RUSHING MEPHEDRONE BAN IS WRONG

The home secretary might try to brazen out Penny Taylor's
resignation from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. If so,
the government's claim that it values independent scientific advice
will take another knock. Waiting to impose a ban on mephedrone until
the ACMD reports is not the same as basing a decision on scientific
advice. The Home Office had already decided to ban mephedrone. The
ACMD's deliberations were mere window dressing. So it is worth
considering how the process of classifying a drug generally operates.

Under the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act the home secretary is obliged to
consult the ACMD about any proposed changes to a drug's classification.

Following discussion with the Home Office, an ACMD working group
will draw up a draft report, normally over a period of four or five
meetings. It will then go to the full ACMD for agreement, after
which the ACMD will write to the home secretary with
its recommendation. This is painstaking, detailed and time-consuming work.

After giving the report due consideration, the home secretary makes
his or her response. There then comes the formal consultation,
lasting 12 weeks, and a regulatory impact assessment. Both houses of
parliament then need to approve any change, as does the privy
council. Following this the new classification becomes law.

In normal times the whole process takes a year and a half, sometimes
longer. The deliberations that led to cannabis being reclassified
from class B to class C in January 2004 came on the back of an
ACMD-led review that lasted close to two and half years.

But these are not normal times. We are in the middle of a mephedrone
scare in the runup to a general election. The result of this toxic
combination is the current farrago.

Since the mass resignations in the wake of David Nutt's dismissal,
the ACMD has been unable to function. New members, originally due
for interview in April, are now hurriedly being put into place.

A report has been rushed through a depleted technical committee.
Most of the ACMD members will not even get to see it until today's
meeting, at which they will be expected to make a potentially
far-reaching recommendation on classification.

The interim chair, Les Iversen, has been put in an impossible
position. I can not imagine that any of the current ACMD members can
be feeling too good right now. We are facing a rush classification
of a drug, the harms of which are still little understood.
Indeed, some are openly questioning the principle of
a science-based drugs classification system. The whole thing is a mess.

Yet even at this late stage there is a chance to do things
differently. The European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug
Addiction, an EU body that provides factual analysis for member
countries, is conducting its own study of mephedrone and is likely
to report in July. This should give a far more rounded view of the
evidence than the ACMD alone can provide.

It is also about time that there was a serious debate about the
alternatives to outright criminalisation. As David Nutt argued last
week in the Evening Standard, legal, though regulated, supply of
drugs like mephedrone, ecstasy and cannabis might be a better
way of reducing the undoubted harms of drug taking than an approach
that criminalises users.

Criminalisation, at the end of the day, is a pretty blunt and
ineffective mechanism for controlling certain behaviours deemed
criminal. It is a thoroughly inappropriate means for seeking to
protect individuals from the harms drugs cause, or ensuring they
have the right kind of information to make informed choices.