This is in large part because Nutt's research is entirely fraudulent. C.f. my previous analysis here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4044431

I believe it is: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67.... Is a panel of experts providing views on an objective criteria the most satisfying solution? No. But they are open about the method, the scoring system, and data used to set assumptions. Plus, it beats "experts" legislating based on subjective, opaque critera.

"The rankings are creating by combining a lot of different factors that don't have anything to do with each other, e.g. by combining harm to the user with harm to society"

Nutt et all advocate considering the harm done to society by drugs, versus individuals, since it is at the society-wide level that we regulate. In any case, the data are provided to allow for one to pry apart the local and global harms. Here is a chart allowing you to, visually, do just that: http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_caus....

"The harms for drugs are measured as they are typically used, rather than correcting for things like differences in demographic and route of administration."

In his book, he spends a good deal of time addressing routes of administration, pointing out that "the health impacts of a drug can vary enormously depending on how it’s consumed". He is similarly expansive on the role of "setting" and culture in vulnerability and harm potential.

"The harms of the drugs caused by prohibition are not accounted for."

I thought he went quite extensively into the War on Drugs and how it wasn't "obviously the wrong thing to try in the 1970s, but today it is clearly doing more harm than good", that the "'drugs problem' needs radical rethinking as a public-health crisis rather than a moral crusade." He also uses the example of Portugal to show how legalisation can reduce indirect drug harms.

"They're not accounting for the benefits of drug use, only the harms."

Nutt is presently at the forefront of the British effort to de-regulate drugs. Further, harm reduction should first focus on clarifying risks.

So do you feel like, after reading that, that you could replicate the study and get the same results? Because having read that I understand that the scores came from a committee, and are supposedly an an interval scale, but beyond that I have zero clue as to how they came up with the scores that they did. Also, as far as I can tell this is just a new analysis of his old data, and the methodology for that is still equally (or more) lacking.

> the data are provided to allow for one to pry apart the local and global harms

Yeah, but the local and global harms are both wrong, and combined they are even more wrong. You can break it down all you want, but it's still wrong at every single level. (E.g. do you really believe that, say, alcohol causes 2.5x as much harm to users than butane? And is it even meaningful to make that comparison in the first place?)

> In his book, he spends a good deal of time addressing routes of administration, pointing out that "the health impacts of a drug can vary enormously depending on how it’s consumed".

Then doesn't this only show that he knows his own study is invalid?

> I thought he went quite extensively into the War on Drugs

I was only talking about the validity of the study, not the book.

Not only do I think it is meaningful to compare the harm done by drugs as they are actually used, it is necessary. Nutt's research is from society's perspective - that's why it spends more time on how people actually use drugs than how much harm would be done if they used them appropriately. It is not meant to guide responsible drug use, but instead, inform pragmatic harm-minimising policy. From that perspective, the inclusion of the endogenous prohibition effects on harm is a feature of his methodology, not a drawback.

Saying a study is "invalid" is a harsher critique than saying there are additional factors that need to be taken into account before coming up with policy conclusions. As an analogy, Newtonian gravity is not "invalid" - it is just a cruder model than one including Einsteinian time dilation. Nutt's 2007 paper is crude compared with his later work. Not "fraudulent" nor "invalidated".

The problem is that how drugs are used is almost entirely dependent on the public policy surrounding them. E.g. when coffee was an illegal drug, you had many people abusing it similar to what we think of as a stereotypical heroin addict today. So how can you set future public policy based on the societal harms of a drug without taking into account current public policy, when those harms are mostly determined by current public policy? Especially since the study (and his marketing of it) portrays these rankings as being objective and scientific.

And even if you were to think of it as a measure of societal harm caused by individual drugs, it doesn't even make any sense for that. E.g. there are no objective measures of the number of users, the amount of harm caused per user, the amount of harm each user causes to society, etc. It's only the opinions of a bunch of random people about these things. How is this supposed to be more accurate than getting actual data?

Policy seeks to move from where we are forward. Nutt advocates "forward" be measured in minimising aggregate, actual harm. The logic is that since we do not know precisely how biology, psychology, sociology, economics, and policy interact we can start by observing the entire system and seeing where problems are bubbling up.

"It's only the opinions of a bunch of random people about these things. How is this supposed to be more accurate than getting actual data?"

Experts who have looked at the data are coming to a different consensus than our policy makers. That is powerful. I don't know how to integrate data including bioavailability, legal availability, neurotoxicity, safety ratio, etc. But having toxicologists' opinions juxtaposed with policy makers' signals that I should start looking deeper.

Characterising the 2010 paper as "the opinions of a bunch of random people" is disingenuous - a panel of experts weights factors including safety ratio and probability of physical dependence in producing their conclusion. We should not fault the use of estimates with appropriate error margins in lieu of perfect data.

Highly questionable. Coffee was made illegal in the Ottoman empire because people in coffee shops were suspected of sedition, not because they were having caffeine ODs and dying. Comparing it to heroin is just silly, and I say that as a supporter of legalization.

