regulate drugs

Open Archive Day

Back in 2013 I wrote a feature on the collateral damage of the global prohibition on drugs. It came out within days of the death of Oxford teenager Martha Fernback from an accidental overdose, which could have been avoided if drugs were sold with proper controls and labels like other products. Martha' mother, Marie Cockburn went on to campaign to legalise and regulate drugs, follow her progress on twitter.

Things are moving very slowly, but the understanding that the war on drugs isn't working and has killed millions over the last 100 years is gaining ground.

My feature is in the open archives here:


Drugs prohibition is criminals’ gain, neuroscience’s loss

why reduce harm

... when you could go and lock up harmless people?

Well, ahem, don't get me started on the psychoactive substances bill which is currently on its way through UK parliament and may well become law. I find it ironic that this steaming pile of b****t, which will make totally harmless substances like nitrous oxide (used in childbirth and whipping cream, no less) illegal, shows up at the same time as the commercial success of e-cigarettes demonstrates that harm reduction is possible. Sadly though, reducing harm is not what our government wants. Appeasing the Daily Mail is more important, obviously.

Anyhow. My feature juxtaposing these two issues is out now in Current Biology:

Drugs: blanket ban or harm reduction?
Current Biology Volume 25, Issue 13, pR523–R525, 29 June 2015
Summary and limited access to full text
(should become openly accessible one year after publication)

Laughing gas has been safely used for over two centuries, as this cartoon from the early 19th century exemplifies.

PS (14.7.2015) Today, Anyone's Child, a group of families who lost children to the war on drugs (including Anne-Marie Cockburn, mother of Oxford teenager Martha Fernback who died two years ago), are taking their petition for a drugs policy based on harm reduction to Downing Street. You can sign their petition here.

how drugs became demons

In my long essay review of the book "Demons - our changing attitudes to alcohol, tobacco and drugs" by Virginia Berridge (OUP 2013), I had plenty of space to ponder the perversity of current drugs regulation, as highlighted by David Nutt and others. As for the book itself, Berridge does a very good job explaining how events from the Opium Wars onwards led to the world ending up in this particular rabbit hole. My main criticism was the author's remarkable detachment from these hotly debated issues, which can at times be infuriating. Also, as she apparently has no opinions on any of the controversial issues surrounding current drugs policies, she doesn't offer a way out of the mess either.

Anyhow, my review is out in the June issue of Chemistry & Industry, on pp 50-51. If you have any problems accessing it, drop me a note.

archaic proteins and all that Bach

In the round-up of German pieces published in May-June 2014 we have medical marijuana, curious carbohydrates, and paleo proteins, as well as intellectual giants from Johann Sebastian Bach to Dr House.

Wirkstoff THC: Marihuana-Medizin macht Ernst
Chemie in unserer Zeit Vol 48, No 3, p 163

Biochemie: Kohlenhydrate spielen Protein
Chemie in unserer Zeit Vol 48, No 3, p 167

Ausgeforscht: Kobalt im Blut
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Vol 62, No 5, p 595

Ausgeforscht: Proteinreiche Buchstabensuppe
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Vol 62, No 6, p 727

Blickpunkt Bio: Proteine aus der Urzeit des Lebens
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Vol 62, No 6, pp 632-634

Oh, and I nearly forgot, the paleo proteins made the cover of Nachrichten:

october harvest

The monthly roundup of things published in German magazines yields algal biofuels, mind-altering drugs and mysterious mechanisms:

Forschungspolitik: Drogengesetze schaden Neurowissenschaften
Chemie in unserer Zeit 47, 284 DOI: 10.1002/ciuz.201390056 restricted access

Biosprit aus Algen?
Nachrichten aus der Chemie 2013, 61, 1035-1036

Ausgeforscht: Struktur und Funktion
Nachrichten aus der Chemie 2013, 61, p1083

The last item was inspired by the historical scientific instrument of unknown function shown below. There is a competition on for the best explanation of what it might be for.

