David John Nutt (born 16 April 1951) is an English neuropsychopharmacologist specialising in the research of drugs that affect the brain and conditions such as addiction, anxiety, and sleep. He is the chairman of Drug Science, a non-profit which he founded in 2010 to provide independent, evidence-based information on drugs. In 2019 he co-founded the company GABAlabs and its subsidiary SENTIA Spirits which research and market alternatives to alcohol. Until 2009, he was a professor at the University of Bristol heading their Psychopharmacology Unit. Since then he has been the Edmond J Safra chair in Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London and director of the Neuropsychopharmacology Unit in the Division of Brain Sciences there. Nutt was a member of the Committee on Safety of Medicines, and was President of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology.bbc.co.uk David Nutt on The Life Scientific with Jim Al-Khalili, September 2012, BBC Radio 4
Career summary and research Nutt completed his secondary education at Bristol Grammar School and then studied medicine at Downing College, Cambridge, graduating in 1972. In 1975, he completed his clinical training at Guy's Hospital.
He worked as a clinical scientist at the Radcliffe Infirmary from 1978 to 1982 where he carried out basic research into the function of the benzodiazepine receptor/GABA ionophore complex, the long-term effects of BZ agonist treatment and kindling with BZ partial inverse agonists. This work culminated in a ground-breaking paper in Nature in 1982 which described the concept of inverse agonism (using his preferred term, "contragonism") for the first time. From 1983 to 1985, he lectured in psychiatry at the University of Oxford. In 1986, he was the Fogarty visiting scientist at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Bethesda, MD, outside Washington, D.C. Returning to the UK in 1988, he joined the University of Bristol as director of the Psychopharmacology Unit. In 2009, he then established the Department of Neuropsychopharmacology and Molecular Imaging at Imperial College, London, taking a new chair endowed by the Edmond J Safra Philanthropic Foundation. He is an editor of the Journal of Psychopharmacology, and in 2014 was elected president of the European Brain Council.
In 2007 Nutt published a study on the harms of drug use in The Lancet. Eventually, this led to his dismissal from his position in the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD; see government positions below). Subsequently, Nutt and a number of his colleagues who had resigned from the ACMD founded the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, later renamed as Drug Science.
Nutt has since produced numerous prominent reports on drug policy through Drug Science, while launching campaigns of support for evidence-based drug policy; including Project Twenty21, Medical Cannabis Working Group, and the Medical Psychedelics Working Group. In 2013, Drug Science launched a peer-reviewed journal - Journal of Drug Science, Policy and Law - for which Nutt was appointed Editor. Nutt also hosts the Drug Science Podcast, in which he engages drug policy experts, policy-makers, and scientists on the topics of drugs and drug policy.
Nutt is the deputy head of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London. He and his team have published research into psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, as well as neuroimaging studies investigating psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, and DMT.
In November 2010, Nutt published a study in The Lancet - co-authored with Les King and Lawrence Phillips, on behalf of the Independent Committee on Drug Science - which ranked the harm done to individual users and broader society by a range of licit and illicit drugs. Owing in part to criticism of the 2007 study for arbitrary weighting of factors,Tim Locke (1 November 2010) Alcohol more harmful than crack or heroin: Study. Former government drugs advisor Professor David Nutt produces new measures on the way drugs and alcohol cause harm , WebMD Health News the 2010 study employed a multiple-criteria decision analysis in its procedure to support their conclusion that alcohol is more harmful to society than heroin and crack (cocaine), whereas heroin, crack, and methamphetamine are most harmful to individuals. Nutt has also published popular-level articles on these findings in newspapers and print media for the general public, which have been met with to public disagreement from other researchers.
Nutt continues to campaign for changing UK drug laws to facilitate greater research opportunities.
Alcarelle and GABA Labs Building on his extensive research on the role of GABA in the brain, and the psychopharmacology of alcohol, since 2014 Nutt has spoken publicly about his desire to bringing-to-market a compound which could act as a "safer" replacement to alcohol and mimic some of its effects – namely, "conviviality" – by affecting the GABA receptor without the negative health impacts of alcohol. Nutt has named the compound "Alcarelle", but has not yet disclosed the exact chemical composition; preliminary tests employed a benzodiazepine derivative, with later adaptations aimed at improving efficacy and reducing abuse potential.
In 2018 Nutt's company GABALabs (previously called "Alcarelle") lodged patents branded as "Alcarelle," for several new compounds proposing to more closely mimic the desired "conviviality" of alcohol.Journal 6751, GB1813962.6, Applicant: Alcarelle Holdings Limited Title: Mood enhancing compounds. Date Lodged: 28 August 2018Journal 6751, GB1813962.9, Applicant: Alcarelle Holdings Limited Title: Mood enhancing compounds. Date Lodged: 28 August 2018 As of October 2019, no research has been published regarding the efficacy, safety, or long-term health impacts of these compounds, nor have they been made publicly available to consumers.
