Есірткі саясатындағы даулар мен кеңесшілер алмасуы

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) is a British statutory advisory non departmental public body, which was established under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971.

The ACMD is required to have at least 20 members. All members are unpaid, although expenses are reimbursed.

In January 2011, the government appointed nine new members to the Advisory Council, including a new chair. The new chairman, Les Iversen, is a retired Oxford University professor of pharmacology and neuropharmacology specialist. The appointment of Dr Hans Christian Raabe, a prominent member of the Maranatha Community, which aims to "re establish Christian values in society" received coverage in the British press. Raabe, a General Practitioner from Manchester, had previously stood as a Christian Peoples Alliance candidate for the North West of England in the European Parliament elections of 2009. As a candidate for the CPA, Raabe had made a number of controversial statements concerning homosexuality, one being; "there is a disproportionately greater number of homosexuals among paedophiles and an overlap between the gay movement and the movement to make paedophilia acceptable". Dr Raabe once argued that "it is futile to pursue discredited policies of so called 'harm reduction'", and had written that "The only way of stopping people from dying from drug related deaths is to prevent drug use in the first place". On the 8th of February 2011, Dr Raabe was sacked before his first meeting.

Professor David Nutt of the University of Bristol was Chairman of the ACMD until being relieved of his post on 30 October 2009 after criticising politicians for "distorting" and "devaluing" research evidence in the debate over illicit drugs. David Nutt founded the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs on 15 January 2010. The goal of his new committee is to complement and eventually supersede the ACMD by providing independent advice that is untainted by government interference. In February 2009, the government was accused by Professor Nutt of making a political decision with regard to drug classification in rejecting the scientific advice to downgrade ecstasy from a class A drug. The ACMD report on ecstasy, based on a 12 month study of 4,000 academic papers, concluded that it is not as dangerous as other class A drugs such as heroin and cocaine, and should be downgraded to class B. The advice was not followed. Jacqui Smith, then Home Secretary, was also widely criticised by the scientific community for bullying Professor David Nutt into apologising for his comments that, in the course of a normal year, more people die from falling off horses than from taking ecstasy. Professor Nutt was sacked by Jacqui Smith's successor as Home Secretary Alan Johnson; Johnson saying "It is important that the government's messages on drugs are clear and as an advisor you do nothing to undermine public understanding of them. I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy and have therefore lost confidence in your ability to advise me as Chair of the ACMD." In his October 2009 paper (based on a lecture given in July 2009) Nutt had repeated his familiar view that illicit drugs should be classified according to the actual evidence of the harm they cause and pointed out that alcohol and tobacco caused more harm than LSD, ecstasy and cannabis. Alcohol should come fifth behind cocaine, heroin, barbiturates and methadone, and tobacco should rank ninth, ahead of cannabis, LSD and ecstasy, he said. He also argued that smoking cannabis created only a "relatively small risk" of psychotic illness. Explaining his sacking of Nutt, Alan Johnson wrote in a letter to The Guardian, that "He was asked to go because he cannot be both a government advisor and a campaigner against government policy. [ ] As for his comments about horse riding being more dangerous than ecstasy, which you quote with such reverence, it is of course a political rather than a scientific point." Responding in The Times, Professor Nutt said:

In the wake of Nutt's dismissal, Dr Les King, a part time advisor to the Department of Health, and the senior chemist on the ACMD, resigned from the body. His resignation was soon followed by that of Marion Walker, Clinical Director of Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust's substance misuse service, and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society's representative on the ACMD. The Guardian revealed that Alan Johnson ordered what was described as a 'snap review' of the 40 strong ACMD in October 2009. This, it was said, would assess whether the body is "discharging the functions" that it was set up to deliver and decide if it still represented value for money for the public. The review was to be conducted by David Omand. Within hours of The Guardian revealing this, an article was published online by The Times arguing that Nutt's controversial lecture actually conformed to government guidelines throughout. The report of the review was published in February 2011. On 10 November 2009 three further members of the Council resigned following a meeting with Alan Johnson. They were: Dr John Marsden, Dr Ian Ragan and Dr Simon Campbell. A sixth member, Dr Polly Taylor, resigned in March 2010, shortly before the decision to make substituted cathinones including the legal high mephedrone illegal. On 1 April 2010 Eric Carlin also resigned after the announcement of the ban, saying that the decision by the Home Secretary was "unduly based on media and political pressure". He also stated "We had little or no discussion about how our recommendation to classify this drug would be likely to impact on young people's behaviour. As well as being extremely unhappy with how the ACMD operates, I am not prepared to continue to be part of a body which, as its main activity, works to facilitate the potential criminalisation of increasing numbers of young people."

The Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 removed the legal requirement which meant the ACMD had to have scientists and experts on the panel. Following the Act, the panel no longer has to have: someone who practices veterinary medicine; someone who practices medicine, other than veterinary medicine; someone who practices dentistry; someone who practices pharmacy; someone from the pharmaceutical industry; or a chemist, other than from the pharmaceutical chemistry.

Previous Home Secretaries, when responding to the advice of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, have all reiterated that the majority of public opinion is against reforming the current stance on prohibition. However, a poll commissioned by the Liberal Democrats found that when the definitions of three regulatory options were given to members of the public instead of simply asking "Do you think drugs should be legalised?" the majority in fact supported new regulatory control.