The Sacking of Professor David Nutt: Or Why British Drug Policy has nothing to do with the third Reich.

So the Daily mail has done it again. Hot on heels on Jan Moir's barely concealed hate speech against the "unnatural" (read homosexual) death of Stephen Gately. The venerable publication has once more proven how possible to dodge the mark of sanity.

I have just read A.N. Wilson's misguided response to the rather unceremonious sacking of Professor David Nutt. Professor Nutt finds himself on extended leave from his position as government drugs advisor after foolishly recommending both reclassifying cannabis and re-evaluating the actual harm threatened by ecstasy to its legion of users. Users whose main activity seems to be stampeding all over the countryside hugging one another in states of chemically induced bliss, ramblers beware.

Wilson has many issues with Professor Nutt's findings. Firstly he takes to task the scientific method used in the research leading up to the report. His damning accusation not being based on bad science or errors in methodology, but rather that the research was carried out...

"in a laboratory by an unimaginative academic relying solely on empirical facts.".

Discovering that research driving national policy might be a little unimaginative in execution surprised me a little less than Wilson. It seems Mr Wilson would prefer fantastical creatures in laboratories all over the country, carrying clipboards and wearing white coats. I hear the biggest barrier to Unicorns entering the sciences are troublesome undergraduates balancing test tubes on their horns for cheap laughs, hooves making removal slightly problematic but highly amusing.

I suspect that by using the term "unimaginative", Wilson was attempting to suggest that science is generally carried out by a dense lot, unable to think outside the box of their ivory towers. Reading up on recent advances in theoretical physics might not be a bad idea for him. Some really fantastic books have been written on the topic that might convince him that science still has some creative problem solving power left in it, and I doubt he would find it unimaginative.

Even so, people disagreeing with scientists is understandable, laudable even. It could be argued that science itself is the process of extended disagreement. The problem comes when this disagreement carries with it the expungement of information.

This ideal doesn't seem to be held up in government, especially considering this gem from the cavernous used car salesman leer of Alan Johnson, Home Secretary.

"You cannot have a chief adviser at the same time stepping into the public field and campaigning against government decisions. You can do one or the other, you can’t do both" 

It seems that times are darkening on this moistened green isle. You don't even need to burn books anymore. You can wipe out entire databases, if the information contained in them is undesirable.

With Professor Nutt Being a scientist, his findings being opposed to the party ideology should have no impact on any results published. It is clear that the last bastion of someone trying to defend something they suspect indefensible is attempting to remove the information from the debate. Luckily times are indeed a changing and the attempts to remove information tend to be met with an equal and opposite force. Ever hear of the Streisand Effect Home Secretary? Well you're living it now.

Not content to critisise scientists, Wilson smoothly segues into subtly accusing poor people of being uncontrollable substance abusers that need protecting from themselves.

"Try saying that ecstasy is safe in the sink estates of our big cities... to those who see, every single day, the devastation wrought not only on the youngsters themselves, but on whole communities by the casual abuse of drugs"

Not only does this smack of the sort of classism that I had hoped was unacceptable in British society today, it attempts to play on the fears that many people living in rich or poor areas have about their families safety. Suggesting that drugs are the source of all social disfunction is self-serving at best and more accurately described as manipulative propaganda.

Glossing over the champagne and cocaine parties happening in the more upmarket areas of the country, it is suggested that the lower classes of society are not eligible to be aware of the debate, much less have a say.

"It is one thing to argue Professor Nutt's case in a university common room or over a Hampstead dining table, but another to translate his arguments to murkier parts of our society".

Rich responsible people that take drugs and drink doesn't cause a problem. Don't worry about the banking system, it will be fine, just inject a little more quantitative easing. It's poor people, with their bad teeth, class A substances and dance parties. These are the people that are going to steal your money or mug your granny. The drugs make them do it and the drugs are bad.

It seems that if in fact rich people and poor people as groups both consume drugs, the problem Mr Wilson has isn't really with the drugs at all, it's with the poor people that consume them.

Finally Wilson goes for the big one. Swimming through the shallow muck of his outpouring, there is a comparison left standing that I really didn't expect him to resort to. The point in a debate where you know you have won it with out even trying. The argument that proves your opponent is dead in the water and they don't even know it. Accusing science as being legitimately at fault for the holocaust.

"The only difference between Hitler and previous governments was that he believed, with babyish credulity, in science as the only truth".

Just let that sink in for a moment. Say it with me. "The only difference between Hitler and previous governments was that he believed in science as the only truth."

The only difference.

I hope you get some hate mail from people with far too few relatives Mr Wilson. You surely deserve it.

Note to self

Watch Andrei Rublev by Andrei Tarkovsky & Russian Ark by Alexsandr Sokurov

Jenna says they are good.

"Everything's shiny, cap'n . not to fret!" Firefly reference in waves error report.

I like google wave, you can tell can't you!

'everything's shiny, cap'n . not to fret!' 

Unfortunately you'll need to refresh. 
Want to tell Dr. Wave what happened?

Certainly the best error message in the 'verse. Now if only they could get
a Dr. Horrible reference in there also we would be on to a winner.
Anyone seen any others? I did read there was a “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!” somewhere in there also but I haven't managed to reproduce that one yet.

