A timely article from Auntie:

The sacked drugs adviser Prof David Nutt famously compared its risks with those of ecstasy. But just how dangerous is horse riding? …

In his paper earlier this year, Prof Nutt noted that riding in the UK was associated with 10 deaths and 100 traffic accidents a year. He coined the tongue-in-cheek “equine addiction syndrome” or “equasy” when suggesting it might be more harmful than ecstasy.

Dr John Silver, emeritus spinal injuries consultant, researched serious injuries in professional rugby union, gymnastics and trampolining, and horse riding, over a period of many years. …

In his paper Hazards of Horse-riding as a Popular Sport [abstract here], Dr Silver cited a study from 1985 that suggested motorcyclists suffered a serious accident once every 7,000 hours but a horse rider could expect a serious incident once in every 350 hours.

Now, I wouldn’t have expected the difference to be that much (but then I had no idea of the risks of either activity).

Dr Silver also cites a figure from 1992 of 12 equestrian-related fatalities from 2.87 million participants. …

More dangerous on the face of it than cannabis but less dangerous than alcohol and ecstasy.

It is not easy to gain a complete overview about the dangers of horse riding.  The British Horse Society says there are no centrally collated figures on horse riding injuries. There is no obligation to notify the society about any incident. …

Of course not – why would we want people to be informed of the risks of an activity we approve of / don’t feel inclined to interfere with?

And of course, to fans of the sport, many of whom regard it as as much of a way of life as it is a mere hobby, any recognition of the dangers must be tempered by the positives of the sport. …

Absolutely a reasonable point and I imagine it applies to any sport.  I suspect there are no benefits in taking Ecstasy… but one never knows. Well, facetious comments aside, some drugs (legal and illegal) are said to be of benefit in particular circumstances.

Mark Weston, director of Access, Safety and Welfare said: “The health benefits of horse riding are well known, how anyone can maintain that taking a class A drug has such benefits beggars belief.”

Um, no-one has claimed that taking a class A drug has such benefits as associated with horse-riding – the point was about the risks associated with each activity.  And really the decision should be ours after we weigh up the benefits and costs, not the government’s.

But none of this addresses the fundamental issue relating to interference with your freedom to do as you please so long as you do not harm others – you know, that ’society’ asserts the right to interfere with you For Your Own Good.

It is not about the personal risks associated with legal and illegal drugs or various sports such as horse-riding although that is a reasonable means of showing up the inconsistency of the legality and illegality of particular substances and activities.

Rather, it is What gives ’society’ the ‘right’ to dictate what I may not do to myself?

It has been seriously suggested that society has no such right.

For example:

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty:

That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil, in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

William Humboldt, On the Sphere and Duties of Government:

In no case, then, should prohibitive laws be enacted, when the advantage or disadvantage refers solely to the proprietor. Again, it is not enough to justify such restrictions, that an action should imply damage to another person; it must, at the same time, encroach upon his rights.

(caveats apply in relation to mental faculties)

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (yet relevant to representative democracies):

The moral authority of the majority is partly based upon the notion that there is more intelligence and wisdom in a number of men united than in a single individual, and that the number of the legislators is more important than their quality. The theory of equality is thus applied to the intellects of men; and human pride is thus assailed in its last retreat by a doctrine which the minority hesitate to admit, and to which they will but slowly assent. Like all other powers, and perhaps more than any other, the authority of the many requires the sanction of time in order to appear legitimate. At first it enforces obedience by constraint; and its laws are not respected until they have been long maintained.

1.  A professor claims that Activity A is less risky than Activity B.

2.  Some people assert that this means the professor is claiming Activity A is risk-free.

3.  Those people are stupid and if they are in positions of responsibility they ought to resign or be fired.

Keep taking them pills!

P.S. http://www.google.com/search?q=dunning+kruger+effect

Social costs of alcohol £20bn pa.

Nearly 9,000 alcohol related deaths in 2007.

