Spiced Up

Among the more annoying tendencies of mere experts is the unwavering belief in their own correctitude purely on the grounds that mere reality happens to match their predictions. In mature and enlightened political cultures like our own, where democracy essentially consists of militarised advertising, such retrograde quibbles are entirely out of place, and may even put the quibbler at risk of becoming a pessimist, a nay-sayer and an enemy of the people. Nevertheless, Professor David Nutt, who was fired from the Home Office advisory council on drugs for his inadequacy in bending mere facts to New Labour policy, has evidently failed to take the hint. Along with other interfering do-gooders, including the police and crime commissioner for North Wales, Nutt is proclaiming that, as predicted, drug bans serve simply to drive the trade underground and make it harder to control, while the absence of red tape means that the drugs themselves can become even stronger and more buccaneering than before. Not one of the pessimists has noticed that the policy's ill effects are concentrated in, and therefore the fault of, prisoners and the homeless and young people in care: groups in whose welfare Her Majesty's Government has made emphatically clear that it has no interest whatever.