How to create public waves

This post has been rewritten & republished on Associated Content where I thought someone might actually read it!


I am definitely enjoying this, google wave is like a little treasure trove of toys and ideas that are hiding just below the surface. Things are slightly creaky at the moment but that really is part of the pleasure of getting the chance of looking at something like this up front. 

Okay, so I just learned how to create a public wave. There is no button or specific function to make a wave public. The only way I have found to do it is to add public@a.gwave.com to your contacts list. 

To do this:

•  Click the add contacts button which is a little plus. Type public@a.gwave.com into the Address field ignoring the warning "User does not have a Google Wave account" press Enter (the submit button is greyed out, this is ok, just roll with it)

•  The public group will appear in your contacts list.

• Drag this to any wave you want to make public

Caveat Lector

• Public waves seem to get mobbed and over pretty quickly by people not quite understanding what is going on. There doesn't seem to be any access control yet as far as I can tell.
• I haven't found a way to make it private again, once it's out it's out unless someone can correct me.
• The first post you make is the title, and then away you go.

 People seem very willing to talk at the minute. It's really a lot of fun.


Edit--Publish Post


You can also add the bot easypublic@appspot.com which gets around some of the errors.

Finding public waves

Oh dear me, in my last post I talked about google wave and how it was likely that the power of it probably wouldn't become apparent until lots of people were using it.

Well if you already have a google wave account you can simply do a search for with:public to get a list of public waves in real time. I just did it and my head nearly exploded. As one twitterer put it "I already feel like I'm not waving but drowning"

If anything it reminds me of typing /list into an IRC client. I just nostalgiad over google wave. I really must be getting old. Perhaps the strangest thing is the apprent trend of D&D players using it as a medium to run table top games. Colour me impressed

Google wave invites

This post has been rewritten & republished on Associated Content where I thought someone might actually read it!

Invited to google wave

Okay, so yesterday, bleary eyed and clutching a mug of coffee I opened my email to find a bright shiny new google wave invite. Unless you have been dwelling under a lump or mass of hard consolidated mineral matter for the past few months, you will probably know that google wave is the new product from google promising solve the many glaring omissions exist in the much loved, often maligned and frequently cursed method of communication known as email.

Actually wave is designed to do much more than that. While browser based communication technology has jumped ahead leaps and bounds over the last few years with Googles own gmail pushing the boundary of what email could be, Facebook making it entirely unnecessary to see anyone you know ever again and Myspace giving you the ability to make people gouge out their eyes at nearly any distance while accompanied by a catchy pop song, all of these platforms are lacking. Namely collaboration. Google wave promised to blur the boundary between communication and document, in fact Google makes the claim that google wave is equal parts conversation and document. Which in actual fact is not something that anyone has ever seen before outside excitedly scrabbling down notes on the back of beer mats in drunken bouts of creative passion.

So, I have watched the videos, read the articles, worked myself up to such a fever pitch of excitement that some people would question my sexual motives and then from out of the ether it arrives. A google wave invite. The last time I got this excited was when I got my google voice invite, only be crushingly disappointed on finding it was unavailable in the UK.

With palms sweating and fingers twitching I clicked the link, my breath exhaling slowly as the moment seemed to expand out into infinity. The page loaded and behold! I wasn't really sure what I was looking at.

I know this is unfair but I think that after the hype surrounding this launch I was expecting some sort of religious experience, and as usual I wasn't getting one. I am not criticising wave by any means. It's just that there is a problem, and that problem is I haven't got anyone to wave to. Imagine Facebook as one lonely page with just your lonely self writing status updates telling yourself what a great guy you are, not completely dissimilar to my blog in fact.

This is actually a serious point. The thing that will make or break this thing is people. When computers were first networked someone had the bright idea of being able to link pages together by joining the words between two documents. They called this hypertext and it was initially seen as a way to write non sequentially quite a while earlier than the computer, but the concept really came alive when networked machines become commonplace. It didn't seem obvious at the time but give a 1.6 billion people the ability to write non-sequentially and link each others work together then you find some pretty interesting emergent behaviour occurs. In fact the global network occurs.

Now update that a little. What google wave essentially offers is the ability to edit those documents in real time and use them as a form of conversation. Rather than a static pages being linked together, emails bouncing back and forth or even instant messages being sent in real time all of this comes together in one document. Combined with the playback facility that lets new participants to a wave being constructed by reviewing its history you are starting to see some pretty powerful properties of an essentially simple format.


Okay so back to my problem. I have nobody to wave to. I have twenty invitations to give out and I am willing to offer them to anyone who is will to help me test out what this new platform can do. Read that clearly, I am not just wanting to give them out to anyone so they can sit on them. I wan't to actually use this system and see what happens when you get a group of people communcating over it. If you're interested then leave a comment with your email address. Remember to obfuscate them a little otherwise you will likely get spidered and spammed. http://scr.im/ is a pretty good service for this. It's kind of like tiny url but for email addresses. If you're not interested yourself but know someone who would like to know where to get a google wave invite then feel free to point them in this direction

If I can get some people to try this out with me, and we notice some behavour in use that wouldn't neccessarly be apparent by poking around at the options then I might write a couple more posts on it. I think it would be really interesting to have a group of technology enthusiasts using wave to discuss wave.