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Duncan O'Leary

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Duncan works on projects looking at public services, skills and work.

Posted by Duncan O'Leary at 11:08am on Wednesday, 7th May 2008

A couple of thoughts struck me this morning as I listened to the debate on the today programme (7.35) about the (re)re-classification of cannabis:

  1. The ‘battle between science and politics’: science is there to serve politics, not replace it. In other words, scientific judgements about the safety or otherwise of cannabis do not trump the importance of political judgements. These require other kinds of evidence (which I’ll come on to) and which concern bigger issues like what kind of society we want to live in. i.e. issues of freedom of choice, issues of who is selling drugs to whom, where and with what effect. That doesn’t give you the answer, but it tells you that ‘science’ doesn’t have it, even if it can and should contribute to it.

  2. Second, the government is making an interesting distinction between the message that is sent out, and what people actually hear. Evan Davis on the Today programme couldn’t see or accept this distinction: surely the evidence is the message, he argued. But the government’s response is that the message is what people hear, not what you tell them. Social science, not just laboratory testing..
 

Of course there is electoral politics and all the rest involved here (and a U-turn by the way), but I think there are some interesting arguments going on nonetheless.

Comments

1
"There is a compelling case for us to act now, rather than risk the future health of young people."
- Jacqui Smith

This is interesting as the 'compelling case' to act doesn't seem to come from medical advice, nor does it seemingly come from a serious effort to think of smarter way to discourage young people from taking drugs. For a start, the numbers on young people's use of cannabis seem to have been going down since the first reclassification.

So if it is about understanding how the message will be received, one can only assume the ears they are talking to aren't the ears of 'young people'. The idea that government will be 'sending a message' about  any drug's acceptability through the classification scheme, especially to 'young people' is...quaint? In that case, I definitely wouldn't file it under 'smart communication'.
Posted by Pete Bradwell  at 6:37pm on Wednesday, 7th May 2008
2
Surely the health problems cased by cannabis use are nowhere near as significant as the social problems caused by crime.  Buy Fair Trade Weed, I say.
Posted by Robert Sharp  at 11:24am on Friday, 9th May 2008
3
"science is there to serve politics".  What a ghastly thought.  Science serves science, any other relationship undermines the whole proceedure.  I have some sympathy with your argument that politicians have more to consider than scientific evidence but that doesn't justify skewing and spinning the scientific reality to match your own agenda.  The cannabis agenda is such a deliberate distraction.  A bit like fox hunting.  When the government is getting kicked around it will distract the tabloids for a few weeks.  Is this not painfully transparent to anyone but myself?
Posted by Philip Conway  at 4:14pm on Sunday, 11th May 2008
4

Interesting.  I also no longer think that 'science is there to serve politics'.  Firstly, questions of fact and value are extremely difficult to separate in practice - science equally relies on a set of political values (empiricism, rationality, etc).  As Demos itself has brilliantly shown, scientific quesitons can themselves be political (and should therefore be 'see-through' rather than the exclusive preserve of scientists).

At least as importantly, seperating science and politics isdamaging to politics, emptying political debate of all constructive, practical concern and leaving only empty rhetoric and 'opinion'.  That is precisely the complaint many make of politics today.

Politicians will only be able to rescue their legitimacy not by standing above the fray of theologists, environmentalists and engineers but by getting stuck in and showing that politics can help to solve practical problems.  So, while I disagree with Brown on this particular point, I don't mind him getting stuck in with the scientists.  Science and politics both produce helpful 'answers' and politics is strengthened by those who acknowledge that.

 

 

Posted by John Craig  at 9:40am on Monday, 12th May 2008
5
In science, truth is everything.  In politics truth is merely useful.  Of course your ontology, your epistemology, your philosophy of science, is inherently political but that doesn't mean that the two share similar standards for and of truthfulness.  You can't seperate the two entirely, but politics in science can only do damage.  Of course this is conflating somewhat different kinds of politics.  There is politics between people, between scientists, between publications and institutions.  We could equally call this discourse and science couldn't function without it and neither could anything else.  The politics that has at most a limited place in science is that of government, religion, vested interests.  A good, if extreme, example would be that of Stalin's biologist-in-chief Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, whose principles had little if any scientific merit but were adopted because they fitted into the prevailing ideology of the time.  Clearly we don't live in that world but the same principle potentially applies and we should be wary.
Posted by Philip Conway  at 7:18pm on Wednesday, 14th May 2008

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