PS: My feature on diatoms will appear in the next issue of Chemie in unserer Zeit (December) but it is already online (restricted access).

drugs prohibition kills

I wrote a feature about psychoactive drugs a few weeks ago, mainly inspired by the recent paper from David Nutt and colleagues who argued that the blanket ban of psychoactive drugs harms progress in neuroscience (apart from ruining the lives of millions of people with the unwinnable "war on drugs").

Since then, tragic events, including the death of a teenage girl here in Oxford, have highlighted the issue. There is a properly dangerous drug making the rounds in the UK right now, PMA (paramethoxyamphetamine) (probably called Dr Death for a reason), but as drugs are banned regardless of their harm, it's hard to know what is and what isn't dangerous. Plus, there is no quality control, and if kids buy an illegal pill, it could contain anything. In the Netherlands, by contrast, there are labs checking up on what is being traded, and they haven't had problems with PMA yet.

Essentially, my bottom line is, people always have used mind-altering drugs and always will do, and if there wasn't this blanket prohibition banning harmless and dangerous things alike, it would be much safer for them to do so. Hardline prohibitionists are just creating most of the problems they are pretending to solve.

Oh well. Don't get me started on this, it drives me up the wall in no time. Just read my feature:

Drugs prohibition is criminals’ gain, neuroscience’s loss

Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 14, R585-R588, 22 July 2013 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.07.012

which is freely accessible (and legal, still!) as

HTML text

PDF file.

Cannabis sativa - picture credit: GW pharmaceuticals.

PS: couple of further links re. the recent deaths linked to PMA:

• Ian Birrell in The Guardian
• Excellent piece from Archie Bland in the Independent
• Martha Fernback post-mortem inconclusive (BBC news)

PPS only after publishing this blog entry I became aware of the organisation Transform Drug Policy Reform, which has published detailed suggestions for a drugs regulation based on actual scientific evidence and on policies that are feasible (borrowing bits and pieces from established frameworks such as the handling of prescription drugs). "After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation" is freely available as a PDF download, but if you would like to support the organisation, you can also order it as a book from them. You can also download the executive summary only, which is also available in several other languages including Spanish, Russian, and Italian.

first cannabis prescription drug hits the market

I'm very pleased to hear that the cannabis based pharmaceutical Sativex is being launched on the UK market now, after 11 years in the pipeline. I covered its early promise in this Current Biology piece in 2001, but haven't followed its progress in recent years.

Sativex® (as in C. sativa, and not Savitex, as the Guardian called it) is an oromucosal spray for the treatment of spasticity in patients with multiple sclerosis. Sativex contains two cannabinoids as active ingredients - THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol) and CBD (cannabidiol). It is the first cannabinoid medicine derived from whole plant extracts from the Cannabis sativa plant. The company expects Sativex to be approved in Spain shortly. Further submissions will be made in additional European countries during the second half of 2010 under the mutual recognition procedure.

At a price tag of 11 pounds per day, one does have to wonder, though, if allowing patients to grow their own might have been a more affordable solution ...



(photo: GW Pharmaceuticals)

busy

... no time for meaningful blogging today, but do check my tweet feed. Had great fun on Twitter last week, thanks to the home secretary and his inspired decision to shoot the messenger when he didn't like the message. The #NuttSack affair rumbles on ...

summing up the Nutt sack affair

(--> deutsche Version)

I don't know whether anybody outside the UK noticed, but we've had a big debate here over the head of the government's drugs advisory body, David Nutt, who was sacked by the home secretary, Alan Johnson, last Friday (30.10.). Essentially, he was fired because he had insisted that the real danger posed by drugs is completely unrelated to the ABC classification used for law enforcement. (e.g., both cannabis and ecstasy are less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco). By firing him, Johnson unleashed a major science v. politics clash.

It was great fun watching this drama onfold on twitter -- the twitter-using science minister, Paul Drayson (@lorddrayson) was caught out by it on a visit to Japan, tweeted his support to the enraged scientists back home, but as soon as he was back in London and under cabinet control order, he fell silent.

