UK drugs advisor sacking fuels science, politics row

The British government's sacking of its chief drugs adviser highlights the tense relationship between scientists who see evidence as objective data and politicians who want use it to woo voters. Britain's scientific community reacted with dismay to interior minister Alan Johnson's decision to push David Nutt out of his job as head of the independent drugs advisory body, saying it undermined the integrity of science in policy.
Scientists said the decision to sack Nutt, who criticised Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government for ignoring scientific advice on cannabis and ecstasy, could devalue policy-making in areas including health, environment, education and defence. Climate change, healthcare and tackling the H1N1 swine flu pandemic are all high on the political agenda as Brown - whose Labour party trails way behind opposition Conservatives - prepares for an election due by June next year.
Nutt said Brown's was the first government in the history of Britain's 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act - the main law covering illegal drugs and categorising them into risk groups - to have gone against the advice of its scientific panel. Analysts say playing politics with science may prove to be dangerous.
"Scientific data and their independent interpretation underpin evidence-based policy making - and nobody rational could possibly want a government based on any other type of policy making," said Chris Higgins, chair of an advisory committee on spongiform encephalopathy, or "mad cow" disease.
The Labour government downgraded cannabis' legal status on the advisory body's advice in 2004 but Brown reversed that decision last year saying he wanted to send a strong message that use of the drug was unacceptable. What angers scientists most is what they see as cherry-picking of evidence by politicians who use data when it suits them and ignore it when it doesn't.
Nutt said that of the hundreds of recommendations made by his committee, the government has chosen to ignore just two. He accused ministers of misleading the public about the dangers of drugs like cannabis and ecstasy for purely political reasons. Maurice Elphick, a professor of animal physiology and neuroscience at Queen Mary, University of London, said politicians should look elsewhere if they wanted data to back social policies and allow science to maintain objectivity.