Category: Politics

Politics in the UK, with a Liberal Democrat (LibDem) slant

Jan 17 2010

We are the angry mob

Once again it feels like I’m accused being a member of an angry mob of twitterers. This time by Catherine Bennett in The Observer, over the censure of Rod Liddle, stimulated by his potential appointment as editor of The Independent. As far as I can tell Rod Liddle is a rather unpleasant individual both in terms of his personal treatment of those close to him and in his public writing, actually looking down the first page of his Spectator articles I would appear to agree with him approximately 10% of the time.

Catherine Bennett raised this as an issue of free speech, implying that we are attempting to remove Rod Liddle’s right to free speech and also the rights of those such as Jan Moir, whilst going easy on Islam4UK. As an articulate member of a mob, I’d like to say this is really not what I want to do. To my mind Rod Liddle, Islam4UK and the BNP should all have a right to let their views be known, I just don’t believe they have a right to express that freedom anywhere or any time. However, the corollary of this is that I believe that I also have the right to point out that what they say is stupid, unpleasant and wrong. When given a public platform the BNP and Islam4UK seem to do a pretty good job at making themselves look risible, remove that platform and you risk people imagining that they are eloquent and right  for lack of any evidence to the contrary.

The intriguing question with people like Jan Moir and Rod Liddle is that they have liberal backgrounds of a sort, they are clearly pretty smart. So when they write something that sounds illiberal, offensive and pandering to the basest of instincts are they simply being “radical for pay”? Do they really believe what they write, or do they just write what they know will go down well with their employers and their readers, happy in the knowledge that all publicity is good publicity. Writing a blog brings these questions to the fore, because it’s very obvious how frequently a post is read (or at least looked at). Should I write something worthy, but dull to most people and get a few hits or something that people are impassioned about which will get many hits and mentions?

What is it I want from complaint? In a way I want to shout that someone is wrong on an equal footing, I want access to the means of production (okay dissemination, but you have to turn a phrase when you can). In the past the right to provide public comment was a special privilege, available to the few who had a newspaper column or similar. What I have written here contains no more or less research than the Observer piece, I’d humbly suggest that my opinion is of equal value to Catherine Bennett’s. I am happy to accept that her writing is somewhat superior to mine. Is this the message for mainstream media? Ill-informed rant is no longer viable, because anyone can do that – genuine insight, research, knowledge and good writing are valuable because they are hard.

Oct 30 2009

Professor Nutt and the classification of harm through the misuse of drugs

The sacking of Professor Nutt (now ex-head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs) by the Home Secretary Alan Johnson, has been in the news today. The immediate cause of his sacking appears to have been this recently published paper which was originally presented as the “2009 Eve Saville Memorial Lecture” at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College in July 2009. The lecture appears to have been a policy discussion based in part on his classification of relative drug harm which was first published in The Lancet in 2007:

Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse, David Nutt, Leslie A King, William Saulsbury, Colin Blakemore, The Lancet, vol. 369, (2007), p1047-1053.

This classification of harm was based on assessment by two sets of experts: the first set of 29 from the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ register as specialists in addiction, the second set draw from a wider community involving members “ranging from chemistry, pharmacology, and forensic science, through psychiatry and other medical specialties, including epidemiology, as well as the legal and police services”. The basic scheme was to ask these experts to assess the harm caused by a set of 20 substances (mainly illegal but including alcohol and tobacco) on a set of 9 measures:

This is done iteratively using what is called a ‘delphic process’, the experts make their initial numerical assessments independently in an initial round, but can then modify those assessments once they have seen and discussed the assessments made by others. Once they have reached some pre-determined finishing criteria they combine the average scores for each area to produce an overall measure of harm. They are pre-warned of the substances in question so they can go read up on them. The rankings of the two separate groups appeared to be very much in agreement. The resulting mean harm scores for the twenty substances are shown in the following graph:

The interesting thing about this group is that tobacco and alcohol (which I’m currently enjoying in the form of fine Chardonnay) are found in the middle of the range, below heroin and cocaine but above cannabis and Ectasy. A statement which in part has earnt Professor Nutt his dismissal.

Now you could argue that “The Lancet” paper is flawed, and Professor Nutt makes suggests for improvements in methodology, but the thing is: there is no competition. Current drug classifications into A, B and C are not made on an assessment of harm based on any published or transparent criteria. If Alan Johnson wants to argue that Professor Nutt is wrong on his evaluation of the relative harm of drugs he should do so on the basis of a transparent evaluation process not because he just doesn’t like the advice he’s been given.

Though I have not focussed on it in this post, the Eve Saville lecture includes this assessment of harm along with a discussion of other issues including the media reporting of deaths through drug misuse. It does also include some support for elements of government policy on drugs, in particular he says:

One thing this government has done extremely well in the last ten years is to cut away much of the moral argument about drug treatments. They have moved in the direction of improving access to harm reduction treatments, an approach that, I think, is wholly endorsed by the scientifi c community and by the medical profession.

Update
1st November 2010: Professor Nutt has published an improved version of this study in The Lancet (pdf), the process used is a little different and an attempt has been made to improve the relative weight given to different harms. This revised study finds that heroin, crack cocaine and metamfetamine most harmful to individual users and alcohol, heroin and crack cocaine most harmful to others.