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)