We can't handle the truth

England and America aren't so very different, apparently. According to this article in The Boston Globe, Dr. David Nutt quickly lost his position as the United Kingdom's top drug adviser (he was fired the very next day, in fact) when he questioned their policy of throwing marijuana smokers in jail.

But behind Nutt’s words lay something perhaps more surprising, and harder to grapple with. His comments weren’t the idle musings of a reality-insulated professor in a policy job. They were based on a list - a scientifically compiled ranking of drugs, assembled by specialists in chemistry, health, and enforcement, published in a prestigious medical journal two years earlier.

The list, printed as a chart with the unassuming title “Mean Harm Scores for 20 Substances,” ranked a set of common drugs, both legal and illegal, in order of their harmfulness - how addictive they were, how physically damaging, and how much they threatened society. Many drug specialists now consider it one of the most objective sources available on the actual harmfulness of different substances.

That ranking showed, with numbers, what Nutt was fired for saying out loud: Overall, alcohol is far worse than many illegal drugs. So is tobacco. Smoking pot is less harmful than drinking, and LSD is less damaging yet.

Nutt says he didn’t see himself as promoting drug use or trying to subvert the government. He was pressing the point that a government policy, especially a health-related one like a drug law, should be grounded in factual information.

What? Base government policy on factual information, rather than what's politically popular? Heresy!

The more data we accumulate about drug harmfulness, the more it seems like the classification systems used by the United States, the United Kingdom, and other governments need to be dismantled - and the more it becomes clear that societies can’t, or won’t, take that step. Drug laws are rooted in history and politics as much as science.

As much as science? Far more than science, in fact. This caught my attention because lately, here in Lincoln, the news has been full of drug busts. Police have discovered one marijuana-growing operation after another, in two weeks finding 13 times as many plants as they found in all of 2008 (I don't know how many they found last year). It's big news here.

But what does it really mean? By far, the biggest danger in marijuana lies in supporting the violent drug cartels that ship the drug here. Marijuana itself is comparatively benign (not harmless, but not nearly as harmful as alcohol). Marijuana is dangerous mainly because it's illegal. And by keeping it that way, we enrich some of the most violent men in the world.

In this case, growing the plant locally might be considered almost beneficial. Yes, it's still illegal, and I have no idea who is actually behind this operation. But if it keeps money from going to drug cartels, how bad is it? As I say, I don't know who's behind it, so I'm certainly not going to claim that they're wonderful people. But it points out how crazy our drug laws are, doesn't it?

No politician in Nebraska, no public official of any kind, would dare to say anything like this. Not a chance. It would instantly mark him as insufficiently "tough on crime." (In America, prisons are our only growth industry these days. And no one seems to be bothered by that.) Frankly, no politician would even dare to say that drug treatment is more cost effective than throwing users in jail. Drug treatment isn't popular because it's not "punishment." Punishment is always very popular, whether it works or not (rather like abstinence-only sex education).

And it shows how we're not smart enough to try something new when a policy doesn't work. We've lost the war on drugs. It's been a complete failure. Violent drug cartels have become so powerful that they're waging war on Mexico itself. But - just like our Cuba policy - we simply will not reconsider a failed policy and decide to try something new. Maybe it's just another instance of the status quo always having powerful defenders, I don't know.

I'm not saying that marijuana definitely should be legalized, but maybe we should look at it. I'd rather our police concentrated on really dangerous drugs and more serious crimes. I'd like to see the drug cartels stop making so much money from prohibition. And I'd prefer that prisons weren't such a growth industry here - and certainly not the only one!