DRUGS DRIVE POLITICIANS OUT OF THEIR MINDS

IMAGINE you are seated at a table with two bowls in front of you. One
contains peanuts, the other tablets of the illegal recreational drug
MDMA (ecstasy). A stranger joins you, and you have to decide whether
to give them a peanut or a pill. Which is safest?

Say you have to decide whether to give a stranger a peanut or
ecstasy. Which is safest? Ecstasy, of course

You should give them ecstasy, of course. A much larger percentage of
people suffer a fatal acute reaction to peanuts than to MDMA.

This, of course, is only a thought experiment; nobody would consider
doing it for real. But it puts the risks associated with ecstasy in
context with others we take for granted. Yes, ecstasy is dangerous
and people who take it are putting their lives on the line. But the
danger needs to be put in perspective.

Sadly, perspective is something that is generally lacking in the long
and tortuous debate over illegal drugs. In this magazine, we have
argued that drug policy should be made on the basis of evidence of
harmfulness - to individuals and to society. The British government's
stated line is similar, yet time and again it ignores its own rules
and the recommendations of its experts. Most other western
governments act in a similar way.

The latest example of doublethink concerns MDMA. As New Scientist
went to press, the UK government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of
Drugs was widely expected to recommend downgrading it, based on
evidence of its limited harmfulness (see "Ecstasy's legacy: so far,
so good"). Yet the government has already rejected the advice.

No doubt this is partly a reaction to the furore over the
government's de facto decriminalisation of cannabis in 2004, based on
another advisory council recommendation. Despite the fact that the
move actually reduced the quantity of cannabis being smoked - surely
a welcome outcome of any rational drug policy - the government
recently reversed it in the face of implacably bad press.

For evidence of how irrational and lacking in perspective the public
debate has become, consider how the advisory council's chairman,
David Nutt, found himself in hot water last weekend for comparing the
harm caused by ecstasy to the harm caused by horse riding, or
"equasy" as he dubbed it. Nutt's intention was simply to put ecstasy
in context with other sources of harm. But his comments - which he
actually made last month in an editorial in the Journal of
Psychopharmacology - caused predictable squeals of outrage and calls
for his head.

This is a worldwide problem. We need a rational debate about the true
damage caused by illegal drugs - which pales into insignificance
compared with the havoc wreaked by legal drugs such as alcohol and
tobacco. Until then, we have no chance of developing a rational drug policy.