Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
MR VERNON
COAKER, PROFESSOR
SIR MICHAEL
RAWLINS AND
PROFESSOR DAVID
NUTT
22 NOVEMBER 2006
Q80 Mr Newmark: In terms of its impact
on society—
Mr Coaker: And we try to address
that in different ways through public health messages that we
put out and through education.
Q81 Dr Turner: I think the point
is that you cannot necessarily put them into totally distinct
categories because if you talk to anyone who drinks a bit and
certainly anyone that smokes, nine times out of 10 they will say,
"I do not do drugs", but of course they do.
Professor Sir Michael Rawlins:
Coffee, tea, the whole lot; we all do drugs.
Dr Turner: Tobacco is a lethal
drug. All I am suggesting is that you draw the parallels and you
use this as part of your public education to the effect that alcohol
and tobacco are examples of potentially very harmful or even lethal
drugs.
Mr Newmark: And addictive.
Dr Turner: Which are as harmful
if not more harmful than many Class A illegal drugs. I think that
sends out a very powerful message if you link the two.
Chairman: To be fair, one of the
most disappointing aspects of the response from the ACMD and the
Government was the total rejection of a new scale of harm decoupled
from criminal penalties to put alcohol and tobacco and other substances
within that scale of harm. I will not ask you for a comment, Professor
Nutt, because I know you totally agree with my comments!
Mr Newmark: I would put at the
far end of the chart that you would put there how many deaths
are created by each of these drugs and alcohol and tobacco, so
people can see the harm of alcohol and tobacco.
Q82 Chairman: I think we have made
our point very forcibly to you and I know that you will take it
away, Vernon.
Mr Coaker: Always, of course.
Q83 Dr Iddon: As you know, we looked
at individual drugs in our inquiry and I want to start by looking
at methylamphetamine, ice, crystal meth, or whatever you wish
to call it. In November 2005, Professor Rawlins, your Committee
advised the Government not to move crystal meth from Class B to
Class A on the basis that "reclassification could have had
the unintended consequence of increasing interest in the drug
amongst potential users". Then on 25 May 2006 you did a u-turn
and recommended to the Government that crystal meth became a Class
A drug. What was the evidence on which you based your first decision
and what was the new evidence that caused you to do a u-turn?
Professor Sir Michael Rawlins:
I think I made it perfectly clear but I will repeat it. The first
time round there was virtually no use at all in Britain and the
police and the forensic services had virtually no evidence of
use, and so we had to consider very carefully whether making it
a Class A drug would promote its use rather than deter it. That
was an honest decision. Whether it was political I do not know,
it was a judgment we made and because it was such a serious judgment
I very consciously went to talk to the then Minister Paul Goggins
about it and to explain why we were recommending it as we were,
but I said we would keep a close eye on it. Six months later we
had intelligence from the police to suggest that they had found
a number of laboratories that were starting to manufacture it
and they had intelligence in relationship to a small increase
in usage, and we felt that under those circumstances we should
recommend classifying it as Class A. The business about drawing
further attention to it by that stage had probably been overwhelmed
by the beginnings of the emergence of laboratories. You may call
it a u-turn but we were acting on additional evidence subsequent
to our initial review.
Q84 Dr Iddon: In your response to
our report you mention that you are not simply a scientific forum
but you consider social impacts of drugs misuse as well?
Professor Sir Michael Rawlins:
Yes.
Q85 Dr Iddon: We would agree with
that but where does your evidence come from about the social aspects
of drugs misuse? Where do you get your evidence from?
Professor Sir Michael Rawlins:
The evidence comes from a number of sources. It may come from
publications, it may come from surveys that we are aware of or
surveys that we commissioned (like in the case of khat where we
undertook ourselves some qualitative research in relation to its
use), and we get information also—not conventional scientific
evidence—data, evidence, if you like, from the police and
from other sources, from Customs & Excise, from the forensic
science laboratories, and we have patterns of epidemiological
use from the British Crime Survey, so they come from a number
of different sources.
Dr Iddon: Let me turn now to magic
mushrooms which, as you know, is a special interest of mine.
Chairman: I hasten to add for
the record that he does not use them. Maybe this is why the Committee
is always so happy!
Q86 Dr Iddon: Why did you recommend
to the Government that magic mushrooms were classified as a Class
A drug?
Professor Sir Michael Rawlins:
Psilocin and psilocybin are hallucinogens. They have long been
known to be hallucinogens and they have hallucinogenic properties
very similar to lysergic acetate, the underlying element of LSD.
Psilocin and psilocybin has been a Class A substance since the
Medicines Act started, and I think perfectly reasonably. Hallucinogens
are unpleasant things to have in a community. Psilocybin and psilocin,
whether it is in dry mushrooms or wet mushrooms or any other sort
of magic mushrooms, have the same pharmacological effects. There
is not a bioavailability problem between fresh mushrooms and dry
mushrooms. You absorb the same amount of psilocin and psilocybin
from each. Psilocybin and psilocin are controlled substances and
dried magic mushrooms are controlled substances and so should
wet ones or fresh ones be.
