Ben Goldacre, a physician who hosts the Bad Science website and writes the UK Guardian's Bad Science has produced a witty compendium of the year in dodgy scientific research in the UK and elsewhere. Moneyquote: A £6m Home Office drugs education study was published with no results, because it was so flawed it couldn’t produce any, we saw MPs being foolish about cervical screening and moon magic, and then when they didn’t like the scientific evidence they got from Professor David Nutt, they sacked him. If politicians want us to take them seriously on the evidence for global warming, they have...

20 December, 2009
peanuts-csWriting in the New Scientist, David Nutt, recently fired as chair of Britain's scientific advisory council on the misuse of drugs, offers cogent thoughts on the nature of scientific advice to government. Moneyquote:
I can trace the beginning of the end of my role as chairman of the UK's official advisory body on drugs to the moment I quoted a New Scientist editorial (14 February, p 5). Entitled, fittingly enough, "Drugs drive politicians out of their minds", the editorial asked the reader to imagine being seated at a table with two bowls, one containing peanuts, the other the illegal drug MDMA (ecstasy). Which is safer to give to a stranger? Why, the ecstasy of course. I quoted these words in the Eve Saville lecture at King's College London in July. This example plus other comments I have made – such as horse riding is more harmful than ecstasy – prompted Alan Johnson, the home secretary, to say that I had crossed the line from science to policy. This, he said, is why I had to go. But simple, accurate and understandable statements of scientific fact are precisely what the advisory council is supposed to provide...
More after the jump.
08 November, 2009

British scientists are up in arms about the Labour government's sacking of Dr. David Nutt as head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs after he refused to toe the government's strident line against marijuana and ecstasy. On Friday, Home Secretary Alan Johnson dismissed Nutt, head of the Psychopharmacology Unit in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Bristol, after the Centre for Crime and Justice at King’s College London published a paper containing criticisms he had made of the Brown government’s drug policies in a lecture last July. In the talk, Nutt said ecstasy...

01 November, 2009