Drugs without the hot air: Making Sense of Legal and Illegal Drugs

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Engaging, informed, contemporary and wise: David Nutt’s new edition will inform anyone touched by the myriad psychoactive chemicals we call drugs. That’s everyone. – Peter B Jones, Professor of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge The dangers of illegal drugs are well known and rarely disputed, but how harmful are alcohol and tobacco by comparison?

Chapters 11 & 15 were the places I could have found policy Dos and Donts, and sure there were some shallow recommendations, and I think the generally push to remove triggers for people's addictions is a good one and worth following. But again they were just way to abstract and felt like a cursory glance at potential policy solutions rather than a thoughtful engagement with them. Professor David Nutt, one of the world’s leading Neuropsychopharmacologists, has spent 15 years researching this field and it is his most significant body of work to date. In 2018, he co-founded the first academic psychedelic research centre – underpinned by his mission to provide evidence-based information for people everywhere. It revived interest in the understanding and use of this drug in its many forms, including MDMA, ayahuasca, magic mushrooms, LSD and ketamine. The results of this have been nothing short of ground-breaking for the future categorisation of drugs, but also for what we now know about brain mechanisms and our consciousness.

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From the Publisher: The dangers of illegal drugs are well known and rarely disputed, but how harmful are alcohol and tobacco by comparison? What are we missing by banning medical research into magic mushrooms, LSD and cannabis? Can they be sources of valuable treatments? For me, the real strength of this book is in the sharing of the author's depth of knowledge in the science and political history of the subject, along with his clinical perspective and a passionate desire to reduce the harm caused by all substances including alcohol and tobacco. My only real negative is that the book does get somewhat repetitive near the end. While I'd still recommend reading the whole thing through, it does feel a bit like each chapter is it's own separate essay; i.e. if a point has been made in one chapter, it will still be made again, two chapters later.

Having enjoyed a Hay-Festival talk involving David Nutt among others, which discussed the current attitude towards drugs, and whether the "War on Drugs" had failed, I immediately bought and read this book. In that one hour's discussion, I'd found that my attitude towards drug laws had changed significantly from supporting the current emphasis of strong prosecution and imprisonment, to the recognition that if drug abuse was thought of as purely a health issue, the world could be a much better place. Reading this book helped me understand these concepts further, and taught me a great deal I hadn't known about drugs and the consequences of our approach to their use. It’s easy to assume that the author has a chip on his shoulder after being controversially removed from his governmental position. It’s much harder to read this book and not feel frustrated at the drug policies adopted by the UK government and others, which are neither sophisticated nor evidence-based. The chapter evaluating the success or failure of the War on Drugs is particularly damning – no prizes for guessing which way the evidence would seem to point. Surveying the state of medical knowledge around various currently prohibited substances – from hard drugs to LSD, cannabis, ecstasy, magic mushrooms and poppers – Professor Nutt ranks their potential harms and benefits (e.g. in treating anxiety, depression or pain) leading him to challenge the distorted logic of a blanket ban on anything psychoactive except alcohol, tobacco and caffeine. Praise for the Book: I don’t think you could ask for a more sensible, clear-eyed, and useful book about drugs, from the ones your doctor prescribes to the ones your bartender serves you to the ones you can go to jail for possessing. Nutt is not just a great and principled campaigner, nor merely a talented and dedicated scientist – he’s also a superb communicator. – Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

Chapters 6 and 7 were almost enough to give this book two stars. Six presented the problems associated with alcohol better than any other place I've seen, and did a really good job to succinctly make the case for why we should think about it differently than we do. Seven did a good job at looking at the specific evolution of British policy on Mephedrone, and did a much better job to analyze something specific with a granularity that actually she some light on the issue. This is excellent and exactly what it says. Highly informed, caring, social-minded. Drugs without the hot air; without uninformed opinion parading as fact. Chapters 1 & 2 felt like a long ego trip. Don't get me wrong, the events are worth writing about, but Nutt doesn't give much substance here, he just gives you a sort of tabloid overview of the situation that felt like it was about 95% filler and 5% content. I would have loved to have learned more about the traditional relationship between the ACMD and the government, he gives something like a paragraph on this topic that I think had to be far richer and would either paint a picture of a relationship that has grown fraught recently or one that has been flawed from the start, each of which suggestion we should take different actions about the problem. Chapters 3, 4, 5 & 16 all felt incredibly introductory, so if you have even a basic familiarity I recommend to skip them entirely. Note: the chronicling of how perception of cannibas changed from medicine to drug in chapter 5 was a notable exception here that was something new for me.

This was first published in 2012 and has been on my “to read” list ever since. I think, but can’t be certain, that I’ve sat through a tall by the author at some point in that period—though it may have been someone talking about him! If you've ever thought that drugs should be criminalised to protect drug-users from harm, but realise that sending someone to prison harms them many times more than the drugs ever did or ever could, then you may be on the verge of a worthwhile read. David Nutt became somewhat famous in the UK when he was chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs [ACMD], the statutory body which is responsible for advising the government on drug policy, and specifically on the appropriate legal classification of different drugs.Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-beta-20210815 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-1200055 Openlibrary_edition This once in an epoch review by experts from a range of disciplines, Drug Science and British Drug Policy shows how lawmakers and the media have ignored the scientific evidence to sustain badly founded rhetoric in favour of blanket bans, punishment and the marginalisation of opponents. Countless individuals (including the vulnerable, deprived, addicted and mentally ill) have therefore suffered unnecessarily.