Ecstasy: should it be downgraded?

The Government’s refusal to listen to the advice
of the Advisory Council on Drugs Misuse to
downgrade ecstasy from Class A to Class B calls into question
the drug classification system in the UK and
strengthens appeals to scrap the current system
and employ a new, more relevant one. Their
suggestion that downgrading this drug would
encourage use is unsupported and an example
of political posturing.

In a statement Professor David Nutt, head
of the Council, stated that riding horses is more
dangerous than taking ecstasy. Home Secretary
Jacqui Smith responded by accusing Professor
Nutt of trivialising the effects of ecstasy. It is a
plain fact though: there are around fifty deaths a
year as a result of ecstasy compared to one hundred
caused by riding horses. Nutt said he aimed
to show how dangerous drugs really are, which
is exactly the role of the Council.

Furthermore, Smith’s focus on this part of
Nutt’s statement effectively trivialises the actual
research he and the Council put forward. They
found that despite previous assumptions about
the damaging effects of ecstasy, taking it affected
memory recognition and susceptibility to mild depression
only marginally. Clearly it should remain illegal
and is harmful to individuals, but it should
not be ranked alongside crack cocaine and heroin.
These not only cause more deaths and have significant
short- and long-term negative effects, but
they affect society beyond the individual as well.

Following the reasoning of the current classification
system and the advice of the experts
in the Council, ecstasy should be downgraded.
Smith’s reaction to this proposal and the
Government’s refusal to do so highlight the deeper
problems of the way drugs are classified in the
UK. The idea behind the current system is to
class the various types of drugs by their
harmfulness but the three categories mean that any
downgrading becomes a huge deal. The Government
worried that downgrading ecstasy would
“send the wrong message” to the public, implying
that it was okay to take. This clearly is not
the case: if it remains illegal it’s obviously not
‘okay.’ Also, it is the government’s responsibility
to educate the public about the dangers of all
drugs (illegal and legal), just as it is the Council’s
job to educate the government. Their decision
has more to do with politics than the people.
Many experts, including the Advisory Coun-
cil and Colin Blakemore of Oxford University,
have been calling for an overhaul of the classification
system. Blakemore suggested one which
ranks drugs on three measures of their harmfulness
to the individual, three measures of their
harmfulness to society and three measures of
the level of addiction. These nine measurements
are then summed and rank the drug. On
this scale ecstasy fell lower not only than heroin
but also alcohol and tobacco.

Without dismissing its negative effects it is
worth pointing out that one of the reasons ecstasy
(surprisingly to some) fell so low is that it is a social
drug. People do not pop the so-called ‘happy pill’
and sit at home alone. Nor do they become violent
or aggressive, though it can lead to less than
intelligent decisions sometimes. It gives a high that
really lives up to the name, a feeling of ecstasy.

Keeping the drug at Class A and sending people
holding it to jail for up to seven years, and
people selling for life exaggerates the damage it
does both to the individual and to society. Most
of the users will be younger and jail time for taking
a couple of pills at a party does not put them
in the same box as the criminals they would be
sharing cells with. Even putting a pusher of E to
jail for life overstates the harm it can do. Jails are
overcrowded in the UK, why fill it with twenty-somethings
who were holding ecstasy (or cannabis for that matter)?

And what about the socially accepted tobacco and
alcohol? Yes, the government has various campaigns
aimed at discouraging the use of either but,
especially in the case of alcohol, they aren’t working.
Using a new classification system might show people
how harmful these are, though it is doubtful that
alcohol, which is so deeply ingrained in our minds as
a normal, acceptable thing, will ever be seen as more
dangerous than drugs like ecstasy.

Ecstasy should be downgraded for all the
above reasons. Now, personally, I’m not a user
(I get my thrills from horseback riding) but the
Government’s refusal to heed the recommendations of
an advisory body highlights the need for a new
classification system and, maybe, a new look at drugs,
both the illegal and the ones around us every day.