Mum doesn't know best

The Effect of an Ad That Overstates the Dangers of Cannabis Is to
Discredit All Public Health Advice

A new UKP 2.2m ad campaign about cannabis targets 11- to
18-year-olds. Before you decide that's a waste of money, imagine how
much more it would have cost before the collapse of ad revenues. I
think the government should take advantage of this to advertise the
dangers of all drugs. Indeed, so what if ecstasy is only about as
dangerous as horse riding? Why not have an ad about how dangerous
horse riding is?

There is some sense in the ads. Cannabis was reclassified last year,
from a class C drug to class B, and what's the point in making it
more dangerous without a public health warning? Nevertheless, this
raised questions - compounded by the government's refusal to
downgrade ecstasy from class A - about why ministers commission
reports from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, only to ignore them.

Among the council's reasons against reclassifying cannabis were the
decrease in presentation of severe toxic reactions to cannabis
between 2004 and 2007; and research that found the drug's
characteristics remained closer in impact and strength to class C
than class B. This is the point of having classes, surely: to gather
proximal substances, not to create a sliding scale of naughtiness.
Presumably the government had been expecting a different outcome,
given a perceived increase in the strength of street dope, attributed
to the prevalence of skunk - a different creature to the 60s variant
that politicians all took at university, which had no effect besides
making them sleepy.

Some may argue that, having braced themselves to step up anti-dope
campaigning, public health ministers were justified in ignoring the
science community whose expertise they had sought. Actually, I think
it is sloppy and childish; but I also think that, if it were only
this instance, it could be looked on as a blind spot. But, taken with
the controversy on ecstasy, it is far more troubling: again public
health authorities wanted the drug reclassified, and again the
advisory council advised against, on the stated criteria of the
classification system - to wit, ecstasy is just not that dangerous.

Then came a personal attack on David Nutt, the head of the advisory
council: a junior minister accused him of being on a personal
crusade. This seemed vindictive and cast policymakers in a yet poorer
light - which is some doing, considering they already looked like the
kind of people who endlessly solicit advice and resolutely refuse to take it.

Naturally, there is some very banal motivation at play, which is that
nobody ever won votes campaigning for laxity on drugs. But, to give
the health minister Dawn Primarolo and her ilk the benefit of the
doubt, they would not overstate the dangers of drugs if they did not
regard overstatement as a neutral, benign policy, beneficial to some
hoodlums and harmful to none.

I disagree profoundly with this: public health messages have to chime
with experience. When they do they have an incredible impact, but
when they don't, they are not simply a bit less effective: they
discredit the promulgating authority. An individual who hears from
Primarolo that cannabis causes "serious and long-term health
problems" but finds little empirical evidence for the same, stops
listening to the government - not on those drugs alone, but altogether.

We don't need to see things with our own eyes to believe them; we're
not Neanderthals. But we do need to be assured that advice is
evidence-based, that the authorities haven't just ignored the
evidence and gone ahead anyway. I contend that the negative
consequences of this mummy-knows-best approach have already gone
beyond the world of class C drugs. I bet this is why so many young
people have stopped using condoms and are getting syphilis.