drug policy is one of the greatest failures of the Blair/Brown governments. They acknowledge drugs as the single biggest curse on families, schools, policing, community cohesion and the housing estate economy. Yet nothing, absolutely nothing, is permitted by way of reform.
The reason has been simple. Blair\'s (and now Brown\'s) press operation lives in holy terror of the tabloids. The last substantive, and disastrous, change was the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, leading to 38 years of legislative inertia. Narcotics control is a prime example of media power over weak government.
The advisory committee is like the prisons inspectorate or Ofsted, an uncomfortable public body that constantly reminds ministers of their failures. Its task is to collate the findings of research and recommend adjustments in the harm classification of drugs to assist the courts in sentencing. It must marry evidence to reason in the hope of yielding due proportion.
A sequence of politically weak home secretaries has balked at reform, other than towards wider imprisonment (notably of women). The only mildly courageous change, David Blunkett\'s reclassification of cannabis from B to C, is about to be reversed.
Research into mind-altering substances is now worthless. Instead research should seek a substance capable of mind-altering ministers from their addiction to illiberal headlines. Leaving ecstasy in class A on the grounds that "there is no such thing as a safe dose" is public stupidity. On this basis there is no safe alcoholic drink or cigarette. There is no safe tree, no safe ladder and, according to Smith, no safe mobile phone. Do we ban trees, ladders and mobiles? Lurking behind them all is an accident waiting to happen, a terrorist incident, a loss of state control. Smith\'s nostrum may be music to the health and safety industry, but not to common sense.
The classification of ecstasy alongside heroin and crack is justified on the grounds that there are "at least 30 deaths a year" of those using it. While any death is tragic, this figure has no significance, given that a dehydrated dancer can suffer all sorts of traumas.
The 2000 Police Foundation committee on the drug laws, on which I served, was the first to call for a reclassification of ecstasy. We concluded that the "population safety comparison" made it "more than a thousand times" less dangerous than heroin, and its retention in the same harm group was absurd. Tens of thousands of young people thought the same, which is why the law is in such disarray. This has led to more rather than less ignorance of the real dangers of ecstasy abuse.
When ministers defy evidence, rational citizens should shudder. Barely a week passes without some new statistical mendacity to sustain a dud policy. Knife crime figures, bandied about over Christmas, are useless since records vary nationwide and no one can tell a slashing from a stabbing or a bottle attack.
Like statistics on all forms of crime, and indeed on health and education, those on knifings are so embroiled in qualification as to be meaningless. Crime figures, collated by some 40 target-driven police forces, are not more or less accurate or more or less good news. They are devoid of sense, mere political chaff.
The mathematician David Spiegelhalter pleaded this week for children to be taught "risk literacy" as an elementary life skill. He is launching a Risk Roadshow to spread an understanding of probability and danger, so young people know how to handle odds, lotteries, interest rates, insurance premiums and health scares. Such literacy, he says, should be "the basic component of discussion about issues in the media, politics and schools ... to deconstruct the latest story about a cancer risk or a wonder drug".
Children who cannot handle risk have no way of adjusting to and properly using the world around them. But what hope is there for such a programme when a home secretary peddles statistical nonsense to justify a policy that every teenager knows is rubbish? None.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/07/ecstasy-drugs-policy
