Returning to the subject of an earlier blog from last November… There must be more to Professor Nutt (sacked last November as head of the government’s Drug Advisory Council) than meets the eye, or finds its way on to radio or page.  He had in his recent spat with Alan Johnson the support of Colin Blakemore, one-time head of the Science Research Council.  How, I ask myself, can two such eminent men be so wide of the mark?  

Professor Nutt has now launched his new independent advisory panel on drugs. His interview on Five Live on Friday (15th January) evening showed how curiously out of touch with reality he is. In response to a call from someone running a unit for mental health patients, every one of whom had a link with previous cannabis use, he simply denied there was any scientific proof. The explanation seems to lie in different definitions of what harm entails. Alcohol causes more deaths than cannabis and LSD and ecstasy no doubt. But most of us don’t use death as the main criterion. We use impairment of mental faculties, anxiety, distress, inability to live an ordinary family or working life. There is also a wide spectrum of impairment, from minor difficulties to psychosis. The lack on the one hand of any awareness (he never speaks of it) of mental impairment together with the absence of any subtlety in his analysis is what is so worrying. 

Reversibility is another criterion I’d like to see discussed. Drying out at the Priory is one thing, tough as hell I’m sure, but alcoholism is an addiction and can be reversed if the will is there. For cannabis, whether or not it is addictive is not the issue. Rather it’s the connection with mental illness, which is so often irreversible.   

The irony for Prof Nutt is that his only supporter among the few who phoned in on Friday night was a regular user of cannabis these last twenty years. He hadn’t suffered, he said, apart from some impact on his sleep patterns… 

What this shows up is the danger of talking of ‘the science’ as explanation and justification of all things. So much depends on the criteria you use, what you include and exclude. Nutt excludes or downgrades a wide range of impacts in his analysis. He over-emphasises one impact, that of death, and is happy it seems to allow the press to pick up the misleading message it presents.  Nutt would of course dispute that he’s manipulating evidence, but that to my mind, and that of many others, is what he’s doing.

Blakemore, pre-eminent as a neuro-scientist, Nutt with pretensions to similar eminence, it seems to me have an overly mechanistic approach to the brain and to the mind,  and don’t have the understanding of the nature, subtleties and extremes of mental illness. It just can’t be calibrated or indeed dismissed as they would wish.

I’m not writing here with any great sense of certainty. But Nutt’s arguments fail to tie in with the experience of so many of us, and I’m trying to understand why that might be.

Commentary, Chris Collier, 12 Jan10 

Simon Schama makes a point of beginning his programme in Korea, not Vietnam, and with another post-war president, Harry Truman. But Truman took over at the end of a victorious war, where no-one back home doubted the rights and wrongs. Not so Afghanistan.

Truman then found himself facing a new foe, a predictable foe, in Russia, and the Berlin Blocade and the Cold War ensued. But few predicted his second foe, Korea, backed by Communist China. Just what unknowns, beyond Afghanistan, that we don’t know, in Rumsfeld-speak, might lie in wait for Obama?

Truman chose containment not aggression (Macarthur, who he sacked, would have risked all) in the Korean War, pushing forward the frontiers of freedom as far as they would reasonably go, given the millions-strong Communist forces on the other side of the 38th parallel, but going no further. Yet 37,000 Americans still died in Korea before the 1953 armistice. This is the war from which Schama wants Obama to draw lessons, not the ignominy of Vietnam.

Can, as Schama argues, Obama bring back that mixture of idealism and realism that Harry Truman showed, can he bring clarity and coherence where Bush and his cabinet had been mired down by puzzle and confusion as their war turned against them, bring to bear the lessons and legacy of Korea, not the mistakes of Vietnam and Iraq? Can he also restore confidence and trust in America, something that in 1945 the free world took for granted, but post Iraq especially, no more?  

Freedom, as Truman said, is not free. It has to be fought for. But it is also indivisible. Schama remarked on all the burgers and nuggets and cappuccinos on sale on the streets of Seoul, and we all of us saw the bright lights and the sameness now evident in Seoul and so many world cities – but we also sensed there what Schama sensed, that there was a buzz, something positive, a sense of freedom in action. Freedom indivisible. Other peoples may not want to enjoy quite the Westernised freedom of Seoul, but they also want no truck with tyranny.

No wonder Obama took so long before deciding on a troop surge in Afghanistan.  Who knows what could flow for Obama and America from failure?

There’s endless talk of change in teaching, in learning, in the curriculum.. But there’s the beginnings of something else out there, which just might have a significant impact if it became embedded. Judge for yourself if there’s the remotest chance… 

Tonbridge School (others plan to follow) has introduced meditation classes, focusing on mindfulness, with perceived benefits in terms of concentration skills and combating anxiety. Living in the moment, avoiding past regrets and future worries, is a hard lesson to explain philosophically to a 15-year-old but if you learn to slow down through meditating then it does begin to relate to actual experience. 

Above all, slowing down is about silence. Not the shouted silence that gives the teacher control, but the inner silence where you’re in control.  You cannot continue to shout and demand and insist and posture while engaging in silence. 

