Smith ‘disappointed’ by drug czar’s comments
By politics.co.uk staff
Home secretary Jacqui Smith has said she is “surprised and profoundly disappointed” by Professor David Nutt’s comments that taking ecstasy is no more dangerous than horse-riding.
Prof Nutt, chairman of the Home Office’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, wrote the controversial comments in an academic journal.
He said taking the drug was no worse than “equasy”, a term he coined to describe people with an addiction to horse-riding, which caused 10 deaths and more than 100 road traffic accidents a year.
He said: “Making riding illegal would completely prevent all these harms and would be, in practice, very easy to do.
“This attitude raises the critical question of why society tolerates – indeed encourages – certain forms of potentially harmful behaviour but not others, such as drug use.”
The council is expected to recommend this week that the government downgrade ecstasy from class A to class B, or perhaps even lower.
In May 2008, when Prof Nutt was appointed to his position, politics.co.uk revealed he had previously called for the declassification of ecstasy.
Shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, said: “It is profoundly worrying that someone so close to the Home Office’s drugs policy appears to have such a superficial attitude to the drug issues we face.
“There have been many cases where ecstasy has caused otherwise healthy young people to drop dead and it is utterly wrong to trivialise this issue in this way.”
Even if the council does recommend to downgrade the drug the government is entitled to overrule the decision.