Soon there was a petition on the gov. website to get Prof. Nutt reinstated, and the brilliant twitter-hashtag #NuttSack. The tabloid press went berserk: "Cannabis scandal expert admits: My children have taken drugs", but among the serious newspapers, even the conservative ones (Times, Telegraph) backed the scientists side. The collected stories in the Guardian are here.

I think it was ultimately a positive thing, as the scientific evidence about the real dangers of drugs got acres of media coverage rather than being swept under the rug by the government. Plus, the government will probably have to reorganise the way it commissions expert advice on drugs, and it will have to do so under public scrutiny. Thus in a political sense, this was a major own-goal for the home secretary (and Gordon Brown as well who backed him, rather than the science minister who tried to get the decision reversed).

Editorials summarising the whole affair are now appearing, e.g. by David Colquhoun in the British Medical Journal, and by David Nutt himself in New Scientist. Only trouble is that the Tories, who are likely to win the next elections, are just as blockheaded about this as the current home secretary. So scientists will have to vote Lib Dem next time ...


PS the most revealing contribution re. the misunderstanding of science was probably made by the Daily Mail columnist who called scientists (all of them) the "arrogant gods of certainty". Could someone pop down to Waterstones and get him a copy of Popper ? (more about risk and uncertainty in the Times)

cannabis news

well, it's not news really, as we've known for decades that prohibition isn't working, but it's always nice to see it reiterated by some official report, even though we know that politicians aren't listening to reason:

Report urges regulated market for cannabis to replace prohibition

drugs and mental illness

deutsche Version

I can get quite furious about certain parts of the media that want us to believe that drugs (e.g. cannabis) cause mental illness (e.g.schizophrenia), when there is absolutely no evidence at all that the observed statistical link is causal in this direction. There are at least two other interpretations of the same data, namely

1) that an as yet undiagnosed, early stage mental illness makes people more likely to try and enjoy mind-altering drugs, and

2) that both the mental illness and the drug addiction are consequences of the same or similar neural disorders.

A paper in Behavioral Neuroscience, published by the American
Psychological Association (APA), now presents evidence that -- at least in rats -- damage to the amygdala has effects that support explanation no. 2.

Wouldn't it be nice if this could put an end to the headlines screaming that drug X "causes" mental disease Y ? Sadly, I guess that this will be largely ignored by the press. (I proposed a news item on this but was turned down!)

cannabis

Now that I've calmed down a little bit re. last
Friday's cannabis story and the way it was reported in
the media, can I just try to un-muddy the waters by
clarifying that:

1) the relevant paper in the Lancet did not contain
any new data. It was a meta-study, i.e. the authors
did nothing but review existing studies of cases where
mental illness coincides with a history of cannabis
use. Considering this, I thought that The Lancet was
guilty of fuelling hype when they flagged this paper
up with not one but two accompanying commentaries (and
probably a press release!).

2) if for a second we choose to believe the claim
(still based on a rather small number of cases, with
no systematic epidemiology!) that people who have used
cannabis are a bit more likely to develop
schizophrenia than people who haven't, the serious
newspapers (like most disappointingly, The Guardian)
which reported this study uncritically, should have
clarified that this observation does not prove a
causal connection.

3) ... and even if there was a causal connection, any
serious report should have clarified that the
connection can go two different directions. Unlike in
smoking / lung disease, where the cause-effect route
goes one way, mental illness changes the way people
behave. Thus, somebody who is harbouring a disposition
to develop schizophrenia (or depression, or any other
mental illness) may be more likely to try and even
enjoy mind-altering drugs.

Personally I think that if there is a causal
connection behind these stats, it is much more likely
to go in that direction, in that disposition to mental
illness causes drug use, not the other way round.
That is of course a matter of opinion. But the claim
that there is a proven causal connection as reported
in the media, that is just bad science.

I've also sent a letter to the Guardian on this matter, which got published
here.