Eideard

The government’s former chief drug adviser has accused the prime minister, Gordon Brown, of tightening the law on cannabis for political reasons.

Professor David Nutt warned that other experts on the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) could resign in protest at his sacking by the home secretary, Alan Johnson…

Nutt told the BBC today that Brown had “made up his mind” to reclassify cannabis despite evidence to the contrary.

“Gordon Brown comes into office and, soon after that, he starts saying absurd things like cannabis is lethal… it has to be a class B drug. He has made his mind up.

“We went back, we looked at the evidence, we said, ‘No, no, there is no extra evidence of harm, it’s still a class C drug.’ He said, ‘Tough, it’s going to be class B’…”

The decision followed the publication of a paper by the Centre for Crime and Justice at King’s College London, based on a lecture Nutt delivered in July. He repeated his familiar view that illicit drugs should be classified according to the actual evidence of the harm they cause and pointed out that alcohol and tobacco caused more harm than LSD, ecstasy and cannabis…

Richard Garside, the director of the Centre for Crime and Justice at King’s College London, accused Johnson of undermining scientific research.

He said: “I’m shocked and dismayed that the home secretary appears to believe that political calculation trumps honest and informed scientific opinion.”

No one in the United States would be “shocked and dismayed” over politicians locked into opportunism and butt-kissing for the Eedjit Vote.

Bible-thumping ignoramuses control a significant portion of the popular vote delimited by a 6th-grade education and 3rd-rate political parties. That the best politicians in world history were willing and able to lead a populace from the front means nothing to the craven and cowardly lot the Anglophone millenium has inherited.