Nutt, Advising, Deciding & Transparent decision-making

The Nutt affair rumbles on.  The government's policy framework has been reduced to chaos.  If that weren't true of so much of the rest of government policy it would be a big story.

Some of us say: Advisors advise; ministers decide.  We don't want government by technocrats, and you can't have advisors campaigning against the policy on which they are advising.

Others say: You can't appoint an independent committee then hope to muzzle them if they complain that your policy does not reflect science.

Still others say: The committee missed out important scientists, so its recommendations can't claim to reflect the best scientific view, anyway.

I suspect that many of those arguing one of these points approaches the matter have their opinions strongly coloured by their view on cannabis in particular or drugs in general.  If you think drugs policy is too lax, your sympathies are with Nutt; if you think it's about right or not strict enough, your sympathies are against Nutt.  I want to avoid all that to make my point, so I'm going to think about a different drug altogether: strychnine.

Now, suppose that the way it worked were as follows.  Suppose that the government wanted to claim to the public that its position on drugs were determined by their medical effects, the harm they caused the body in the narrow medical sense.  Suppose that it set up some rankings of harm.  Let's call them W, X, Y, and Z.  Drugs in Z were very harmful, medically, whilst drugs in W were only fairly harmful.  Then suppose that the policy framework were designed so that lots of other things flowed automatically from the harm ranking - e.g. suppose that the law involved a minimum sentence for selling the stuff; that police-forces were instructed to devote resources to enforcing prohibitions on trade; that doctors had duties to report instances of addicts in certain classes but could respect medical confidentiality in other cases; and so on.

Now suppose that the drug strychnine came before the committee, and the committee decided that, in the narrow medical sense that they were asked to comment upon, the drug were extremely dangerous and should be placed in category Z.  But suppose that the government felt that there were wider social reasons for not imposing the minimum sentences on strychnine traders that went in category Z, and that policemen in areas where strychnine were usually sold would be better to devote their resources to monitoring suspected terrorists.  So they thanked the committee for its advice but placed strychnine in category W.

The chairman of the committee then comments publicly on that decision, saying it wasn't based on medical science.  Do you think she should be fired?

I say no.  Why not?  Well, because the government's decision wasn't based on medical science, and it was surely the job of the committee chairman to point this out if she is truly independent and wishes to maintain her integrity.  If she doesn't point that out, who is going to?

But was the government's decision wrong?  Perhaps not, but that's not the point.  The point is that the government claimed that its drug classifications and the other public policies that flowed from them were based purely on the medical science, whilst at the same time in fact wanting to base them on some wider public interest calculation.  You can either base your decision on the wider public interest or on the narrow medical science.  You can't do both (unless those always coincide).  If you choose to deviate then of course you are the government - you can do that.  But in such a scenario it is surely integral to the concept of the transparent policy-guiding framework you established, with a committee that determines what the medical science is, that the committee will, in such a case, point out that your judgement was not based on the medical science (for it wasn't).  Then you must defend yourself on the basis of whatever wider justification you have.

If you fire your critics, you are simply negating that aspect of the transparent process, and they are entitled to feel that you are treating them as fig-leaves, not as advisors, and resign.