An age-old battle rumbles on. In one corner, we find those features which our modern society supposedly exalts – science, reason, and free speech. In the other corner, we find the familiar enemies of those things – prejudice, censorship, and blind faith. But whereas one might hope that within a modern secular government it would be reason that reared its head, one would be disappointed: a populist, paranoid prejudice reigns supreme in these death thralls of our Labour government.

It has recently been reported that the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, has seen fit to sack the senior drugs advisor, Professor David Nutt, who, from analysing evidence and drawing on his expertise, has concluded that the current government policy on drugs is flawed, and that many illegal substances are in fact less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco. Most people know this already. It is a plain and acknowledged fact that whereas one cannot die from cannabis use, one can certainly die from taxable drugs like tobacco and alcohol.

Less people were perhaps aware that, as Nutt’s research has demonstrated, ecstasy is significantly less dangerous than these legal drugs. The reason the public might be surprised by such a revelation about the relative harmlessness of ecstasy is, Nutt contends, because of an acute media bias when it comes to drugs. In his report, Nutt cites a PhD project which examined the correlation between drug-induced deaths and their reportage in newspapers in Scotland between 1990 and 1999. The study showed that whereas 26 out of 28 ecstasy-related deaths were reported, only 1 out of 265 aspirin-related deaths were reported, and up to 3000 alcohol-related deaths were never reported at all. The result of such ‘a peculiar imbalance in terms of reporting’, says Nutt, ‘is clearly inappropriate’. As if to prove this point, The Sun’s Jon Gaunt wrote that Nutt ‘must be sacked immediately’ for daring to suggest that ecstasy might be less harmful than alcohol. 

Alan Johnson agreed, and wrote a letter to Nutt which ‘expressed surprise and disappointment over…comments which damage efforts to give the public clear messages about the dangers of drugs’. In sacking someone for such unprejudiced research, Johnson was all too clear about the government’s message: Nutt and the rational and dispassionate form of policy consideration that he personifies is not a welcome part of government, and research carried out in the government’s name is supposed to reaffirm preconceived notions rather than contest them with evidence. Nutt must have had some idea that this would be the response to his findings – ‘It is very easy to get research money to show that drugs are bad’, he wrote, ‘but it’s very difficult to get…funds to show that they may not be so’. 

What we have here is a battle between reason and unreason, rationality and blind faith. Johnson and his ilk believe that ecstasy is more harmful than alcohol, and therefore anyone who thinks otherwise is a political heretic and must be disavowed. Newspapers work to consolidate beliefs in the superior dangers of illegal drugs in comparison to legal ones, thereby justifying the parochialism of our Home Secretary’s message on drugs. 

The truth is lost amid such black and white logic, and people who call for a more nuanced version of our ridiculously simplistic classification system are fired. These are elements which are completely at odds with our national self-perception as a progressive and liberal state that encourages independent thought. To sack someone who does not toe the party line may be all well and good when attempting to maintain a coherent government, but when the dissent arises not from a qualitative difference in opinion but from the fact that a scientific study discredits the party line, then sacking the man who spoke that science constitutes a troubling rejection of reality akin to the Papal censorship of Galileo in the Sixteenth Century