Eve Saville Lecture 2009
Jump to full article: Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (uk), 2009-10-01
Author: Professor David Nutt
Intro: In the last 40 years we in the UK have developed a
way of regulating drugs using a complex legislative
framework. There are two major acts of parliament
regulating drugs. First, there is the Medicines Act
1968, which is essentially monitored and acted upon
by the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency
(MHRA), and second, there is the Misuse of Drugs
Act 1971, which comes under the remit of the Home
Office (see Figure 1). Thus, recreational psychoactive
substances are controlled by Home Office legislation.
There are a number of other substances that are
popularly used and cause harm whose risks fall
outside these two control mechanisms. For example,
alcohol and tobacco are essentially regulated foods
or commodities, while solvents, which kill about
ten people a year in the UK through inhaling, are
regulated at the point of sale according to the age
of the person buying the solvent. . . .
If we look on the generous side, there is a likelihood
that taking cannabis, particularly if you use a lot of
it, will make you more prone to having psychotic
experiences. That includes schizophrenia, but
schizophrenia is a relatively rare condition so it’s
very hard to be sure about its causation. The analysis
we came up with was that smokers of cannabis are
about 2.6 times more likely to have a psychotic-like
experience than non-smokers. To put that figure
in proportion, you are 20 times more likely to get
lung cancer if you smoke tobacco than if you don’t.
That’s the sort of scaling of harms that I want people
to understand. There is a relatively small risk for
smoking cannabis and psychotic illness compared
with quite a substantial risk for smoking tobacco and
lung cancer. . . .
The ranking also suggests that a tripartite
classification system might make sense, with drugs
ranking as more harmful than alcohol being class A
and those ranking lower than tobacco as class C. . . .
We also have to fully endorse harm reduction
approaches at all levels and especially stop the
artificial separation of alcohol and tobacco as
‘non-drugs’. In some parts of the UK this has already
happened. In Wales the programme of intervention
in relation to drug harms now incorporates
smoking and drinking because those are seen as
in some cases being bigger problems than other
drugs. There are other merits in approaching them
simultaneously: for example, many of these drugs are
being used at the same time by the same people.
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Quotes from this article:
A fully scientifically-based Misuse of Drugs Act where drug classification
accurately reflects harms would be a powerful
educational tool. Using the Act in a political way to
give messages other than those relating to relative
harms undermines the Act and does great damage
to the educational message.
We also have to fully endorse harm reduction
approaches at all levels and especially stop the
artificial separation of alcohol and tobacco as
‘non-drugs’.
Professor David Nutt
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