Another government expert resigns over Mephedrone

Eric Carlin: "Government policy is pish, lol!"

Another expert adviser, Eric Carlin, has resigned from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, in protest at the government’s rush to ban Mephedrone.

Carlin is an expert in the field of drug prevention, public health and health promotion. His resignation from the council leaves the government’s already damaged drugs and scientific policy even more in tatters.

Over at his blog, you can read about his resignation, as well as his actual resignation letter to the Home Secretary, Alan “If it’s in the papers it must be true” Johnson.

Carlin writes of how he joined the ACMD hoping to take forward an agenda of research into why young people take drugs, and seeing how harm can be reduced, rather than just looking at drugs as a criminal justice issue. He has been disillusioned by the government’s lack of interest in these issues.

In his resignation letter he writes:

“We had little or no discussion about how our recommendation to classify this drug would be likely to impact on young people’s behaviour. Our decision was unduly based on media and political pressure.  The report was tabled to the whole Council for the first time on Monday; the Chair came to brief you before the whole Council had even discussed all of the report. In fact, I still haven’t seen the final version . . .

We need to review our entire approach to drugs, dumping the idea that legally-sanctioned punishments for drug users should constitute a main part of the armoury in helping to solve our country’s drug problems. We need to stop harming people who need help and support.

At the end of last year, I decided not to resign over the sacking of David Nutt, preferring instead to see how things panned out and to hope that the ACMD could develop a work programme which would help prevent and reduce harm, particularly to young people. I have no confidence that this will now happen, largely though not totally due to the lack of logic of the context within which the Council is constrained to operate by the Misuse of Drugs Act. As well as being extremely unhappy with how the ACMD operates, I am not prepared to continue to be part of a body which, as its main activity, works to facilitate the potential criminalisation of increasing numbers of young people.”

Says it all really, I think. Elsewhere, he writes of how “the criminalisation of young people does more harm than good”, as well as how other important work of the ACMD on harm reduction has been sidelined in the rush to ban Mephedrone.

“The latter process [the ACMD's rush to produce a report justifying the decision to ban Mephedrone] has left me deeply concerned, intellectually insulted and morally compromised. I contributed little to the discussion on Monday, confused and disillusioned that our focus was not on what we should recommend to understand and influence young people’s behaviour so as to prevent and/or reduce harm. Rather, we made a decision to ban this, the currently most publicly demonised drug, based mainly on its chemical similarities to other Class B substances. If that was the main criterion, how could one not agree with the decision? The problem is that the context of and rationale for our decision-making is a nonsense. What next? How many more new drugs are we going to ban, without an adequate evidence base about the impact of banning on young people’s behaviour re-use of drugs? Do we just keep on going? Rather than banning each new drug that comes along, we need to shift resources into social research about young people’s behaviours, how to influence them and investment in interventions to support demand reduction . . .

I’ve just been working with some young people who, honestly and seriously, told me that Cannabis, with all its risks, made them feel better about themselves, more able to assess their personal agency, manage their lives and feel more hopeful about the future. My current feeling is that the ACMD, with our focus on chemistry and legality, doesn’t contribute anything towards reducing the countless harms young people like these experience on a daily basis, including though not limited to harms from drug use. Moreover, we are colluding in the sustenance of a system which may in fact disadvantage even further some of the most disadvantaged people in our society.”

The Mephedrone moral panic has been a textbook example of how the madness of drugs prohibition is kept up, despite the fact that it causes huge harm to people in the UK and around the world. The government’s claims to be taking decisions based on expert advice lies in absolute tatters, their drugs policy a discredited echo-chamber for the lies of the corporate media. We have to stop letting the tabloids write our drugs policies based on nothing other than what will help increase their profits, and we have to start taking the drugs problems seriously and look at what approaches are actually going to help people.

END THE DRUG WAR!