Government Drugs Policy Unlawful

[EcoTort Theatre]

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/08/436154.html

In 2007 a paper by Professor David Nutt, the current ACMD Chairman, and Professor Colin Blakemore, the former Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council, appeared in The Lancet entitled "Development of a Rational Scale to Assess the Harm of Drugs of Potential Misuse". This paper describes the first scientific ranking of the relative harmfulness of the most commonly used drugs and fatally undermines Government’s subjective rational for their arbitrary administration of the Act’s classification system.

“The current classification system has evolved in an unsystematic way from somewhat arbitrary foundations with seemingly little scientific basis. […] Our findings raise questions about the validity of the current Misuse of Drugs Act classification, despite the fact that it is nominally based on an assessment of risk to users and society. The discrepancies between our findings and current classifications are especially striking in relation to psychedelic type drugs. Our results also emphasise that the exclusion of alcohol and tobacco from the Misuse of Drugs Act is, from a scientific perspective, arbitrary. We saw no clear distinction between socially acceptable and illicit substances”. (The Lancet 369: 1047-1053)