Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs

Both the Home Secretary and the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) have missed the point. The hon. Gentleman is at risk, indeed, of becoming the Home Secretary's Mini-Me, because today he again insisted that the only difference between them was that he thought Professor Nutt should have been sacked sooner. The Government do not want evidence, and the official Opposition want even less evidence even more quickly. The Government rely on objective, impartial and unpaid advice from leading experts on everything from nuclear safety to mad cow disease, and the comments to which the right hon. Gentleman and hon. Gentleman object were in no way contrary to the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs code of practice or the general code of practice for advisory committees. The Home Secretary signally failed to give us chapter and verse on that or to mention it in the letter that he sent to Professor Nutt. Professor Nutt's specialism is the relative harm of drugs, and his so-called campaigning vehicles were the peer-reviewed Journal of Psychopharmacology and a lecture at King's college London. If scientists advising the Government are not allowed to write in learned journals and lecture at universities, does the Home Secretary agree that very few will be prepared to accept such absurd restrictions? Why did the Home Secretary fail to consult the Minister for Science and Innovation, Lord Drayson, before blundering into this area and imperilling independent scientific advice across the Government? Will he apologise to Professor Nutt and set up the advisory council on a clearly independent basis to ensure that he does not recruit an army of nodding yes-men? Will Ministers now agree to a code of practice to stop themselves being ludicrously thin-skinned if they foolishly choose policy options that are not supported by the scientific evidence?