If Science Cannot Do Without Nutt…
November 4th, 2009Presumably if you’re reading this you’ve heard that Alan Johnson demanded David Nutt resign as head of something called the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for comments he made in a speech reproduced as a pamphlet you can download. I have read his speech. It’s quite interesting. It discusses the intentions of the drug classification system, criticises the current implementation, and offers a proposal for and justification of an alternative based on a systematic comparison the effects of a range of drugs, according to criteria decided by the public. This is complete with references, and in short exactly the sort of thing a Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology should be doing and while it’s not perfect I honestly can’t imagine why anyone would sack him for it.
Ann Widdecombe, who can always be relied upon to jump into the wrong side of any issue put before her, offered this dismal attempt at an explanation:
Look, you read your newspapers every day. Scientific advice changes almost as often as the wind.
You can hear this on iPlayer now; I heard about it from @krypto. And she’s right, of course, because the sum total of everything we know about the universe changes when we learn new things. Your choices are to go with what we know now, understanding that it could change in the future, or to make shit up and run with that. If you want to make shit up then fine (it’s called religion), but don’t foist your made up shit on me, and don’t employ a scientific advisor to make it look credible or else exactly this is bound to happen.
The Daily Mail’s A N Wilson also defended Johnson, who presumably wishes he wouldn’t, saying
The only difference between Hitler and previous governments was that he believed, with babyish credulity, in science as the only truth. He allowed scientists freedoms which a civilised government would have checked.
This was accompanied by an inset photo of Hitler until The Jan Moir Police made them take it down.
While obviously Wilson’s biggest crime against reason in that quote is kidnapping the word ‘only’ and dumping it, lost and confused, in front of an idea well outside its comfort zone, he’s also quaintly ignorant. Hitler was a big fan of science in principle, but corrupted it with quackery and racist ideology, and all but banned theoretical work as ‘Jewish science’ (except secretly where it might help his war effort). Anyone caught doing science that didn’t fit the racist message was fired. One mathematician even attempted to prove quantum mechanics and Nazism were the same thing. All of this is covered in John Grant’s Corrupted Science which I presume the Daily Mail’s A N Wilson hasn’t read, because it is a book.
Melanie Phillips, also of the Mail, implied pretty strongly that Nutt’s claims were simply wrong, which would at least be a legitimate defence of his sacking, were it true.
The reason they are casting the Home Secretary as the villain of this episode is that the chattering classes have bought into the idea that soft drugs are indeed less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco. They therefore think Nutt is the voice of scientific reason.
But he is not.
She does, at least, appear to have read his speech, as she criticises it piece by context-free piece, which is perhaps as strong an endorsement as a scientific claim can get. Melanie Phillips’ views on science are almost uniformly opposed to reality. Take, for example her butchering of the Cochrane report on MMR or her support for ‘intelligent design’. Incidentally, Nutt’s speech cites the MMR fiasco as an example of harm done by ignoring evidence. Phillips doesn’t mention this. (For a better cricism of Nutt’s ideas, see the Transform blog post about the original paper.)
On what I will generously refer to as ‘the left’, Alan Johnson himself defended his actions by saying
Professor Nutt was not sacked for his views, which I respect but disagree with … He was asked to go because he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy. This principle is well understood and long established.
Widdecombe also made this case. And it’s true, although irrelevant. This was a lecture about scientific work, not a campaign. In any case, I think it’s equally well understood and established that you can’t ignore science and expect your science adviser to sit there and let you get on with it. Even if Nutt had crossed the line into campaigning, I think he would have been justified in doing so. As it is, Nutt did little more than present an alternative idea for consideration and present arguments in its favour (i.e., science). Gordon Brown believes Nutt should be fired for this, “because we cannot send mixed messages”, an argument pre-emptively demolished by Nutt himself on page 12 of the PDF transcript.
Martin at LayScience.net points out [with my annotation in square brackets] that
nobody hearing Professor Nutt speaking about the government is going to confuse him with a Labour minister [and it was made clear Nutt was speaking only as a scientist], so the problem that Gordon Brown is referring to is the problem of a senior scientist publishing and publicising research that contradicts the government line. In Gordon Brown’s world of control freakery, such dissent is not to be tolerated.
which sounds familiar but I shan’t comment on why because I’m not sure what happens if both sides of an argument are compared to Hitler.
Don’t listen to these people, and don’t listen to me. Read Nutt’s speech for yourself. If you’re a scientist, you’ll find its structure and tone familiar and start to wonder what all the fuss was about. If not, just read it and then ask yourself if you’d consider it ‘campaigning against government policy’ or ‘a man telling a class what he does at work’.
Tags for this article: Alan Johnson , Ann Widdecombe , David Nutt , Gordon Brown , Melanie Phillips , The Daily Mail
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November 4th, 2009 at 09:19
Cracking post – Nutt was indeed simply doing his job as a scientist and not campaigning, his sacking is a new low point in the relationship between the (NuLab) government and science.
btw, love this line…: “which I presume the Daily Mail’s A N Wilson hasn’t read, because it is a book.”
rofl…!!
November 4th, 2009 at 11:05
Great post again. What on earth is Anne Widdecombe being asked her opinions for again? As you say, of course she can’t possibly comprehend the way in which the views of scientists change in the light of new evidence, as HER view of the universe was laid down by a bunch of religiots about two thousand years ago!
