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I was a scientific adviser to the UK government from 2000 to 2009. During this time, it became clear to me that drugs policy was being formed, not based on evidence, but on the political expediency of winning votes and pandering to the hysteria whipped up by a media more concerned with increased sales than decreased drug harms. When I was sacked, I wrote Drugs Without the Hot Air and used the proceeds to set up a charity, DrugScience.org.uk, dedicated to researching the truth about drugs. The book is set for its upcoming US release in a revised and updated second edition.The first research funded by DrugScience, published in The Lancet in 2010, quantified the overall harm of 20 drugs in the UK. The scores, which were derived from a powerful new technique called multi-criteria decision analysis, tabulated both the harms done to the users of ...
