In February the government's senior drugs adviser compared horse-riding and ecstasy. If the politicians followed the evidence, he said, riding would be classified as more harmful than getting loved up.
David Nutt, who chairs the independent Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, published his paper in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. His claim was partly tongue in cheek. Obviously, he didn't expect the police to start rounding up horses and shooting them. But he did want a debate about how the government deals with risk. He didn't get one.
Ecstasy hit its stride in the dance culture of the early 1990s, but was originally used by psychiatrists in the late 1950s to make withdrawn patients friendlier and more talkative—in fact it used to be called "empathy." For a sociable species, human beings can actually be rather shy, so when the drug leaked out into the market in the late 1970s, cleverly rebranded as the much hipper-sounding ecstasy, it quickly became popular.
At the time the drugs advisory council worried that ecstasy—Methylenedioxymethamphetamine or MDMA to its regulators, and simply "e" to its friends—would be the next LSD. The government slapped it in the class A category of drugs, along with heroin and cocaine. Dealing pink pills with smiley faces can get you a lifetime in jail. Just carrying them can put you away for seven years.
Consumers, on the other hand, found that it was nothing like LSD, heroin or crack. It doesn't make the street turn into a spinning, multicoloured fairground as LSD can, it doesn't make you zone out as smack will and it doesn't make you want to thump someone, as crack so often does. The worst it does is make you hug a lot of strangers and dance for hours to really bad doof-doof music. Most of the 20 or so annual deaths attributed to ecstasy are caused by dehydration on the dance floor.
About 5 per cent of people aged 16-24, and 470,000 Britons in total, take the drug every year. And they seem to enjoy it—one of the reasons that ecstasy is a class A drug in the first place. In the classification process the more fun a drug is, the more "danger points" it gets. That's pure fun, measured separately from psychologically or physically addictive qualities. Of course, this is absurd. As David Nutt put it, "The arguments about relative drug harms are arcane… at times taking a quasi-religious character."
It took scientists a while to catch up with what consumers had worked out for themselves. The drug advisory council's review, commissioned by the government and published in February, found that, for the vast majority of users, ecstasy is neither addictive, nor does it cause permanent damage to the brain or any other organ. As long as it's not mixed with other drugs, it doesn't have much effect on driving—nothing like as much as a couple of pints. And at around £10 for three pills, almost everyone buys ecstasy with money that they've earned rather than stolen, so the crime factor is low too. In his ironic table comparing harms, Nutt gives riding a higher "harm to society" rating, in part because it causes more traffic accidents and higher methane emissions. Someone gets badly hurt for every 350 trips on horseback; for ecstasy trips, the figure is one in 10,000. The police appear to have grasped this: 37 per cent of those booked for ecstasy possession are let off with a caution, compared to only 17 per cent for heroin.
So consumers, police and scientists all seem to agree: ecstasy is a much more "do-able" drug than others in class A. But the government, in its infinite wisdom, knows better. Home office minister Alan Campbell has said, "We will not send a signal to young people and the public in general that we take ecstasy less seriously."
But it is the young people of Britain, not the government, who are taking ecstasy. They are doing it in spite of the class A categorisation and, according to exhaustive, taxpayer-funded reviews of the evidence, have come to remarkably little harm as a result. It's another illustration of just how threadbare the idea of evidence-based policy has become. But it's also an indication of how bad scientists are at reading the data. If there is one thing for which there is overwhelming evidence, it's that it is not worth wasting their time or taxpayers' money giving scientific advice to the home office.
