Drugs Tsar, that is "scientific expert", sacked

The irony about this Science adviser controversy is that government shouldn't have paid, "independent" advisers in the first place. Why not just ask independent scientists?

The suspicion is that Governments don't hire science advisers to be independent, but to take cover themselves. That way they can implement policy while pretending to be swayed by expert science, and circumvent due democratic process. The advisor will sometimes disagree with the boss, but they will only be hired because they have a similar world view. It looks like Nutt was hired for his liberalism on drugs, which has become embarrassing to New Labour as we approach an election.

In reality, there is unlikely to be a consensus on scientific issues. In a free society rather than a managed democracy, the media would be the conduit for a range of scientific views. Hiring a chief scientist creates the false impression that there is a supreme expert who knows best. While the BBC referred to him a "scientific adviser", the Guardian referred to him as a drugs adviser, the Daily Mail called him the government chief drugs tsar. The left tend to believe in rule by experts. The Daily Mail has a good record on fighting technocratic dictatorship, as has the non-globalist right generally. Although the exception has been control of the money supply by central bankers, which the right have bought into over the past decades: that is what got us into the current financial mess, especially low interest rates.

It also pretends that drugs policy is purely a scientific issue rather than a moral one. After complaining 'But politics is politics and science is science and there's a bit of a tension between them sometimes.', Nutt gave the game away, 'I think we have to accept young people like to experiment – with drugs and other potentially harmful activities – and what we should be doing in all of this is to protect them from harm at this stage of their lives. Surely what society accepts or not, and the costs of either choice, is what we should be arguing about. There are civil liberties issues relating to the police checking people for drugs, so as to actually enforce drug laws; there is the danger to society and to individuals of being dependent on drugs, regardless of whether they are "harmed" in a purely physical sense. It is not primarily a scientific issue at all, although evidence has its place.

A government who believed in scientific evidence rather than information control would sack all its paid advisers. Then let politicians inform the electorate of their views and take those views to the election. Let scientists say what they think also, not because they are the chief expert, because they represent one scientifically informed opinion among many. There will be a range of competing studies and conflicting evidence. In the end, let the public decide.

Then social policy would revert to the democratic arena rather than being the preserve of experts. Government would be improved by elected officials taking responsibility for the policies they implement rather than hiding behind a smokescreen of bureaucrats and "experts". Secondly, the Government, by which I mean the taxpayer, would save money, at least if Government (here I mean the people governing) were not determined to find something else to spend it on.