Last Sunday BBC Radio Four's Broadcasting House invited 'thinking out of the box' suggestions for public expenditure cuts.  They gave air time to Danny Kushlick's economic case for legalising drugs.

 

But his speculation that £10 billion per annum could be saved is gamble that I suspect no sound minded bookie would set the odds for nor any gambler put his money on.

 

Certainly not after they had examined the assumptions and...

Read more: Legalising drugs? Radical yes, a gamble certainly, but a saving to the country? Highly unlikely

Was anyone else more than a little disturbed by Professor Martin Rees' call in his Reith Lecture for public policy choices "to be leveraged  by 'scientific citizens' - scientists from all fields of expertise - engaging, from all political perspectives, with the media, and with a public attuned to the scope and limit of science", (as defined by scientists)?

 

His idea of a citizenship of scientific gatekeepers (21st century versions of...

Read more: The Scientific Citizen: The danger of stamping brand 'trust' on science

A new Conservative Government's antennae need to be on alert from day one for the 'evidence based' and 'what works' justifications for Brown's bloated state and overreaching policies.   For these cliches are symptoms of 'scientism':  the belief that science, and science alone, can deal with every aspect of human existence, described by Melanie Phillips this week. Evidence is over-rated, experience and reason underrated. These are the clues to the poisoned...

Read more: The need for reason

"....because this stuff is legal, they are actually taking this, ..... they are prepared to take it, because it is a so-called legal substance, a legal high". Stephen Welch's  plea for action, BBC Radio 4 Today, 19th March 2010

My friend had not even heard of ‘miaow' or mephedrone when the head of her children's leading London day school decided to take the law into his own hands, she told me...

Read more: Mephedrone – the time for the government to act is overdue.

"I would be dead without Middlegate" she told me simply, "I had nowhere to go psychologically, no future. I needed to be shown that my life would be better without drugs. That is what the therapist here did. I had never experienced happiness without drugs before." A seventeen year old former resident of Middlegate I interviewed last year.

 

It's somewhat ironic that only since we had a national adolescent treatment policy...

Read more: Middlegate – the teen rehab defeated by state orthodoxy and target tyranny