David Nutt has an interesting history, and has caused quite a bit of controversy in his career by remaining scientific in the face of poorly thought-out drug policy. Nutt is a British psychiatrist and neuropsychopharmacologist who has a very impressive list of academic accomplishments, and I’ve been following his work since long before his pivotal research on e-cigarettes was popularized by Public Health England (PHE). He ruffled a lot of feathers in 2007 when he released a study that compared the harm different drugs cause with the legal classification of those drugs. The study found ecstasy and marijuana to be safer than cigarettes and alcohol—which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone familiar with these substances—but he released this study while he was serving as a chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, a government organization. This flew in the face of the government’s position on those drugs. A pamphlet was later published that contained a lecture Nutt had given on the disparity between drug classifications and the actual harm those drugs caused, and he was sacked for it. Yeah, that’s right: the UK government fired a science advisor for suggesting public policy should be based on scientific evidence.
The Man Behind The Finding That Vaping is 95% Safer Than Smoking
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