Sir, Dr Robert Vanderplank misses the point when he attributes the sacking of Professor David Nutt to a failure by Alan Johnson to understand the difference between political and scientific discourse (letter, Nov 12). If anything it is Professor Nutt’s failure to appreciate this difference that determined his downfall.
If the Home Secretary was aiming to rank drugs in a rational order according to the physiological harm they do to the individuals who use them then of course he would have implemented the advisory committee’s advice in full. The Home Secretary’s job, however, was to decide what categorisation best served the purpose of minimising the use and harm of illegal drugs among the wider population and that required a more subjective judgment that could be informed only partially by the science and for which he alone, as the elected minister, would be held accountable. In these circumstances he was entitled to expect Professor Nutt to offer his advice frankly and then to accept in his future commentary that the Home Secretary had arrived at a different position in good faith. Irrelevant comparisons with the dangers of horse riding were both unscientific and deliberately provocative.
Before becoming an MP I worked with one of the committee members who has now resigned. I would offer him and his colleagues advice and sometimes they would take it and sometimes, from their more senior position, they would take account of other factors and reject it. Had I then mounted a campaign to undermine or overturn that decision I confidently predict I would have been fired with a lot less courtesy and consideration than the Home Secretary has shown to Professor Nutt.
Dr Stephen Ladyman
Labour MP for South Thanet
House of Commons