Leff: Dr. Raabe, new drugs "specialist" appointed to the ACMD.
Right: Evan Harris, Lib-Dem Politician, Secular Humanist
and generally awesome guy.
Evan Harris has a rather awesome article about the decision to appoint Dr. Raabe to the "Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs". This is the council from which Dr. Nutt was rejected because he noted that scientific research was at odds with government policy. At the point where Dr. Nutt was removed from his position, we still had a Labour government. Seemingly not to be out-played the Coalition government (Tory majority) have chosen a candidate with little in the way of expertise on this topic, but with plenty of juicy homophobic Christian fundamentalism. It seems likely that the main reason he has been chosen is because he thinks marijuana is just bad bad bad and why factor something as trivial as objectivity when appointing "specialists" for an advisory board, eh?
Evan Harris' article is as follows:
Dr Raabe's two-doctor Manchester surgery does not advertise any specialist drug clinics on its website. Other than a single article in German in 1994 on "Dietary intervention in hyperlipidemia. Experience in general practice" he does not appear to have published any peer reviewed research, let alone into drug addiction or treatment.
Given that the expert membership of the ACMD is known by the Home Office to be a sensitive issue as I have written before, it might appear that the Home Office was simply not able to recruit attract any specialist GPs and thus appointed an ordinary inner city GP.
But Dr Raabe is not just a GP. He is a leading member of the Maranatha Community – a Manchester-based fundamentalist (in the literal, non-pejorative sense) evangelical Christian group.
Read the full article here....