Another day, another Manx drug SNAFU

I see from the government website ( see http://www.isleofman.com/News/details/55367/methoxetamine-mexxy-classified-as-a-class-b-illegal-drug) that the island is to extend a temporary ban on various quasi-legal chemical substances and is also – at least in theory – offering advice to those who might like to be surer what they’re taking.

Except, of course, that this is not what is happening

In a nutshell, the tabloid-addled know-nowts up in the Wedding Cake who ‘advise’ on drug policy are trying to pretend their paranoid fantasies have been verified by UK government ‘expertise’. But as anyone who followed the David Nutt affair knows, the UK government does not actually have an expert panel of objective, independent drug advisors.

The chief advisor was sacked for giving evidence based advice rather than being prepared to rubber-stamp baseless nonsense and the principled members of the council resigned in protest. They now offer the objective research the UK government doesn’t want direct to interested members of the public instead (see http://www.drugscience.org.uk/ ) while a ragbag collection of pseudo-independent scientists, professionals and academics produce what reports and findings they’re told, when they’re told, and which fool nobody.

Except, of course, for a class of politicians and civil servants who are even less educated or honest - such as ours.

Meanwhile, a Manx drug advisory service which used to - at least - be guided by information from dependable (if sometimes self-serving) sources in the drug-control cottage industry lost government funding because it did not have enough religious friends there.
‘Advice’ now comes from a clueless consortium which does, and which having absolutely failed to give advice on its core area of inexpertise, ‘alcohol abuse’, now fails to give advice on topics it knows even less about while living off ‘sin taxes’ extracted from the industries which sell such products.

Some days I wonder what would happen if the Manx government sought advice on potential social problems from objective, knowledgeable professionals and tried to put in place coherent and realistic policies to deal with them (if they exist, which is sometimes also debateable). It would be a waste of time, because it has never happened, and will never happen.

Manx government culture just does not work like that, and its policies and ‘solutions’ just do not work. Period.