Smith rejects advice to downgrade ecstasy

The credibility of the official system of drugs classification suffered a fresh blow yesterday after the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, again vetoed a key recommendation from her own expert drug advisers, this time to downgrade the dance drug ecstasy from its class A status.The Home Office junior minister Alan Campbell, explaining the rejection of the 12-month study by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which looked at more than 4,000 academic papers, said the government would not send a signal to young people that ecstasy was taken less seriously.Professor David Nutt, the council's chairman, said its role was not to send messages to the public but to provide the home secretary and prime minister with evidence of the relative harm of different drugs. "I suspect that they accepted our evidence but I think that they have made a political decision not to reclassify," he said.The decision not to...

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