Jacqui Smith has said she was wrong to defy a panel of experts and upgrade cannabis to a Class B drug when she was Home Secretary in 2008. Defying experts is now apparently the worst thing a politician can do. Every policy, whether it’s on drugs, child-rearing or the environment, must, it seems, be based on the “best available evidence”. Professor David Nutt, who was Smith’s most senior scientific adviser, has in recent years become the walking, talking personification of modern society’s elevation of evidence above all else, particularly above such gubby matters as belief or ideology. And with excellent snootiness, as befits a leading member of the new priestly class of experts, Nutt said of Smith’s volte face on cannabis: “She, like most politicians, has the delusion that whatever they think is right. They lack all humility.”
Leaving aside the small matter of where a Prof who has spent the past few years hectoring evidence-ignoring politicians gets off talking about humility, there is a burning question few seem willing to ask: why should policy-making be based on evidence? Why should something like the right of people to take drugs, which touches upon amorphous, evidence-free things like liberty, morality and responsibility, be determined by the lab tests of men in white coats? Why is it any more right for a man of science to say “Yes, this drug may be permitted, but this one may not” than it is for a man of the cloth to say “Thou shalt not smoke dope”? The former’s pontification might be based in science, while the latter’s is based in religious considerations, but the end result of both are the same: tiny cliques of people conspire to deny everyday people the right to choose their vices on the basis that those vices might harm them either physically or spiritually.
