Professor Nutt: Nutty Professor or driven nutty by ignorance?
So, to Professor Nutt, and the need for a headline which involves "The Nutty Professor."
He's the expert scientist, if you've been under a rock for the last week, who makes loud announcements about cannabis being less dangerous than alcohol, and ecstasy being safer than horse-riding (although, to be frank, both are pretty daft past-times).
He had a job as chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, although when I say job, I should point out it was a voluntary one.
Then he was sacked by home secretary Alan Johnson because Mr Johnson had lost confidence in him. Not, says Mr Johnson, because his views differ from Professor Nutt, but because Professor Nutt sought to proactively campaign against government policy after his views were ignored.
And so the "scientific community" is suddenly up in arms, apparently angry at the fact someone who spoke as he found has been binned off for not conforming with government opinion.
Meanwhile, Alan Johnson is roundly applauded by his party and the Tories for standing by the Margaret Thatcher rule: "advisors advise, ministers decide."
To me, this issue raises several key issues. First off, for the scientific community to be up in arms suggests they aren't as good at analysing facts in politics as they are bits of fluff under a microscope.
Surely if Prof Nutt felt so strongly about being ignored, he should have done what many advisors and, indeed, ministers have done before him: Resign. There's no point being inside the tent and being ignored. And it should come as no surprise that if you speak out against the owners of the tent that you'll get thrown out.
Indeed, by clinging on to a job which presumably brings kudos with it while feeling ignored, he was only serving to make himself look stupid?
Alan Johnson is right when he says this isn't about binning off someone who just disagreed with him - after all, many of the advisory panel's suggestions are acted upon.
But when he trots out the "ministers decide" line, and is roundly applauded by the Tories, I start to feel slightly sick. It feels, ever so slightly, that having taken a battering over expenses, MPs are seeking to assert their authority.
Of course, ministers decide, and they have to look at issues in a broader context than any one expert advisor has to.
But by glibly resorting to cliches, Alan Johnson fails to answer the question: Why did Prof Nutt feel he had to campaign against Government? And if the weight of the scientific community is behind Prof Nutt's badly-phrased drug danger examples, then is it really right that a former postman has sign off on government policy on drugs?
Talk of legalising ecstasy will never be a vote winner, but politicians are the first to argue they aren't there just to make easy decisions.
Politicians need to hear the dissenting voices towards their beliefs, preferably before the policies are announced. It seems here that the biggest failing was the ability of the Government to manage experts who are clearly, well, expert, but were also left feeling somewhat igored.
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David Higgerson - David Higgerson has covered local and national politics for much of his career as a journalist. This blog aims to look at Westminister from the outside in, at a time when it appears very few are looking out from the inside.
Nutt's controversial statements were made in academic papers published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology and The Lancet, and in a lecture to the CCJS that was republished as a pamphlet aimed at an academic audience.
These hardly constitute "loud announcements" - you need an institutional subscription to access the J. of Psychopharm, for a start.
Why are scientists so upset? Because Johnson, in his ignorance of science's collegiate method of progress, has effectively told them that if they take on an unpaid advisory role for the Government, they won't be able freely to publish and discuss research in academic contexts. Doing so is an essential part of their (paid) academic work. He's also shown them that giving up hours of their time, free, doesn't make them immune from Government ridicule and smear.
(By the way, you have read the papers involved, haven't you? If not, how do you expect to make an informed comment without doing so?)