David broadcasts widely to the general public both on radio and television including BBC science and public affairs programmes on therapeutic as well as illicit drugs, their harms and their classification. Grinspoon’s Harvard Health articles have reached tens of millions of readers, have been widely referenced in the national media, and have been cited in congressional testimony. This is the essential knowledge that cuts through the noise and give us evidence-based information that will change people’s lives. Professor Nutt is much more interested in the medical uses and the harm that is being done to many UK citizens through the establishment's over-cautious approach.

Of course, another worry that we hear about is that cannabis makes people become schizophrenic and leads to anxiety. He is the chairman of Drug Science, a non-profit which he founded in 2010 to provide independent, evidence-based information on drugs.

HISTORY: Cannabis has been used as a medicine for thousands of years – back to the Egyptians and Chinese. David is currently Chair of DrugScience (formally the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD) and President of the European Brain Council. Professor David Nutt, a scientist who looks at the evidence-based practice rather than some emotional story (and who was famously sacked by the Labour Government for speaking truth as the evidence shows on drugs) gives the facts about cannabis. It's amazing and yet the USA has been trying to burn coca leaves for 50 years when it's part of some countries in South America's livelihoods - not to make cocaine (that's the USA) but to live on and grow as we might coffee beans or wheat.

When I was a child, I saw my great uncle, a physician, helping my cousin to clean and prepare his medicine – pot– so he could tolerate his chemotherapy treatments. There was only one harm where alcohol didn’t score higher, and that was dependence, where cannabis and alcohol were equal,” Professor Nutt comments in the book. Yet people in numerous countries, including the US, Holland, Belgium and Germany, can access medical marijuana, while several states across the US have legalised recreational cannabis. The UK government has persisted with prohibition policies which have not reduced the consumption of cannabis. The drug became illegal due to propaganda from the US where the world turned against the drug after a clever propaganda campaign in the US, where the end of alcohol prohibition in 1933 threatened many police jobs.is a primary care physician and cannabis specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. We are currently in a war on drugs, and this has only resulted with more people taking cannabis, a black market, and stronger cannabis, as well as criminalising and blotting people's lives with a criminal record. A lot of information to take in, but good to have the facts rather than the fiction put about by media and the government.

We need to move medical cannabis from Schedule 2 to Schedule 4 [of the Misuse of Drugs Act] and allow GPs to prescribe. We are also very excited by the growing use of medical cannabis for Tourette’s and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. Isn’t it strange that the fear mongering about cannabis and mental illness led to stronger forms of cannabis - but not a surprise. UK's point of view, talked about here extensively, reminds me strongly of how it looked like in Poland. Nor that although its medical use is authorized in the UK, the NHS and physicians are not prescribing it.Neatly divided into sections and chapters, the structure flows well and allows for the reader to focus on the sections of most use or interest to them. Nutt was sacked in 2009, when as a government adviser on drugs he stated that ecstasy was no more dangerous than horse riding. Coca leaves are amazing, tiny amounts of these leaves contain incredible amounts of vitamins, large amounts of calcium (which is rare in plants) and they're nutritionally rich. In Cannabis: Seeing Through the Smoke (Yellow Kite Books), David Nutt, Edmond J Safra chair in neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, analyses the risks and benefits of cannabis.