Cannabis row drugs adviser sacked

The UK's chief drugs adviser has been sacked by Home Secretary Alan Johnson, after criticising government policies.

Professor Nutt had criticised the government's policy of reclassifying cannabis from a class C drug to a class B because the scientific evidence doesn't warrant such a move. However, it seems that the government had already decided to take this decision and so anyone questioning their stance simply had to be sacked.

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8334774.stm

The first issue raised by this move is: just how "independent" are these independent advisory committees when anyone serving on them faces being sacked if they don't agree with what the government has already decided should be policy? Surely they are not truly independent if government ministers can sack anyone who doesn't toe the government's line.

Secondly, how good is government policy regarding such issues if they ignore scientific evidence in favour of their own insight? One would have hoped that this sort of non-evidence-based policy making would have ended after the WMD debacle. Although the weapons inspectors could find no evidence of WMD, the government "knew" they existed and would find the evidence after the invasion of Iraq...

The issue here is not whether the decision to reclassify cannabis is right or wrong (evidence can often be interpreted in more than one way and professors can be wrong - so can governments, of course), it's more about the attitude displayed by the government that they know best and will implement their policies regardless of, or despite, the evidence.

It is this attitude that we should be concerned about as it is a recipe for encouraging thinking that is biased, faith based, pseudoscientific and that appeals to populism; the result being: poorer decision making and policies.
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