Party Political Animal

The sacking of Professor Nutt by Allan Johnson and the Tory response has a depressing predictability.

Let’s deal first with Alan Johnson’s synthetic outrage today about “advisers advising and minister deciding etc”. Johnson was no doubt consciously echoing Margaret Thatcher’s words about her economic adviser, Sir Alan Walters, whose criticism of then Chancellor Nigel Lawson (wholly justified as it turned out) caused the Tory’s worst Chancellor to resign.

The difference is that Sir Alan was a paid, chief economic adviser to the prime-minister. Professor Nutt was not a paid, full-time adviser. He was acting in a very part-time and voluntary capacity as head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, set up in 1971 to classify different drugs. His main job is Professor of Neuroscience at Bristol University and therefore his ability to “campaign” as Johnson puts it, cannot reasonably be constrained as, say, a paid, full-time special adviser’s could be.

What is truly depressing is how the affair highlights how all governments have insisted on mis-classifying cannabis to scare people. The obvious result is a growing and damaging mistrust of government figures and pronouncements.

In a sense the Nutt affair is a microcosm of the government’s crash from grace. Tony Blair promised to  “win the war on drugs” and appointed a drugs tsar. I suspect he really thought he could do it. Labour had been out of power so long, and new Labour ministers were so inexperienced and so convinced that all problems could be put down to Tory incompetence and nastiness, that all they had to do was appoint a tsar here, manage the media there and all would be fine again.

Yet drugs are still preeminently one of our greatest problems. The international drugs trade is larger now than trade in steel or cars. It has made some of the most unpleasant criminals very rich and corrupted whole countries in the process. Much of knife and gun crime in the UK is drug related and younger and younger kids are being dragged into drug gangs.

40% of Britons have used illegal drugs and 10% in the past year – the figure among 16-30 year olds is much higher. More than half of all crime is drug related – much of it petty crime by drug users to fund their habit. More than half the people in our overcrowded prisons are there on drug related crimes, many of them users who need help rather than incarceration.

We spend billions trying to win the “War on Drugs” – including annoying a lot of Afghan farmers – but drug use just goes on rising. And in Britain has among the toughest drug laws in Europe – and pretty much the worst drug problem, which indicates that tougher laws don’t work.

I don’t recommend that anyone takes drugs – except, of course, alcohol in moderation. But our drugs policy isn’t working. How we minimise the harm from an inevitable trade is not being addressed. And it’s deeply sad to see Cameron’s Conservatives supporting Johnson and the government for fear of annoying the Daily Mail. Meanwhile, the problem – and the cost to everyone – just keeps on getting worse.