Classifi cation of drugs in the Act

We also have to work on the classifi cation conundrum: what are the boundaries between A, B and C? Can we come up with some absolute measures that would, in future, allow us to say this drug is A because of this or B because of this. One thing’s for sure: at present, experts and politicians don’t agree, which is why I think the public debate needs to begin. Who do the public trust more – the experts or the politicians?

When we look at the discussion that we had about ecstasy (where the ACMD recommended class B (Nutt et al., 2009) and the government maintained it as A), I think there’s very little doubt that we, the scientists, won the intellectual argument, but we obviously didn’t win the decision in terms of classifi cation. Any agreement will be diffi cult if we’re not talking in the same language about the same relative measures of harm; this is what I am trying to address in this talk.