MR VERNON COAKER, PROFESSOR SIR MICHAEL RAWLINS AND PROFESSOR DAVID NUTT

22 NOVEMBER 2006

  Q80  Mr Newmark: In terms of its impact on society—

  Mr Coaker: And we try to address that in different ways through public health messages that we put out and through education.

  Q81  Dr Turner: I think the point is that you cannot necessarily put them into totally distinct categories because if you talk to anyone who drinks a bit and certainly anyone that smokes, nine times out of 10 they will say, "I do not do drugs", but of course they do.

  Professor Sir Michael Rawlins: Coffee, tea, the whole lot; we all do drugs.

  Dr Turner: Tobacco is a lethal drug. All I am suggesting is that you draw the parallels and you use this as part of your public education to the effect that alcohol and tobacco are examples of potentially very harmful or even lethal drugs.

  Mr Newmark: And addictive.

  Dr Turner: Which are as harmful if not more harmful than many Class A illegal drugs. I think that sends out a very powerful message if you link the two.

  Chairman: To be fair, one of the most disappointing aspects of the response from the ACMD and the Government was the total rejection of a new scale of harm decoupled from criminal penalties to put alcohol and tobacco and other substances within that scale of harm. I will not ask you for a comment, Professor Nutt, because I know you totally agree with my comments!

  Mr Newmark: I would put at the far end of the chart that you would put there how many deaths are created by each of these drugs and alcohol and tobacco, so people can see the harm of alcohol and tobacco.

  Q82  Chairman: I think we have made our point very forcibly to you and I know that you will take it away, Vernon.

  Mr Coaker: Always, of course.

  Q83  Dr Iddon: As you know, we looked at individual drugs in our inquiry and I want to start by looking at methylamphetamine, ice, crystal meth, or whatever you wish to call it. In November 2005, Professor Rawlins, your Committee advised the Government not to move crystal meth from Class B to Class A on the basis that "reclassification could have had the unintended consequence of increasing interest in the drug amongst potential users". Then on 25 May 2006 you did a u-turn and recommended to the Government that crystal meth became a Class A drug. What was the evidence on which you based your first decision and what was the new evidence that caused you to do a u-turn?

  Professor Sir Michael Rawlins: I think I made it perfectly clear but I will repeat it. The first time round there was virtually no use at all in Britain and the police and the forensic services had virtually no evidence of use, and so we had to consider very carefully whether making it a Class A drug would promote its use rather than deter it. That was an honest decision. Whether it was political I do not know, it was a judgment we made and because it was such a serious judgment I very consciously went to talk to the then Minister Paul Goggins about it and to explain why we were recommending it as we were, but I said we would keep a close eye on it. Six months later we had intelligence from the police to suggest that they had found a number of laboratories that were starting to manufacture it and they had intelligence in relationship to a small increase in usage, and we felt that under those circumstances we should recommend classifying it as Class A. The business about drawing further attention to it by that stage had probably been overwhelmed by the beginnings of the emergence of laboratories. You may call it a u-turn but we were acting on additional evidence subsequent to our initial review.

  Q84  Dr Iddon: In your response to our report you mention that you are not simply a scientific forum but you consider social impacts of drugs misuse as well?

  Professor Sir Michael Rawlins: Yes.

  Q85  Dr Iddon: We would agree with that but where does your evidence come from about the social aspects of drugs misuse? Where do you get your evidence from?

  Professor Sir Michael Rawlins: The evidence comes from a number of sources. It may come from publications, it may come from surveys that we are aware of or surveys that we commissioned (like in the case of khat where we undertook ourselves some qualitative research in relation to its use), and we get information also—not conventional scientific evidence—data, evidence, if you like, from the police and from other sources, from Customs & Excise, from the forensic science laboratories, and we have patterns of epidemiological use from the British Crime Survey, so they come from a number of different sources.

  Dr Iddon: Let me turn now to magic mushrooms which, as you know, is a special interest of mine.

  Chairman: I hasten to add for the record that he does not use them. Maybe this is why the Committee is always so happy!

  Q86  Dr Iddon: Why did you recommend to the Government that magic mushrooms were classified as a Class A drug?

  Professor Sir Michael Rawlins: Psilocin and psilocybin are hallucinogens. They have long been known to be hallucinogens and they have hallucinogenic properties very similar to lysergic acetate, the underlying element of LSD. Psilocin and psilocybin has been a Class A substance since the Medicines Act started, and I think perfectly reasonably. Hallucinogens are unpleasant things to have in a community. Psilocybin and psilocin, whether it is in dry mushrooms or wet mushrooms or any other sort of magic mushrooms, have the same pharmacological effects. There is not a bioavailability problem between fresh mushrooms and dry mushrooms. You absorb the same amount of psilocin and psilocybin from each. Psilocybin and psilocin are controlled substances and dried magic mushrooms are controlled substances and so should wet ones or fresh ones be.

  Q87  Dr Iddon: Why was it decided to put psilocin and psilocybin in Class A?