Thinking of Old Tonbridgeans. The cricketer, Colin Cowdrey, was one, and his languid demeanour suggests that maybe meditation comes naturally to the school. Alasteir Crowley famous as a mountaineer, occultist and sexual revolutionary suggests the opposite. EM Forster, another old boy, had it spot on – ‘only connect’. 

There’s an important distinction to be made. It’s less meditation, that being a technique, and more mindfulness that’s really being pioneered here. Mindfulness is about being aware of yourself in the moment, no before or after, being receptive, not aggressive, carrying no baggage in, and no baggage out.  

Mindfulness gives perspective, takes emotion out of the moment, and that means taking out aggression, fear, anxiety, hatred, all those emotions that feed on themselves. What’s left intact is a sense of the world as it is, where’s there’s no negative charge, no knots, no warped views or false perspectives. 

Schoolboys will no doubt be just like the rest of us. We come out of the mindful moment and we’re back, racing like rats, shouting, over-emoting, switching in one endlessly unmindful moment after another from one obsession to the next. But once we know mindfulness we can build on it, and that’s hopefully what the boys at Tonbridge, and other schools that try it out, will find. It’s not about undermining ambition or a sense of mission, or negating a desire to achieve for yourself or improve the world. But it does give you a place to return to at any moment, a sense of when you’re out of control, and how to deal with it, and an awareness of how to avoid following others, to stay out of the fray, when they lose control. 

Kids these days are taught so much about the environment, and most come out of school believing in its preservation. They’re taught citizenship as well, but many show little regard for it outside school. Both though get shunted aside as we make our way in the world. Will mindfulness be the same? Probably yes. But it’s worth a try, and if it only takes a small percentage of the strain and stress out of life then it’s worth it – helping a few to real understanding, and allowing that understanding to benefit others by example, seeding in a small way a better future.

Everything has to have a name. Or does it? My favourite no-name is Innominate Tarn in the Lake District. There’s also its close relation, Innominate Crag, and I gather even an Innominate Crack up on Simonside in the Cheviots.

Roger Deakin in Wildwood mentions two moths which also have had partial success in resisting our urge to name everything, the uncertain and the anomalous, yes, both names, and both members of the Noctuidae.

Moving from moths to movies, there is of course not the moth but the man with no name, Mr Eastwood.  

What is it, not to have a name? Tarn, moths, cowboy, they all have identities. But no past, and no future. That’s the idea anyway.

And then there’s Juliet:

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet.”

She loves the person, not the name. Not Montague.

Well, don’t we have to name everything? Any experience, whether a person, an object, a thought or emotion, even a state of mind, has to have a name if we’re to recall it. But that way we bring all sorts of other associations into play.

That’s why I like Innominate Tarn: no associations. Uncertain and anomalous moths: they come from nowhere and fly back into the night. And Juliet: no name, no past, and sadly for her, no future.

I will, if I may, coin a name: innomination, the act of not naming. Something we can only do by not doing. Something to engage in when the hurly-burly gets too much for us.

The government’s ten-year drugs policy is welcome. More community treatment, and more money invested in it, is a very good thing, but it is no substitute for a wider awareness and public understanding, so that people can sustain jobs and find help among family and friends where before they couldn’t and wouldn’t talk. There also needs to be an understanding of what treatment entails and where it takes you. It’s not like treating a physical ailment, it doesn’t lead to an instant cure. It’s an ongoing process, of readjusting to life, and any pressure on recipients is immediately counter-productive.

It’s not just case of the public understanding depression, it’s also a case of understanding what treatment involves, and supporting those receiving it. Indeed supporting anyone who appears down. We’re moving on quickly here to the big and little acts of human kindness which make so much difference to everyone’s days, whether ill or not. Treating depression goes to the very core of our society and our relationships with others. 

It saddened me to read a response from the Patients’ Association arguing that the money would be better spent on cancer treatment. It is of course an impossible balance to strike. But  how about this as a proposition: at least cancer-sufferers can have a certain quality of life, can have relationships and friendships. Sufferers from depression have no quality of life, often wonder why they’re living at all. We need to understand and cater and care for both.

I enjoyed meditation at my local Kadampa Buddhist centre for several years, and I valued all that I learnt and the friendships I made. But no allowance was ever made in anything I read for people with depressive or related conditions. There’s the assumption that the mind is a perfect instrument, misused. If only it was so simple. Fulfilment, love as the ultimate expression of mind, comes from helping and understanding others, not in an abstract but in an everyday, practical sense.

David Cameron’s scrapping of his targets for new jails and prison places is another good example of how populism drives policies in the wrong direction. It never made sense. Rehabilitation wins every time, as long as it is a sustained and effective programme, and not window-dressing.  He sustained his position too long and carried some thundering opinions (Times editorials) along with him. He and they now look foolish, as they now deserve to.

It does make you wonder who advises the Tories on such matters.

Back to Francis Maude on communities. I’m taking him as I have to as representing Tory opinion.