In January 2021, the science team at GABA Labs released-to-market a plant-based functional alcohol alternative, under the brand "Sentia," and advertised as a "botanical spirit" reported to reproduce the relaxed and social effects typically associated with the consumption of alcoholic beverages.
Psychedelics
In collaboration with Amanda Feilding and the Beckley Foundation, Nutt is investigating the effects of psychedelics on cerebral blood flow.Carhart-Harris R, Kaelen M, Nutt DJ How do hallucinogens work on the brain? http://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-27/edition-9/how-do-hallucinogens-work-brain Nutt DJ A brave new world for psychology? The Psychologist Special issue: http://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-27/edition-9/special-issue-brave-new-world-psychologyMuthukumaraswamy S, Carhart-Harris R, Moran R, Brookes M, Williams M, Erritzoe D, Sessa B, Papadopoulos A, Bolstridge M, Singh K, Fielding A, Friston K, Nutt DJ (2013) Broadband cortical desynchronisation underlies the human psychedelic state The Journal of Neuroscience, 18 September 2013 • 33(38):15171–15183Hobden P, Evans J, Feilding A, Wise RG, Nutt DJ (2012) Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin PNAS 1-6 10.1073/pnas.1119598109
Government positions Nutt previously worked as an advisor to the Ministry of Defence, Department of Health, and the Home Office.
He served on the Committee on Safety of Medicines where he participated in an inquiry into the use of SSRI anti-depressants in 2003. The inquiry drew criticism for Nutt's participation, based on potential conflict-of-interest over his financial involvement in GlaxoSmithKline, which led to his withdrawal from discussions of the drug paroxetine. In January 2008 he was appointed as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), having previously served as Chair of the Technical Committee of the ACMD for seven years.
"Equasy"
As ACMD chairman, government ministers have repeatedly clashed with Nutt over conflicting opinions regarding drug harm and drug classification. In January 2009, Nutt published an editorial in the Journal of Psychopharmacology ("Equasy – An overlooked addiction with implications for the current debate on drug harms") in which the risks associated with horse riding (1 serious adverse event every ~350 exposures) were compared to those of taking ecstasy (1 serious adverse event every ~10,000 exposures).
The word equasy is a portmanteau of ecstasy and equestrianism (based on Latin , 'horse'). Nutt told The Daily Telegraph that his intention was "to get people to understand that drug harm can be equal to harms in other parts of life". In 2012, he explained to the UK Home Affairs Committee that he chose riding as the "pseudo-drug" in his comparison after being consulted by a patient with irreversible brain damage caused by a fall from a horse. He discovered that riding was "considerably more dangerous than [he] had thought ... popular but dangerous" and "something ... that young people do".
Equasy has been frequently referred to in later discussions of drug harmfulness and drug policies.
The issue of the mismatch between lawmakers' classification of recreational drugs, in particular that of cannabis, and scientific measures of their harmfulness surfaced again in October 2009, after the publication of a pamphlet containing a lecture Nutt had given to the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College London in July 2009. In this, Nutt repeated his view that illicit drugs should be classified according to the actual evidence of the harm they cause, and presented an analysis in which nine 'parameters of harm' (grouped as 'physical harm', 'dependence', and 'social harms') revealed that alcohol or tobacco were more harmful than LSD, ecstasy or cannabis. In this ranking, alcohol came fifth behind heroin, cocaine, barbiturates and methadone, and tobacco ranked ninth, ahead of cannabis, LSD and ecstasy, he said. In this classification, alcohol and tobacco appeared as Class B drugs, and cannabis was placed at the top of Class C. Nutt also argued that taking cannabis created only a "relatively small risk" of psychotic illness, and that "the obscenity of hunting down low-level cannabis users to protect them is beyond absurd". Nutt objected to the recent re-upgrading (after 5 years) of cannabis from a Class C drug back to a Class B drug (and thus again on a par with amphetamines), considering it politically motivated rather than scientifically justified. In October 2009 Nutt had a public disagreement with psychiatrist Robin Murray in the pages of The Guardian about the dangers of cannabis in triggering psychosis.Robin Murray, A clear danger from cannabis, The Guardian, 29 October 2009 replying to David Nutt The cannabis conundrum, The Guardian, 29 October 2009
Dismissal Following the release of this pamphlet, Nutt was dismissed from his ACMD position by the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson. Explaining his dismissal of Nutt, Johnson wrote in a letter to The Guardian that "[Nutt] was asked to go because he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy. [...] As for his comments about horse riding being more dangerous than ecstasy, which you quote with such reverence, it is of course a political rather than a scientific point." Responding in The Times, Professor Nutt said: "I gave a lecture on the assessment of drug harms and how these relate to the legislation controlling drugs. According to Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, some contents of this lecture meant I had crossed the line from science to policy and so he sacked me. I do not know which comments were beyond the line or, indeed, where the line was [...]". He maintains that "the ACMD was supposed to give advice on policy".Nutt, David: Drugs - without the hot air. UIT Cambridge, 2012. page 4