November 4th, 2009 at 11:10
Widdecombe made a big thing on the radio about how she doesn’t defend the government very often, but of course there’s an unforgivably high chance her party will be the government soon and presumably she doesn’t want to attack the government about policies the Conservatives wouldn’t change.
November 4th, 2009 at 11:17
CHRISTMAS PRESENT SUCCESS!
November 4th, 2009 at 18:02
[...] admins of the petition site have rejected the following petition, which I broadly support: Sack Alan Johnson as Home Secretary. by Ted Smith Alan Johnson has stepped beyond credible remit [...]
November 5th, 2009 at 12:14
Never mind, he’ll be out of office next year, as you say, when a completely different set of incompetent nobodies are elected to replace the ones we’ve got at the moment! (I’m old enough to remember PROPER politicians like Joe Grimond, Harold Macmillan, Barbara Castle, Dennis Healey, and so on. Love them or hate them, they’d have eaten the current lot for breakfast – and then asked for more!!)
BTW Have you seen that a government advisor on nuclear submarines has been sacked, and another has resigned, because their views were not considered acceptable? As you say, the Adolf Hitler analogy seems to be back-to front!
November 5th, 2009 at 12:20
I’m not a fan of the Hitler analogy. The reason censoring inconvenient science is bad is not that Hitler did it. If we use Hitler analogy as an argument against replicating the bad things Hitler did then we can’t say ‘oh, shut up, nobody cares’ when people condemn atheism or making the trains run on time because someone once told them Hitler did it and they never bothered to check.
November 10th, 2009 at 23:56
Which is the internet law that says that invoking Hitler or the Nazis automatically loses you the argument and gets you laughed out of the room?
Or is it just argumentum ad Nazium?
Anyway, it is pathetic, however it is badged. I would be tempted to lock A.N. Wilson and Melanie Phillips in a kind of Sartre Huis Clos type eternal metaphysical hell of moralistic argumentative stupidity, were it not for the fact they’d probably quite enjoy one another’s company.
PS I’ve done my bit on the Nuttsack affair here:
http://draust.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/kneed-in-the-nutts-or-shot-in-the-foot/
November 11th, 2009 at 00:04
It’s generally called Godwin’s Law, although I don’t know why and don’t care to look it up.
Also lately I read Spiked’s take on the whole thing, which essentially said “have you listened to Nutt? the man’s mad” which may or may not be true but struck me as missing the point: if he actually deserved to be sacked it makes it all the worse that this is what precipitated it. His character is irrelevant; you don’t treat anyone this way.
November 11th, 2009 at 00:15
Three more drugs advisors have resigned today, following a reassuring meeting with Alan Johnson!
November 11th, 2009 at 00:25
Yes, I wasn’t sure Godwin’s law covered this, but it probably does in one of its usages, according to the Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin’s_law
Re. Spiked, they have a slightly odd take on this in that people like Frank Furedi feel that the Govt should impose socialist ideological solutions, hopefully electorally mandated, for roughly everything you can think of, and therefore don’t like the idea of the Govt appearing to “outsource” any part of the decision-making to non-elected and relatively apolitical experts (not that Govts actually do that often – as Spiked correctly says, they just pretend to). The Spiked piece by Brendan O’Neill skewers the Govt quite well, but I think he caricatures Nutt rather for comic effect. When Nutt says that alcohol is far more harmful than dope etc etc, he is only echoing what every single hospital doctor and GP I know routinely tells you as judged by the people rolling up in A&E, or staggering into the surgery.
As to the sacking, the way it was done was utterly ludicrous. If Johnson wants a tame adviser, he can hire one. If he wants an independent committee to tell him what the consensus is among the drug use/abuse harm reduction experts, he has the ACMD. Johnson is perfectly free to ignore their advice (which is what Spiked want him to do), but insisting the adviser must stand to attention and agree with what the Govt has already decided is ridiculous. It is really another version of the “dodgy dossier” problem (”Tony needs this answer – can you make it look like that?”)
November 11th, 2009 at 00:29
Oops – Godwin’s law link got scrambled. east to find, anyway. The version I know was the first one
“The longer an argumentative comments thread goes on, the closer the probability that someone invokes the Nazis in a comparison approaches unity” (or something like that).
Antivaccine nutter threads are a famous example of this. The anti-vax nutter stock response to any mention of herd immunity is usually to start bleating about Der Fuehrer.
November 11th, 2009 at 00:33
That does sound like the kind of thing they’d do, but I can’t for the life of me imagine how that argument would go. I can’t even come up with a snide comparison, much less a superficially plausible one.
November 11th, 2009 at 00:51
Well, their scientific (I use the term ironically) hero, the saintly Dr Wakefield, has even led the way for them:
(Warning: reading may lead to repetitive banging of head on desk)
http://www.ageofautism.com/2009/06/poisoning-young-minds.html
November 11th, 2009 at 01:00
Oh, I see. “If you use my bad research as an example of bad research then that is the same as instilling racist dogma in children”. Yes, when you put it like that it makes total sense.
Ugh, it’s moronic. There’s about forty clear and important rebuttals all jostling for position in my head and I’m barely halfway down. I’m going to stop reading before I get cross enough I’m forced to post them and nobody needs to read them all again. I fully credit everyone worth heeding with the ability to figure out the holes in his logic for themselves, not least because, as he points out, schoolchildren can do it.