Professor David Nutt has been berated by government ministers, especially Alan Johnson, for publicly stating his evidence based opinion about the relative harms associated with different types of drugs. He was ultimately fired for standing his ground and suggesting that ministers were making policy decisions that were contrary to the scientific evidence that they had asked Professor Nutt and his colleagues on the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) to provide.
Video © BBC
In a polite ‘up yours’ to the UK government, Professor Nutt was awarded an international prize by “Nature” magazine for “standing-up for science” and “for courage in promoting evidence based science on a matter of public interest in the face of difficulty or hostility”.
Of course, we do not believe that this will change our government’s ideology based policy-making but can only hope that the electorate will start to acknowledge that we are paying billions of pounds for our political masters to run ideological experiments whilst ignoring any plausible evidence that runs counter to their belief systems.
Their mismanagement of our economy and society is largely avoidable although you would never hear these words uttered by a government minister.
- Evidence based policy making or electoral expediency?
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