Q87 Dr Iddon: Why was it decided
to put psilocin and psilocybin in Class A?
Professor Sir Michael Rawlins:
That was the decision of the group that originally ascribed substances
to various classes at that time and, not unreasonably, they put
all hallucinogens into Class A.
Q88 Dr Iddon: What is the difference
between a psychedelic drug and an hallucinogenic drug?
Professor Sir Michael Rawlins:
I would rather like my colleague to answer that question because
he is a Professor of Psychopharmacology.
Q89 Dr Iddon: Because some people,
David, would say that magic mushrooms produce a psychedelic effect
and they use them in an almost religious way and would deny the
fact that they are having hallucinations of the type that LSD
causes, for example.
Professor Nutt: It is a complicated
question and what is almost certainly the case is that there is
a spectrum of effects across the range of drugs which act on the
neural systems, like psilocin and like LSD, and there are two
main factors which seem to determine the effect that individuals
have. One is the effects of the pure pharmacology of the drug
receptor, and LSD, I think you are right, probably does cause
a greater effect in terms of brain changes than psilocybin but
also psilocybin is much shorter lasting, so there is a kinetic
difference as well.
Q90 Dr Iddon: That is the point,
it is much shorter lasting. What evidence is there that psilocin,
psilocybin or especially magic mushrooms are as dangerous as cocaine,
crack cocaine, now ice of course, and heroin, because I do not
see psilocin and psilocybin on sale anywhere and I have not heard
of anybody dying recently in the last few decades from psilocin
and psilocybin, so if you are basing your penalties on classification
and basing your classification on harm, which is 50% to society
and 50% to the individual, where is the evidence that these substances
should be in Class A?
Professor Nutt: I would agree
the evidence is not strong. A lot hinges on your interpretation
as to how damaging the possible very negative consequences that
drugs like LSD can have in some people and how much you weight
your decision on that. I think in the 1970s there was a considerable
concern that LSD, if it was very widely used, might produce a
lot of very unwanted effects in term of psychosis. The social
evidence that that happens is weak. It would be difficult, I think,
to justify having those drugs as Class A, but I do understand
why at the time they might have been seen as that.
Q91 Dr Iddon: Bearing in mind the
penalties for using magic mushrooms now are as severe as using
crack cocaine, for example, will the ACMD be recommending to the
Home Office that we review the classification of psilocin, psilocybin
and magic mushrooms?
Professor Nutt: My view is that
what we should be doing on a regular basis is reviewing all the
drugs. I would like to see a five-year cycle where all the drugs
in the classification are reviewed in a systematic way using the
kind of frameworks that I have set up.
Q92 Dr Iddon: Would you agree that
if the classification of drugs is to be believed by the outside
community and particularly misusers of drugs, it has to a credible
system and that the way you have treated magic mushrooms has made
the system almost incredible?
Professor Sir Michael Rawlins:
Dr Iddon, can I come in. I am not quite sure what you would have
expected us to do. Would you have expected us to have found evidence
that fresh mushrooms as opposed to dried mushrooms were causing
harm or do you think that just dried mushrooms is in the wrong
place?
Q93 Dr Iddon: What I am saying, Professor
Rawlins, is I see the evidence clearly as you do of the damage
that crack cocaine and heroin are doing to society and to individuals—people
are dying—but I do not see the same evidence for magic mushrooms.
Professor Sir Michael Rawlins:
What I do not quite follow, frankly, is that you seem to think
that because fresh magic mushrooms were not Class A, before we
recommended it, we should have done research to see whether fresh
magic mushrooms had the same pharmacological effects as dry ones.
Q94 Dr Iddon: I was not suggesting
that at all. I am suggesting that neither the prepared mushrooms
containing psilocin or psilocybin or the fresh mushrooms containing
psilocin or psilocybin should be Class A.
Professor Sir Michael Rawlins:
I see, so you are really questioning the whole question of whether
psilocybin and psilocin—
Q95 Chairman: Because you have no
evidence to say that anybody is buying these substances and manufacturing
them for illegal use.
Professor Sir Michael Rawlins:
Oh, we had.
Q96 Chairman: In 1970?
Professor Sir Michael Rawlins:
I do not know about the evidence in 1970, I was a little lad in
1970, but we had evidence about sales going on in 2005.
Q97 Dr Iddon: Would you agree there
has been an unintended consequence of what the Government has
done in classifying magic mushrooms as Class A in that previous
users of magic mushrooms have now turned to more dangerous and
similar material, namely fly agaric, which is catching on now
in the shops and whose contents are far more toxic than magic
mushrooms, so there has been an unintended consequence of this
decision? I wonder if you agree with that.
Professor Sir Michael Rawlins:
I do not know the evidence for that.
Professor Nutt: I think there
is a little bit of evidence that this is happening.
Q98 Chairman: Vernon, are you prepared
to look at this issue again?
Mr Coaker: Prepared to look at?
Q99 Chairman: The reclassification
of magic mushrooms, given the fact that there is little evidence
to associate its use with Class A, according to your existing
definition of degree of harm to individuals and to society?
Mr Coaker: Not at the current
time. We have no plans to do that, no.
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