  Professor Sir Michael Rawlins: That was the decision of the group that originally ascribed substances to various classes at that time and, not unreasonably, they put all hallucinogens into Class A.

  Q88  Dr Iddon: What is the difference between a psychedelic drug and an hallucinogenic drug?

  Professor Sir Michael Rawlins: I would rather like my colleague to answer that question because he is a Professor of Psychopharmacology.

  Q89  Dr Iddon: Because some people, David, would say that magic mushrooms produce a psychedelic effect and they use them in an almost religious way and would deny the fact that they are having hallucinations of the type that LSD causes, for example.

  Professor Nutt: It is a complicated question and what is almost certainly the case is that there is a spectrum of effects across the range of drugs which act on the neural systems, like psilocin and like LSD, and there are two main factors which seem to determine the effect that individuals have. One is the effects of the pure pharmacology of the drug receptor, and LSD, I think you are right, probably does cause a greater effect in terms of brain changes than psilocybin but also psilocybin is much shorter lasting, so there is a kinetic difference as well.

  Q90  Dr Iddon: That is the point, it is much shorter lasting. What evidence is there that psilocin, psilocybin or especially magic mushrooms are as dangerous as cocaine, crack cocaine, now ice of course, and heroin, because I do not see psilocin and psilocybin on sale anywhere and I have not heard of anybody dying recently in the last few decades from psilocin and psilocybin, so if you are basing your penalties on classification and basing your classification on harm, which is 50% to society and 50% to the individual, where is the evidence that these substances should be in Class A?

  Professor Nutt: I would agree the evidence is not strong. A lot hinges on your interpretation as to how damaging the possible very negative consequences that drugs like LSD can have in some people and how much you weight your decision on that. I think in the 1970s there was a considerable concern that LSD, if it was very widely used, might produce a lot of very unwanted effects in term of psychosis. The social evidence that that happens is weak. It would be difficult, I think, to justify having those drugs as Class A, but I do understand why at the time they might have been seen as that.

  Q91  Dr Iddon: Bearing in mind the penalties for using magic mushrooms now are as severe as using crack cocaine, for example, will the ACMD be recommending to the Home Office that we review the classification of psilocin, psilocybin and magic mushrooms?

  Professor Nutt: My view is that what we should be doing on a regular basis is reviewing all the drugs. I would like to see a five-year cycle where all the drugs in the classification are reviewed in a systematic way using the kind of frameworks that I have set up.

  Q92  Dr Iddon: Would you agree that if the classification of drugs is to be believed by the outside community and particularly misusers of drugs, it has to a credible system and that the way you have treated magic mushrooms has made the system almost incredible?

  Professor Sir Michael Rawlins: Dr Iddon, can I come in. I am not quite sure what you would have expected us to do. Would you have expected us to have found evidence that fresh mushrooms as opposed to dried mushrooms were causing harm or do you think that just dried mushrooms is in the wrong place?

  Q93  Dr Iddon: What I am saying, Professor Rawlins, is I see the evidence clearly as you do of the damage that crack cocaine and heroin are doing to society and to individuals—people are dying—but I do not see the same evidence for magic mushrooms.

  Professor Sir Michael Rawlins: What I do not quite follow, frankly, is that you seem to think that because fresh magic mushrooms were not Class A, before we recommended it, we should have done research to see whether fresh magic mushrooms had the same pharmacological effects as dry ones.

  Q94  Dr Iddon: I was not suggesting that at all. I am suggesting that neither the prepared mushrooms containing psilocin or psilocybin or the fresh mushrooms containing psilocin or psilocybin should be Class A.

  Professor Sir Michael Rawlins: I see, so you are really questioning the whole question of whether psilocybin and psilocin—

  Q95  Chairman: Because you have no evidence to say that anybody is buying these substances and manufacturing them for illegal use.

  Professor Sir Michael Rawlins: Oh, we had.

  Q96  Chairman: In 1970?

  Professor Sir Michael Rawlins: I do not know about the evidence in 1970, I was a little lad in 1970, but we had evidence about sales going on in 2005.

  Q97  Dr Iddon: Would you agree there has been an unintended consequence of what the Government has done in classifying magic mushrooms as Class A in that previous users of magic mushrooms have now turned to more dangerous and similar material, namely fly agaric, which is catching on now in the shops and whose contents are far more toxic than magic mushrooms, so there has been an unintended consequence of this decision? I wonder if you agree with that.

  Professor Sir Michael Rawlins: I do not know the evidence for that.

  Professor Nutt: I think there is a little bit of evidence that this is happening.

  Q98  Chairman: Vernon, are you prepared to look at this issue again?

  Mr Coaker: Prepared to look at?

  Q99  Chairman: The reclassification of magic mushrooms, given the fact that there is little evidence to associate its use with Class A, according to your existing definition of degree of harm to individuals and to society?

  Mr Coaker: Not at the current time. We have no plans to do that, no.