I do occasionally stop thinking about the concept of
evidence-based policy, but at the moment I seem to keep coming back to it.
With a certain arrogance, my aim in setting up this blog was
to contribute to an open and honest debate on various policy issues, but
particularly those relating to drugs and alcohol.
Regular readers will know that I
don’t have much time for the idea that there is a single unquestionably ‘right’
answer to any policy problem, as every decision is necessarily a compromise. I’m more interested in ensuring that when
we’re making those compromises we’re going into them with our eyes open.
On the walk to work last Friday morning I was thinking about
NPSs (novel psychoactive substances or ‘legal highs’) and nudging – and, oddly,
but not unusually, sceptical
conservatism.
My thought was that both nudging and this form of
conservatism are based on a view of the world as being irrational, but
functional. It’s just that where
sceptical conservatism thinks our ostensibly ‘irrational’ society has huge
strengths, nudgers want to change our actions to make them more ‘rational’.
But what’s that got to do with NPS?
Well, I don’t think there’s any serious argument that our
overarching policy approach to intoxicating substances is ‘rational’ – though
perhaps that would be an oxymoron in any case.
Certainly there’s an inconsistency laid bare by the new Psychoactive
Substances Bill in relation to caffeine, alcohol, nicotine and certain other
substances.
As I’ve written before,
I was optimistic that NPS and e-cigs might disrupt the status quo and get
people to question current arrangements.
Others were more sceptical – and possibly more accurate.
But here’s the link between conservatism and nudging. There are serious ethical debates
around nudging, based on the fact that it operates on your unconscious
‘thinking’ – System 1. But we are able
to override this system (to some extent) with conscious thought (System 2).
So what if a ‘nudge’ lost (some of) its effectiveness if its
aims and methods were broadcast?
That is, what if you told everyone that you were
placing the doughnuts in a particular location in the café in order to reduce
their consumption – and telling people this meant they didn’t react to
that move? The whole approach potentially
depends on us being in blissful ignorance.
And it’s the same with sceptical conservatism. Society is too complex for us to understand,
and it works reasonably well. We
shouldn’t think too hard about how it’s working and try to tweak things to make
them more rational – that
way lie the horrors of the French Revolution.
But then what’s all this irrationality and unconscious stuff
got to do with NPS?
Well, as
I said before, there’s a view that our drug policy isn’t strictly
‘rational’, but it isn’t disastrous, and a complete revamp would be hugely
risky. Alcohol and tobacco might not be
so different from banned substances in terms of their pharmacology, but their
unique histories mean they’re understood quite differently, so it could be
argued that the ‘irrationality’ is perfectly ‘rational’ given the irrational
place we find ourselves in.
I’d suggest that the Psychoactive
Substances Bill is an attempt to support the status quo, and there’s no mention
of ‘harm’ because to frame the debate in this way would highlight the
inconsistency of this current approach.
So this is where sceptical conservatism, nudging and drug
policy interact: we don’t talk about the irrationality of policy for fear that
would destroy the illusion – and if we thought too carefully about alcohol and
drugs, maybe the (arguably) functional arrangement we currently have would fall
apart.
So is it possible that one way to keep harm from drugs down
is to not talk about harm? And is that a
policy compromise worth making?