In nearly half (45%) of all violent incidents, victims believed offenders to be under the influence of alcohol.

This figure rose to 58% in cases of attacks by people they did not know.

37% of domestic violence cases involve alcohol.

In nearly a million violent attacks in 2007-08, the aggressors were believed to be drunk.

Why don’t we get excited about that? Where is the vociferous moral campaign against the horrors and evils of alcohol? Why don’t the Daily Mail, Sun and Daily Telegraph print angry columns demanding alcohol be classed as an illegal drug?

I ask this because some people don’t seem to understand Nutt’s point.

With the above in mind, re-read what Nutt said:

Another key question we have to address as a society is whether our attitude to drugs is driven because of their harms or are we engaging in a moral debate? One thing this government has done extremely well in the last ten years is to cut away much of the moral argument about drug treatments. They have moved in the direction of improving access to harm reduction treatments, an approach that, I think, is wholly endorsed by the scientific community and by the medical profession. For reasons that are not clear, the same evidence-based change has not happened in relation to the classification of drugs of misuse. I think it should happen because, while I’m not a moral philosopher, it seems to me difficult to defend a moral argument in relation to drugs if you don’t apply it to other equally harmful activities.

[update]

• Of 677 rape complaints made in London in April and May [2005], 235 (35%) were alcohol-related

[update 2]

It was pointed out to me that “Booze Britain” constitutes a media-led campaign against the horrors and evils of alcohol.  This is a fair point – but I don’t recall any of the media suggesting alcohol should be made illegal.

Sort-of-independent body

What is the ACMD?

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) is an independent expert body that advises government on drug related issues in the UK.

It was established under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and its current Chair is Professor David Nutt.

Wot he said

In his lecture, Nutt discussed, among other things, relative risks – the risk of doing one thing, e.g. horse-riding, compared to doing another thing, e.g. taking ecstasy. Nutt wrote about this earlier in this year and then-Home Secretary Jacqui Smith slapped him down:

He wrote that the risks of horse riding [10 deaths and more than 100 road traffic accidents a year] showed that society “does not adequately balance the relative risks of drugs against their harms”.He said: “Making riding illegal would completely prevent all these harms and would be, in practice, very easy to do.”This attitude raises the critical question of why society tolerates – indeed encourages – certain forms of potentially harmful behaviour but not others, such as drug use.”

There were plenty of other “risky activities such as base jumping, climbing, bungee jumping, hang-gliding, motorcycling” which were worse than which “many illicit drugs”.

We don’t as a society have a good grasp of relative risks – the point being that if you think taking ecstasy is too risky and therefore want to stop people doing it, and it so happens that horse-riding is equally risky, you should think horse-riding should be stopped too. If you are consistent, that is, and genuinely want to base a harm prevention policy on evidence in a careful and considered reasonable way.

Here is a chart he included on drug harm ranking:

Drugs in the media

In the recent lecture Nutt spoke about the reporting by the media of drugs in drug-related deaths:

Over the decade, there were 2,255 drug deaths, of which the Scottish newspapers reported 546. For aspirin, only one in every 265 deaths were reported – clearly aspirin was of no interest. For paracetamol, there was one newspaper report per 50 deaths, and for benzodiazepines (diazepam and temazepam) one in 15 to one in 50. For morphine, one in 72 deaths were reported, indicating that editors were not interested in this opiate. They were more interested in heroin, where one in five deaths were reported, and methadone where one in 16 deaths were reported. They were also more interested in stimulants. With amphetamines, deaths are relatively rare at 36, but one in three were reported; for cocaine it was one in eight. Amazingly, almost every single ecstasy death – that is, 26 out of 28 of those where ecstasy was named as a possible contributory factor – was reported. So there’s a peculiar imbalance in terms of reporting that is clearly inappropriate in relation to the relative harms of ecstasy compared with other drugs (Nutt et al., 2009). The reporting gives the impression that ecstasy is a much more dangerous drug than it is.