There’s the irony at the core of Maude’s argument that the one area where local government has a key role, education, the Tories want to take away and vest in parents and parent-launched new schools. I’ve argued before against the absurdities of parent-launched schools, reflecting as they will they views of small groups who will require huge amounts of central government time, and be beholden to central government, so what we have is a centrally-driven not a local scheme. Local government, if well run, is at the right level for education policy, local but not too local, centralising but not too much so. The focus should be on improving local government, a big and not an easy task, but we hear nothing of this. It would not be fashionable.

Francis Maude’s description of community in the autumn Prospect magazine is revealing. He focuses on local referenda as a way of involving people. Referenda are a dangerous distraction. Likely to divide communities rather than bring them together, be abused by pressure groups, focus on short-term solutions without regard for the more difficult longer-term picture. Above all they’re open to manipulation by the media at a national and local level, with all the misrepresentation of policies and people that can entail. In a perfect world with a balanced availability of opinions and a careful consideration of the long as well as the short term by voters then they might just make sense. But democracy, and direct democracy especially, is a dangerous instrument wrongly used. National and local government elections are far from perfect and open to the many of the criticisms above, but they respond to a long-term debate and reflect four or five years evidence of performance.

All the bigotry and misrepresentation that was fostered by the rightwing in the Swiss minaret referendum is a good example of what can go wrong. Not refreshing as a Telegraph columnist opined. Worrying that anyone can see good in bigotry.

The case of Professor Nutt, lately chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, has been the subject of much recent debate. He has by overly focusing on what he sees as the science, and by failing to take into account wider social and moral issues, gained the notoriety he was probably seeking and the opprobrium he deserved.  I don’t claim for a second to be an expert but I will comment on what I do know.

His claim that alcohol and tobacco are more harmful than many illegal drugs, including LSD, ecstasy and cannabis, is bizarre, his methodology suspect.  They are so radically different in their effects, they cannot be compared.

He claims that ecstasy is no more dangerous than horse-riding. As the Home Secretary wrote to the Guardian:  ‘There are not many kids in my constituency in danger of falling off a horse – there are thousands at risk of being sucked into a world of hopeless despair through drug addiction.’

Death is but a small, albeit more permanent, part of the damage ecstasy can do. Ecstasy may be safe is small doses and the short term for most, but for some it has an immediate and very damaging psychological impact, which can last for months or years. Longer term the effects on those who have no short-term effects from the drug are unknown. It is irresponsible to make a public judgement about a drug on the basis of one headline-catching fact, and downplay its other consequences.

Likewise, cannabis, about the reclassification of which Prof Nut went public, in my own experience (which goes back many years but is significant) impacts perception in a way quite different and more insidious than moderate doses of alcohol.

Prof Nutt when challenged agreed that a Royal Commission on the subject of the decriminalisation of drugs would be a good idea. I part company with him sharply here too. It may be that decriminalisation would spare a multitude of minor offenders a criminal record, and make treatment more accessible, but more than balancing that is the damage that freely available drugs would do. If all were as harmless as alcohol in moderate quantities then we’d have little to worry about. But a multitude of drugs with the capacity to do a multitude of harms, and freely available, is a recipe for social licence and social disaster.

If you dictate a note of moralising in my tone you are right to do so. We’re talking here not only about social consequences broadly defined but of the deeply personal consequences for all those who suffer as a result of drug  misuse and for all those who would be more likely to do so if an abundance of routes to recreational escape and ecstasy were available.

I leave to last the very dubious nature of the classification chart that Prof Nott used to make his case. He claims that ‘alcohol ranks as the fifth most harmful drug after heroin, cocaine, barbiturates and methadone. Tobacco is ranked ninth. Cannabis, LSD and ecstasy, while harmful, are ranked lower at 11, 14 and 18 respectively’.

Nutt and colleagues used three factors to determine the harm associated with any drug: the physical harm to the user, the drug’s potential for addiction and the impact on society of drug use. The researchers then asked two groups of experts to assign scores to twenty different drugs. Each category is given the same weighting, which is enough in itself to invalidate the process.

The categories themselves are deeply suspect and to a layman look to be an inappropriate basis for scientific analysis. Psychological harm, arguably the most insidious and damaging factor of all, comes under the heading physical harm, when it has to be considered in its own right. Addiction is an extension of psychological harm, with its own specific social consequences. Countless people suffer lonhg-term psychological harm without becoming addicted, or indeed suffering from schizophrenia , another of the extreme conditions (death – see earlier – is another) which Prof Nutt uses to over-simplify the argument.

Sadly it seems much may be explained by Prof Nutt’s role as a psychopharmacologist, with links to the drug industry, and a pro-drug (anti-depressants) and anti-psychotherapy (an oversimplification, but broadly true) stance. In other words he is parti pris, on one side of an old argument, to many the wrong side, and an inappropriate person to be heading up a government body. I have to wonder why he was appointed to chair the Advisory Council in the first place.

Prof Nutt’s categories are a poor basis for research. Scientists have responsibilities to society but also to their own science. Prof Nutt has failed on both counts. If by their actions they discredit science they do great damage, and an over-focus on the supposed verities of their own specific disciplines, combined in this case with a suspect methodology, has just that effect.