Prof David Nutt is the former chief drugs adviser to government. He was recently sacked by the home secretary for being honest.
When Gordon Brown came to power as Prime Minister he ordered a rethink and re-examination of the facts regarding the classification of Cannabis as class c from the previous level of class b in 2004. When the scientists reported the facts and gave their advice the government chose to totally ignore the advice because they felt they knew better.
The scientists had no axe to grind and after a lot of work, which is apparently unpaid, they produced a report that rated drugs according to their serious effects and they considered cannabis was correctly classified as class c.
The government, having asked for advice, chose to totally ignore it and proceed on their mission regardless. In a way this was not too dissimilar to the Iraq war where the government asked for the evidence for justifying the war and when they couldn’t find any they went ahead anyway. They clearly didn’t learn any lessons from that.
History tells us that when a government bans something the people want it breeds further problems for the future. Prohibition in America is widely considered to have been the catalyst to widespread crime in the US. Giving criminals a huge market for illegal products is a sure way to make crime a very successful business and that is what happened in the US.
Here in the UK we have draconian drug laws at the same time as we have an enormous demand from the public for leisure drugs. The laws make the drugs more expensive and provide a huge profit opportunity to the criminals and drug users are often willing to commit crime to pay for their drugs.
It all leads to a huge mess where people do not believe what the government says about anything because we know they can’t be trusted to be honest when it comes to the effects of drugs use, as the case of Professor Nutt being dismissed proves. The government doesn’t want to hear the truth and they don’t want us to know the truth either.
We have far higher crime than we need to have because of people stealing to fund their habit and we have the police tied up chasing small users of cannabis when they should be targeting serious criminals and harder and more dangerous drug dealing.
More honesty from this government seems unlikely to appear any day soon but sadly the Tories are just as bad and David Cameron took the view that government should tighten up the drug laws when the review was being considered.
We hear a lot from politicians saying they need to reconnect with the electorate, especially after the disaster of the MP expenses row. They could try being honest for a change and that would have a huge effect on the public moral and view of MP’s and goverment.
They should not be surprised by the rise in popularity of the BNP when they constantly demonstrate that governemt and parliament cannot be trusted. I want, and I believe most decent people want, government and political parties that can be trusted. We want honesty and while that may be a hard concept for politicians to understand or accept, until we begin to see signs of greater honesty and integrity we are likely to see growth in fringe parties that many people consider totally unacceptable.
If the major parties cannot be trusted to be honest with us what are we to do? How can we be expected to vote for them. The ball is in their court and it is up to them to demonstrate they can be trusted.
Sadly it seems likely they will continue to ignore facts and continue to be less than honest about them. Instead of educating the public with statements of the facts and warnings about the true effects of drug use they make things up. We have seen with the European constitutional changes, when they promise something in their manifesto at election time they are likely to ignore that commitment when it suits their purposes. Nobody should be surpised that politicians are not trusted. It is because we know they can’t be.
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