I think you're right about why coffee was illegal. Regardless, when coffee was illegal my understanding is that every Thursdays there was an event where they drank as much coffee as they could, to the point where there was actually a very real chance of ODing, in order to enter a mystical state. I can't find a real source right now, but here is an unsourced reference at least:

http://www1.lavazza.com/corporate/en/coffeculture/legends/ar...

Did you mean tobacco?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_defamation_law

Perhaps you should inform Imperial College, one of the UK's most prestigious science and engineering institutes, where he currently holds a chair in neuropsychopharmacology.

The thing about intellectual dishonesty is that it's not provable, and in fact usually isn't even noticed by people who agree with the conclusion. If you read the link, you'll see that these allegations are hardly the kind that would lead a university to remove a professor.

This is scary:

Independence => 0 correlation

but

~(0 correlation => independence)

Please get your basic statistic straight.

OTOH, Kary Mullis explicitly attributes PCR to his LSD use. I'd ordinarily believe the primary source over uninformed speculation, but Mullis is also an AIDS and climate change denialist who claims he once spoke to a glowing green raccoon, so he is probably not the most reliable source either.

A dismissal, I might add, with absolutely no argument behind it, simply an arrogant statement.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2009/07/09/dr-lsd-to-steve-jobs-...

I'm not inclined to give full credence to what someone attributes their own success to, either. I'm not taking a position either way, just observing that your argument is unfounded.

I don't think anyone here is arguing the position that LSD will have a profound impact on anyone who takes it, just that it can give people a different way of looking at the world and sometimes that leads to novel and important insights.

Replace "LSD trip" with "university degree" in your example. Sure, there are many people who take a physics course and feel as though they have had profound insights but actually haven't. However, you can't use those examples to argue that everyone who claims their physics course has inspired their life and work is lying.

I think the psychedelic experience at most produces an unwarranted sense of the profound. You may feel like revelations have occurred, but really they were nothing. Like those dreams when you figure it all out but when you wake up it's gone, or it was something about wearing your trousers backwards to solve the problem of disharmony in the middle east.

That's not to say I don't think there are a whole load of positives in there, but deeper understanding of the universe and yourself? Meh, I say, meh.

Even in my limited experimentation with drugs, I feel as though I've experienced thought outside the realm of regularity.

It's not only LSD that does it either, other drugs do it, as do some activities. People with a lot of practice in meditation seem to develop the same feeling, from the way they describe it.

That's not a valid choice in your opinion?

It is something in favour of it, I don't think it's productive to pretend otherwise. But good decisions don't result purely from paying attention to what's in favour of a decision. If you want to know whether something's going to potentially mess your life up, the best way I've heard of is to honestly set out to prove that it is going to mess your life up before you actually do it - and if you fail to prove it then you've exercised due diligence.

If you have someone saying they had a really good time and on the other hand you have a bunch of drug users who are completely messed up, then you might want to exercise a bit of caution - you know?

People call these things "trips", and I'd say that's about right. (I haven't taken LSD, but have taken psylocibin which is milder.) An extended trip, vagabonding without a goal, going new places and meeting new people, without "pushing" to make things happen, is similar to a "psychedelic" experience. It is profound.

I wouldn't recommend using LSD. I'd recommend using a milder drug like psylocibin, or maybe mescaline extracted from a farmed San Pedro cactus. (Don't go after the peyote - it's going to go extinct.)

Also, I would suggest waiting until you're in your early 20s to 30s, and if possible, not using any alcohol or other drugs prior to it; I think it makes it harder to notice the dosage as its taking effect.

It's been around 20 years since I've last had a trip, but it affected me a lot and made me a less judgmental person. I did eat some around 10 years ago, but it was a tiny amount and had only a mild effect; but having curtailed drinking, it was a much better experience.

I do not know where to get these drugs now, nor am I interested in obtaining any.

Also, if you want a profound experience without chemicals, travel if you can afford it. Do some work with people who have difficulties in life. Work a physical job that leaves you exhausted. Teach something to someone who cannot learn a subject you find easy. If you put yourself in a situation where you're not only helping others, but allowing others to help you, you will have profound experiences often.

I also don't think LSD turns anyone into a super genius...

I was just reacting to a now deleted comment that said you should do it because you want to, not because your intellectual heroes thought it was great. Is it wrong to want to because people you respect say nice things about it? (While remembering to evaluate if it's really a good idea for you, of course.)

I don't see anything wrong with wanting to try something because your heroes thought it was great. Though, I can see that just because your heroes thought it was great doesn't necessarily mean that you'll want to. Maybe that was more what Mr Deleted meant? More along the lines of don't just get swept up in the actions of strong personalities.

Of course, jumping the gun can be something very very amazing.

But sometimes, little preperation would not hurt.

[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1276962/?ref_=sr_1