Will the Psychoactive Substances Bill really end brain research in the UK?

The new Conservative government's legislation plans for the year were unveiled during the Queen's Speech to Parliament in May. Several of the bills involved psychological issues, including the Policing and Criminal Justice Bill, which would, among other things, ban the use of police cells for detaining mentally ill people under the Mental Health Act.

However the Psychoactive Substances Bill in particular has sparked an interesting and developing debate. This legislation would lead to a ban on so-called 'legal highs' which would ban trade in 'any substance intended for human consumption that is capable of producing a psychoactive effect' (although the bill adds that 'substances such as alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, food and medicinal products would be excluded from the scope of the offence').

Professor David Nutt, former government chief drugs adviser, spoke to The Guardian about his concerns over the new legislation and said it could lead to the pre-emptive ban of potentially useful substances. He stated: 'It's going to end brain research in this country. It will be disastrous. The ban on legal highs has been very destructive to research into Parkinson's and into anti-smoking drugs.' Nutt said the only drug for Parkinson's is a cathinone (a class of drugs including mephedrone which was banned in 2010), and that we had already seen a 'massive impediment to research of interesting compounds by current law'.

Not everyone is in agreement that the legislation will have such a disastrous effect. Parkinson's UK denied Nutt's claim, with a spokesman telling The Guardian: 'There are a number of Parkinson's drugs of different classes. We have never heard of Parkinson's drugs from the cathinone class.' And John Williams, Head of Science Strategy, Performance and Impact at the Wellcome Trust, took to Twitter to warn: 'Overstated commentary harms ability to have a grown up debate; foghorn negotiations unhelpful in shaping policy.'

James Rucker, a lecturer in psychiatry at King's College London, argued in the British Medical Journal that psychedelic drugs should be legally reclassified so that researchers can investigate their therapeutic potential. 'Hundreds of papers, involving tens of thousands of patients, presented evidence for their use as psychotherapeutic catalysts of mentally beneficial change.' He told The Guardian the government was repeating the mistakes of history, warning that the new law 'centres around the self-reinforcing fallacy of legally defining a drug as having no accepted medical use without the evidence that there really is no medical use for it… UK pharmaceutical research into psychiatric disorders has rapidly diminished over the last decade or so anyway, and this regulation will not help. We derive no benefit from this approach. It stymies research and we are unlikely to be able to discover which of these new psychoactive substances might have medical benefits.'

The government have claimed, in the form of a statement from Mike Penning, minister of state at the Home Office, that 'this new legislation will not stop any legitimate scientific research on such substances.' In any case, there seems little prospect of a u-turn on the Bill, with Penning announcing that the 'landmark' bill will 'fundamentally change the way we tackle new psychoactive substances – and put an end to the game of cat and mouse in which new drugs appear on the market more quickly than government can identify and ban them. The blanket ban will give police and other law enforcement agencies greater powers to tackle the reckless trade in psychoactive substances, instead of having to take a substance-by-substance approach.'

But others question the practicalities of this. Writing on the Mindhacks blog psychologist Dr Vaughan Bell said that within the Home Secretary's letter which accompanied the proposed changes lay a 'little pharmacological gem'. He said the list of banned drugs had become so long the government had banned: "[any] substance [that] produces a psychoactive effect in a person if, by stimulating or depressing the person's central nervous system, it affects the person's mental functioning or emotional state.'

Bell pointed out that as new drugs are arriving on the scene at around the rate of one per week if police are confronted with an unknown white powder, they may have some difficulty in identifying it as psychoactive. He concluded the only reliable way to do so is to take it – as it is difficult to predict what a drug will do to the brain from its chemical structure. 

He wrote: 'Interestingly, this means both the manufacturers of new psychoactive compounds and the UK government will have the same problem. Because you can't do a chemical test on a new drug and say for sure it's psychoactive, and animal tests won't give you a definite answer, someone has to take it to find out. Grey market labs in China and Eastern Europe solve this problem by, well, getting someone to take the drugs. Christ knows what the Government are going to do.'