Drugs without the hot air: Making Sense of Legal and Illegal Drugs

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Drugs without the hot air is a highly readable and informative survey of the current state of play on recreational drug use and abuse by one of our leading clinical psychopharmacologists. David Nutt confronts the many controversial issues concerning both legal and illegal drug use, including its political regulation, with a combination of common sense, evidence-based argument and passion. * Trevor Robbins, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Cambridge * Start telling your kids about drugs from an early age and be prepared to discuss your drinking and smoking with them. The dangers of illegal drugs are well known and rarely disputed, but how harmful are alcohol and tobacco by comparison?

Chapters 11 & 15 were the places I could have found policy Dos and Donts, and sure there were some shallow recommendations, and I think the generally push to remove triggers for people's addictions is a good one and worth following. But again they were just way to abstract and felt like a cursory glance at potential policy solutions rather than a thoughtful engagement with them. There’s a lifetime’s worth of knowledge and research to dig into here but thanks to Nutt’s direct, no nonsense writing style the book also serves as a masterclass in science communication. – BBC Science Focus magazine It’s interesting to read because it simultaneously seems radical and rather obvious. Radical because if all the evidence in the book was taken seriously it would involve a top-to-bottom rewriting of UK drug laws; and obvious because actually not much of this stuff should come as a surprise.

The worst part about this book is that I came out feeling only marginally more informed about what we can do to minimize the harms going forward, what policies I should support and what practices I should adopt. I would have even accepted a book that taught me a lot about the history, or that gave me a lot of anecdotal accounts that weaved stories both from the regulatory and user side of things. But instead I got none of this. Perhaps I'm not the target audience, maybe it's for people who haven't though much about the issue before. But there are still major issues (see Chapter 12) and insufficient summaries (see Chapter 13) to contend with, leading me to think I probably wouldn't recommend this book to anyone. Overall, I'd say about 5% of the book was new, useful material for me, another 5% a worthwhile read, and the rest either introductory or poor quality material that didn't help me grow at all. I'll proceed with a chapter by chapter breakdown (grouping similar ones together) to shine some further light.

urn:lcp:drugswithouthota0000nutt:epub:17a9ae39-0965-4e63-88f9-bde811cb128c Foldoutcount 0 Identifier drugswithouthota0000nutt Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t6r04tb1p Invoice 1652 Isbn 9781906860165 The amazing Professor David Nutt has done it again. The must-read second edition has even more drugs and even less hot air! * Prof Val Curran, Director UCL Clinical Psychopharmacology Unit *

About the contributors

About the Author: David Nutt is a psychiatrist, the Edmund J Safra Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology in Imperial College London and chair of DrugScience. The Times Eureka science magazine voted him one of the 100 most important figures in British Science. This once in an epoch review by experts from a range of disciplines, Drug Science and British Drug Policy shows how lawmakers and the media have ignored the scientific evidence to sustain badly founded rhetoric in favour of blanket bans, punishment and the marginalisation of opponents. Countless individuals (including the vulnerable, deprived, addicted and mentally ill) have therefore suffered unnecessarily.