Meow meow to be banned despite science backlash

The government is to ban mephedrone, the 'legal high' implicated in the deaths of a number of teenagers in recent months, within weeks despite the resignation of a scientist from the drugs advisory panel.

Dr Polly Taylor's departure was thought to have thrown a spanner in the works for Home Secretary Alan Johnson's plan for a swift ban on mephedrone - also known as meow meow or M-Cat. However, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs this afternoon recommended that mephedrone be classified as a Class B drug - the same as cannabis. A ban will now be rushed through parliament and is expected to be in place within weeks.

However, Dr Taylor's resignation letter adds to the mounting body of evidence which calls into question whether the public can trust the government to give honest advice on the harmfulness of drugs.

Dr Taylor is now the sixth member of the ACMD to resign in the wake of the sacking of the panel's chief, Professor David Nutt, last year after he published a pamphlet that outlined the scientific view that LSD and ecstasy are less harmful than tobacco.

It is not known whether Dr Taylor was for or against a ban on mephedrone. Her complaint is that the government, in its over-eagerness to appease the tabloid press, is not taking scientific advice seriously.

In her resignation letter to the Home Secretary, Dr Taylor said: "I feel that there is little more we can do to describe the importance of ensuring that advice is not subjected to a desire to please ministers or the mood of the day's press.

"It is with regret that I feel the need to express my lack of confidence in the way that government will treat [the ACMD's] advice and therefore am unable to continue to serve on the committee."

Lib Dem science spokesman Dr Evan Harris had earlier suggested the government could not now legally ban mephedrone: "The 1971 (Misuse of Drugs) Act is very clear that before the government criminalises thousands of people by banning a drug they must take advice on drug harm and other matters from a legally constituted advisory council.

"If it is necessary to act urgently to ban mephedrone then, by provoking this resignation by their refusal to respect the scientists who offer advice, the Home Secretary will now be forced to wait... while the council is properly constituted." The government clearly does not accept this view.

Dr Harris is part of a growing backlash to the dizzying speed at which a prospective ban on mephedrone - which is sold over the internet as 'plant food' labelled 'not for human consumption' - has been forced through at the behest of the press.

Today, Tom Lloyd of the International Drug Policy Consortium, told the BBC banning mephedrone would be "ineffective, very costly and counter-productive". Lloyd, a former chief constable of Cambridgeshire, said: "Let's not go down this same route that we've gone down with the other drugs."

And last week, Prof Nutt, the man who first cast doubt on the government's approach to drugs classification, called for mephedrone and ecstasy to be available in nightclubs.

Not one of the many teenage deaths ascribed by press reports to mephedrone has yet been scientifically linked, a point Prof Nutt rammed home in an interview with Radio 5 Live: "It's been associated, or claimed to be associated, with deaths - but when they've been investigated it turns out it wasn't at all."

But with so many scientists now mistrustful of the government's ability to act independently of tabloid hysteria, the question must now be asked whether the public can actually trust British drugs policy.

As Prof Nutt wrote in the Times shortly after being shown the door last year: "It seems unlikely that any 'true' scientist - one who can only speak the truth - will be able to work for this, or future, Home Secretaries." ·