Welcome to the Science Media Centre Podcast. In our 20th year we are looking back at some of the biggest stories the charity has been involved with.
In this episode, we discuss the events surrounding the 2009 sacking of Professor David Nutt from his position as Chair of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). Our Chief Executive, Fiona Fox, is joined by:
- Prof David Nutt, Edmond J Safra Chair in Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, and Chair of the ACMD from January 2008 to October 2009
- Mark Henderson, Director of Corporate Affairs at Wellcome, and Science Editor at The Times from 2006 – 2011
- Dr Evan Harris, Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West and Abingdon from May 1997 to May 2010 and member of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee between 2003 and 2010
The sacking of David Nutt as the government’s ‘drugs tsar’ (aka Chair of the ACMD) was a huge cause célèbre in science. It came at the time when Nutt and other scientific advisers were gathering evidence for government about the harms of different illicit drugs, including cannabis and ecstasy, to help inform policy decisions about how to classify these drugs. However, much of the research being published by Nutt and his fellow scientists at that time, including the late Professor Sir Colin Blakemore, revealed that LSD, ecstasy and cannabis were actually less harmful than legal products like alcohol and tobacco. That this evidence was proving unpopular with ministers became clear in February 2009 when Jacqui Smith, Home Secretary, took to the airwaves to lambast her own adviser for stating in a journal paper that ecstasy was statistically no more dangerous than horse-riding. Smith publicly demanded that Nutt apologise to the parents of children who had died after taking ecstasy, and made the apology a condition of him keeping his job.
Nutt clung on to this job on that occasion, but he was an active and prolific researcher as well as a government adviser, and it wasn’t long before new research produced similar findings. In October 2009 in a lecture given to the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College London, Nutt presented new findings about relative harms of drugs and repeated his view that illicit drugs should be classified according to the actual evidence of the harm they cause. The lecture was picked up in the media and this time there were no warnings. Nutt was dismissed from his ACMD position by the then Home Secretary Alan Johnson, and a media storm erupted.
This podcast brings back together four people who were deeply involved in these events. David Nutt himself, who decided as soon as he got over the shock of the news to tour every TV and radio studio telling his side of the story. Mark Henderson, then science editor of The Times, who covered every twist and turn over the following weeks. Evan Harris, then a Lib-Dem MP, who took up David Nutt’s case in parliament and led a campaign alongside Sense about Science and CaSE (the Campaign for Science and Evidence) for new guidelines to protect independent scientific advisers from dismissal in future. And Fiona Fox, Head of the Science Media Centre, who was the first person David Nutt phoned when he heard about his sacking and organised a packed press briefing for him shortly afterwards. Here, they are reunited to reminisce on this extraordinary time and reflect on what the episode told us about the need to keep a clear separation between scientific advice and policy making.
Producer – Andy Hawkes
Editor – Fiona Lethbridge
Audio Production – Lewis Sellars
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