So we get very excited about ecstasy.  That is not to downplay deaths from taking ecstasy, but there are lots of deaths caused by taking aspirin, paracetamol, diazepam, temazepam, morphine, and horse riding.  Why don’t we get as excited about those deaths?  Because we read much, much more about how harmful ecstasy is.   It makes for a better story. Who cares about horse-riding?

The importance of advice to the Government

Nutt also mentioned what happened in 2008 when the ACMD submitted their recommendations on the proposed re-classification of cannabis.  Then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said,

I have given the council’s report careful consideration. Of its 21 recommendations, I accept all bar those relating to classification. I have decided to reclassify cannabis, subject to parliamentary approval, as a class B drug. My decision takes into account issues such as public perception and the needs and consequences for policing priorities. There is a compelling case for us to act now rather than risk the future health of young people. Where there is a clear and serious problem, but doubt about the potential harm that will be caused, we must err on the side of caution and protect the public. I make no apology for that. I am not prepared to wait and see.

Nutt said of this,

… the precautionary principle misleads. It starts to distort the value of evidence and therefore I think it could, and probably does, devalue evidence. This leads us to a position where people really don’t know what the evidence is. They see the classification, they hear about evidence and they get mixed messages. There’s quite a lot of anecdotal evidence that public confidence in the scientific probity of government has been undermined in this kind of way.

As he said, the extraordinary and terrible fear of MMR has led to great harm, so erring on the side of caution might not be a good idea.

Public perception vs. evidence-based policy making

It’s obvious why politicians’ beliefs about what the public thinks is important.  After all, there could be more votes in banning something than in legalising and regulating it.  But Nutt & co. have looked at what the public thinks about drugs and it is rather more complicated, as you might expect, than people simply thinking that drugs should be illegal and users should be banged up for decades.

Incompetent and unaware of it

Nutt also discussed the paper he and others wrote about the relative risks of illegal drugs and legal drugs – comparing for example alcohol and tobacco against illegal drugs.

I believe that using analogies with other harmful activities helps us engage in appropriate debate about relative harms of drugs. One problem is that sometimes you get into what I think of as an illegality–logic loop. This is an example of a conversation that I’ve had many times with many people, some of them politicians:

MP: ‘You can’t compare harms from a legal activity with an illegal one.’

Professor Nutt: ‘Why not?’

MP: ‘Because one’s illegal.’

Professor Nutt: ‘Why is it illegal?’

MP: ‘Because it’s harmful.’

Professor Nutt: ‘Don’t we need to compare harms to determine if it should be illegal?’

MP: ‘You can’t compare harms from a legal activity with an illegal one.’

repeats …

I have been surprised how difficult this concept is to get across to some people, whether they are politicians, fellow scientists or members of the general public. The supposition that if something is illegal its harms can’t be assessed in the same way as if it were legal is one that is quite difficult to break.

Isn’t that extraordinary?  Just because something happens to be legal, it cannot be assessed in terms of harm in the same way as something illegal.

Well said

Do read Nutt’s lecture, it’s well worth your time if you are interested in this subject.

The last paragraph:

Another key question we have to address as a society is whether our attitude to drugs is driven because of their harms or are we engaging in a moral debate? One thing this government has done extremely well in the last ten years is to cut away much of the moral argument about drug treatments. They have moved in the direction of improving access to harm reduction treatments, an approach that, I think, is wholly endorsed by the scientific community and by the medical profession. For reasons that are not clear, the same evidence-based change has not happened in relation to the classification of drugs of misuse. I think it should happen because, while I’m not a moral philosopher, it seems to me difficult to defend a moral argument in relation to drugs if you don’t apply it to other equally harmful activities.

Very reasonable point, I think.

(Moron Alan Johnson and Professor Nutt here.)

… the search and seizure powers given by this Government to bureacrats but CharonQC put it so much better than I and makes the wider case (and it’s worth reading this comment on his post too).

