Beware the drug policy heretics
B. C. Health Officer Perry Kendall has learned the hard way that long- held dogma must not be challenged
From our supposedly sophisticated 21st- century perspective, it’s easy to look condescendingly on our past, when people were persecuted for nothing more than denying or doubting the received “truths” of their religion.
Yet for all the progress we’ve made in accepting unorthodox religious beliefs, the persecution of heretics remains a live issue. And worse, it’s now taking place in a field ostensibly governed not by faith but by reason.
As evidence of this, look no further than the outrage that greeted Provincial Health Officer Perry Kendall’s comments this week, when he dared to question the received “truths” about the illicit drug ecstasy ( MDMA).
Noting that researchers are assessing the drug’s efficacy in treating post- traumatic stress disorder, Kendall opined that it might be safe for adults to use MDMA under certain circumstances. And he also mused about what a regime involving regulation rather than criminalization of the drug might look like.
He was therefore guilty of two heresies: First, he expressed doubt about the received “truth” that ecstasy is necessarily dangerous, and second, he expressed doubt about the received “truth” that criminalization of such drugs is the only way to diminish their dangers.
The reaction to such heresy was predictable: Politicians at all levels of government fell over each other in their attempts to distance themselves from Kendall’s comments, and Kendall was forced to appear before the media to offer a “clarification” — not a recantation exactly, though he did say he wasn’t advocating for the legalization of ecstasy, which as a street drug can be “extremely dangerous.”
So Kendall’s latest comments, whether or not they amount to a recantation, do what every good recantation does: affirm official dogma. In this case, official dogma has it that “dangerous” drugs must necessarily be criminalized, and that all drugs that have been criminalized, and only drugs that have been criminalized, are necessarily dangerous. ( Notice how this latter point effectively sends the message that the government doesn’t make mistakes.)
That’s the dogma. The evidence, of course, is another matter entirely. In an effort to separate the two, researchers led by renowned British neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt assessed the harms caused by a variety of substances and published their results in The Lancet in 2007.
Sure enough, the researchers found that certain legal substances, such as alcohol, are far more dangerous than certain illegal ones, such as ecstasy, which, incidentally, was considered among the least dangerous of the assessed substances.
Now in a culture that respects reason and evidence, such findings would have prompted lawmakers to reassess the current legislative regime. But in a culture guided by official dogma, any evidence that conflicts with the dogma amounts to heresy and must be expunged, along with the heretics who highlight such evidence.
So it was with David Nutt. After delivering a lecture in which he presented the evidence from The Lancet study, and after reaffirming his belief that lawmakers ought to classify drugs based on the actual harm they cause, Nutt was unceremoniously dismissed from his position as chairman of Britain’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.
It is bizarre indeed that someone can be fired for advocating for evidencebased drug policy. But Nutt — who had previously been forced to publicly apologize for daring, in an academic journal, to compare the relative risks of taking ecstasy with riding a horse — took it all in stride and formed his own group, the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs.
It seems Canadians are now following Nutt’s lead and developing similar independent organizations, such as the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition and Stop the Violence B. C., to advocate for evidence- based policy. For as David Nutt learned and Perry Kendall is now learning, there is simply no tolerance for attacking the church’s evidence-free dogma from within.