Drug regulation or scientific censorship?

A group of leading scientists have claimed that the outlawing of psychoactive drugs amounts to the worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Copernicus and Galileo.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, the authors claim the UN conventions on drugs in the 1960s and 1970s have not only compounded the harms of drugs but also produced the worst censorship of research for over 300 years. They have set back research in key areas such as consciousness by decades and effectively stopped the investigation of promising medical treatments, the researchers say.

The paper is written by Professor David Nutt of Imperial College London and Leslie King, both former government advisors, and Professor David Nichols of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Professor Nutt says the decision to outlaw cannabis, ecstasy and psychedelics in the 1960s was “based on their perceived dangers, but in many cases the harms have been overstated and are actually less than many legal drugs such as alcohol”.

“The laws have never been updated despite scientific advances and growing evidence that many of these drugs are relatively safe,” he said. “And there appears to be no way for the international community to make such changes.”

The paper argues that the illegal status of psychoactive drugs makes “research into their mechanisms of action and potential therapeutic uses - for example, in depression and post-traumatic stress disorder - difficult and in many cases almost impossible”.

According to Professor Nutt, this political hindering of research and therapy is “one of the most scandalous examples of scientific censorship in modern times”, with George W Bush’s ban on embryonic stem cell research being the only recent example which comes close.

Professor Nutt and his colleagues point out that the limitations of cannabis research have had a very harmful impact on UK pharmaceutical productivity. The development of the cannabis plant’s psychoactive elements into medications has been strongly hampered by regulation. Thus, they argue that the use of psychoactive drugs in research should be exempt from severe restrictions.

“If we adopted a more rational approach to drug regulation, it would empower researchers to make advances in the study of consciousness and brain mechanisms of psychosis, and could lead to major treatment innovations in areas such as depression and PTSD,” Professor Nutt said.

The call for reform has been endorsed by the British Neuroscience Association and the British Association for Psychopharmacology. The researchers are seeking support from other academic organisations.