Dr David Nutt

Hi! Sorry I haven’t posted in a while – I’ve been kinda sick and between that and revising for my mock exams I haven’t been on here in a while. This is a post I’ve been meaning to do for some time.

Back in August my family and I went to see a man called Dr David Nutt. I’m not really what his official title is (he’s a professor at Imperial College London, a psychiatrist by profession and he was an advisor to the previous government), so I’m going to call him David.

He was doing a talk on drugs – mainly legal and illegal recreational ones – and I found it fascinating. The main thrust of his whole talk was that science is evidence based, and that the evidence should be allowed to influence relevant government policy.

There were a few main drugs which came under fire in his talk – cannabis, tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, ecstasy, “equasy” and heroin. One of his biggest pet peeves was that the politicians were more swayed by the media than by science, because the media reported things incorrectly and as a result the public was misinformed. One example of this was that the previous government had wanted to make cannabis a higher class drug – move it from a class C illegal drug, to a class A illegal drug. As their advisor the government sent David away to do some research and find out whether or not there was any evidence of this. Unfortunately for them he found little or no evidence to warrant such a drastic change in the class, despite the media’s claims that cannabis caused psychosis or paranoia – he showed a graph of the number of cases of reported psychosis and paranoia against time, as well as the number of people using cannabis against time. There was clearly no correlation – the use of cannabis graph increased almost exponentially, while the psychosis/paranoia graph stayed roughly level. I recognise that this was only one factor and obviously he took more than just this into account, but I’m only mentioning a few of the things he spoke about.

He also did a kind of meta-analysis, and showed the impact to the individual and the impact to society of various drugs. These combined to give an overall score. So for example heroin has a huge impact to the individual – it is an exceptionally addictive and damaging drug to take – but because it is used so little it has a low impact on society. Conversely, alcohol has a relatively little impact on the individual, but people use it so much, and so many people use it to excess that the overall impact on society, and the overall score, was huge. Another graph he showed depicted the overall trend in deaths for all diseases of the organ systems – so there was one line for endocrine system, another for the nervous, another for the cardiovascular etc. The overall trend of the last 20 years was a downwards one (thanks to the huge leaps forward in medicine and science) except for one line – the Liver. This was the only spike in the whole system and it was I think the only line which went up, whereas all the other had gone down. He then showed another graph, same style, but for the whole of the EU except Great Britain, and their lines all had a downwards trend. Because of this data he felt that there should be more regulation on alcohol – he cited a number of European countries which had recognised the health risks and had limited alcohol.  

Another drug which came into the firing line in terms of legislation was ecstasy. He felt that it was largely the media which had made this drug illegal. Leah Betts had taken ecstasy and died, and this was one case which was seized; billboards displaying her in hospital were advertised all over the country. However, she didn’t die because of ecstasy – she died of water poisoning. Having heard that ecstasy caused severe dehydration she proceeded to drink around 7 litres in an hour and a half, and it was this which killed her but because of the media hype and poor reporting, (not many people knew that she died of water poisoning apparently) the government very quickly made the drug illegal. David’s point was not that they shouldn’t have listened, or that it should be legal, but that there should have been some scientific basis for making the drug illegal and that it should have been tested.

He also published a paper on the dangers of a “drug” called “equasy” which actually stood for Equine Addiction Syndrome, also known as horse riding. It outlined how this “drug” frequently led to minor and severe injuries, including but not limited to sprains, broken bones, paralysis and death. He then went on to analyse how many cases of “equasy” came into hospitals per year and how much they cost the tax payer in taxes. He wanted to show that making drugs illegal wasn’t addressing the problem scientifically – when people heard about “equasy” they wanted to make it illegal. He felt that proper investigations should be done into how dangerous drugs were and that the evidence found in these studies should be used to make policies to that effect.

I’ve tried to summarise some of his ideas but I realise that I have done a pretty poor job (it was a while ago). For those of you who get the chance to see him talk, I would strongly recommend it – he’s engaging, funny and very thought provoking. I personally found the divides between policy making and medicine, and the conflicts between them exceptionally interesting as it was something I hadn’t thought about before. If any of you who are interested, his old blog is here, and his new website is here.