Which do you prefer as a leisure pursuit — taking ecstasy or riding on a horse? I have done both and am slightly inclined towards the former, although not by much.
Which do you prefer as a leisure pursuit — taking ecstasy or riding on a horse? I have done both and am slightly inclined towards the former, although not by much. Ecstasy rendered me an immobilised sap with a rictus grin and a vocabulary of about 19 words — like a slightly sinister CBeebies presenter who had not been adequately CRB checked. Riding a horse simply transposed my testicles from their more usual berth and left them instead hanging from the ends of my ears. Both activities imparted psychological or social or physical discomforts which easily outweighed any fleeting pleasures. Both are also risky activities — hell, call me Bear Grylls — but one, the horse riding, is far more dangerous than the other.
Dr David Nutt, the last government’s chief adviser on drugs, was sacked for pointing out this last fact. It is a fact, like it or not. I am not proposing we legalise ecstasy or ban horse riding; as the Americans put it, I’m jus’ sayin’. It may be true that we don’t know how egregiously ecstasy affects the brain many years down the line — perhaps this column is itself an indication of an ominous latent problem. But on the raw figures of people killed or hospitalised each year per thousand, weighted for how many do each activity, horse riding is easily more dangerous than taking ecstasy. That’s the sort of thing a drug czar should be allowed to point out, I think, without being sacked.
So, the sacking of Nutt was an absurdity — but it has nothing on the more recent sacking of Dr Hans Christian Raabe from his position on the government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.
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