The Register:

Government legal officials are still investigating whether aspects of the £1.2bn e-Borders scheme are illegal, a year after concerns were raised by Eurostar.

Lawyers for the cross-channel train operator believe the system will require it to break European data privacy laws. They have been pressing the UK Border Agency to clarify the situation since November last year. At their most recent meeting in September, officials told Eurostar they were still mulling the problem.

“There’s been no progress at all,” said a spokesman for the firm. “They said they were still looking into it.”

The ultimate goal of e-Borders is to centrally log every single traveller in and out of the UK, which will mean obtaining personal details before they travel. The UK Border Agency wants carriers to collect the data abroad on its behalf. Eurostar believes this will mean driving an express train through French and Belgian data legislation, both of which implement the EU data laws.

“We believe, and the legal advice we have had is that it is not legal to export the sort of data required by e-Borders within the EU, and it is only legal to export that data outside of the EU,” the firm’s customer service director told the Home Affairs Select Committee back in June. Even then, Eurostar expressed frustration at the government’s lack of response to the possibility it will be “caught in a position that we are abiding by UK law but breaking EU law”.

“I would feel very uncomfortable if I had waited seven months to respond to a letter from the UK Borders Agency on an e-Borders matter,” Noaro said. …

The Register:

The UK government today came a step closer to international embarrassment over its failure to act against BT and Phorm for their secret trials of mass internet snooping technology. The European Commission said it had moved to the second stage of infringement proceedings after the trials, revealed by The Register, exposed failings in the UK’s implementation of privacy laws.

BT and Phorm intercepted and profiled the web browsing of tens of thousands of broadband subscribers without their consent in trials in 2006 and 2007.

The furore generated by the scandal forced Phorm to withdraw from the UK market, but police and the Information Commissioner’s Office both declined to take any action against the firms.

…

The provisions of the Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications that prohibit “unlawful interception and surveillance without the user’s consent” had not been properly brought into UK law, the Commission said. …

The Register:

The estimated number of people whose DNA profile is stored by the government has broken the five million mark for the first time.

…

The untrammelled growth of the world’s largest repository of human DNA information on a per capita basis has continued, despite the government’s defeat at the European Court of Human Rights last December.

…

last week, an official report showed that despite the growth of the database, detections based on DNA evidence have fallen.

I am not a lawyer.

Prompted by Sunny’s post that asked how important a blog hosting company is in terms of mitigating risk of legal attack I left the following comment (here slightly edited):

Selecting a host and domain registrar outside of England and Wales – particularly if the host or registrar’s country isn’t ‘friendly’ to English law as it pertains here – mitigates the risk of legal attacks from that jurisdiction.

But, while these mitigate the risk of content being technologically ‘taken down’ as a result of legal attack from that jurisdiction, you remain personally exposed to similar risks from writing and/or publishing online as you would be in print – from libel, contempt of court, and intellectual property rights infringement, to criminal offences (e.g. under the Terrorism Act).

There are additional risks associated with online publishing, for example relating to user generated content (e.g. comments on articles). You can mitigate this risk by not pre-moderating or otherwise monitoring comments but you must investigate swiftly if there is a complaint and remove / suspend / redact offending comment if necessary while you investigate.

Merely pointing to offending content elsewhere, in the form of a hyperlink for example, as opposed to publishing it verbatim yourself, also exposes you to risk.

It seems worth noting here that the Terrorism Act allows a maximum of only two days to remove offending content before you commit an offence by not removing it.

Also, in general, if user data is demanded from you, you should demand a court order / proper legal authority before providing it as you otherwise risk breaching the Data Protection Act.

Structuring your finances etc so that it is not worthwhile chasing you is beyond me but my guess is that it’s worthwhile doing if you plan on regularly publishing risky content – as is seeking proper advice on all the above.

I am not a lawyer.

Advice congealed from, among others, Pinsent Masons’ out-law.com and McNae’s Essential Law for Journalists.