DRUGS AND PROHIBITION

Certain areas of human conduct lend themselves so readily to bad
science that you have to wonder if there is a pattern emerging. Last
week the parliamentary science and technology committee looked into
the ABC classification of illegal drugs, and found it was rubbish.
This is not an article about that report, but it is a good place to
start: drugs, they found, are supposed to be ranked by harm, in
classes A, B, and C, but they're not; and the ranking is supposed to
act as a deterrent, but it doesn't.

Watching this small area of prohibition collapse like wet tissue paper
got me thinking: how does the world of prohibition match up against
our gold standards for bad science, like the nutritionists or the
anti-MMR movement? Have any of the prominent academic papers been
retracted? Yes, they have. Professor George Ricaurte, funded by the
National Institute for Drug Abuse, published an article in Science,
describing how he administered a comparable recreational dose of
ecstasy to monkeys: this dose killed 20% of the monkeys, and another
20% were severely injured.

Even before it was announced - a year later - that they'd got the
bottles mixed up and used the wrong drug, you didn't need to be
Einstein to know this was duff research, because millions of clubbers
have taken the "comparable" recreational dose of ecstasy, and 20% of
them did not die. It's no wonder animal rights campaigners manage to
persuade themselves that animal research makes a bad model for human
physiology.

That's before you even get started on workaday bad science. Like the
food gurus, prohibitionists will cherry pick research that suits them,
measure inappropriate surrogate outcomes, and wishfully over-interpret
data: a prohibitionist will observe that less cannabis has been
seized, and declare that this means there is less cannabis on the
streets, rather than less police interest.

For textbook bad science we'd also want to see the media distorting
research: overstating the stuff it likes, and ignoring stuff it
doesn't, especially negative findings. We used to read a lot about
cannabis and lung cancer in the papers. The largest ever study of
whether cannabis causes lung cancer reported its findings recently, to
total UK media silence. Lifelong cannabis users, who had smoked more
than 22,000 joints, showed no greater risk of cancer than people who
had never smoked cannabis.

While no journalist has written a single word on that study, the Times
did manage to make a front page story headed "Cocaine floods the
playground: use of the addictive drug by children doubles in a year,"
out of their misinterpretation of a government report that showed
nothing of the sort.

There are even optimists who believe in quick fix treatments for drug
habits - the heroin detox in five days, or painless withdrawal in just
48 hours, under general anaesthesia.

Why are drugs such a bad science magnet? Partly, of course, it's the
moral panic. But more than that, sat squarely at the heart of our
discourse on drugs, is one fabulously reductionist notion: it is the
idea that a complex web of social, moral, criminal, health, and
political problems can be simplified to, blamed on, or treated via a
molecule or a plant. You'd have a job keeping that idea afloat.