The folks at Law Enforcement Against Prohibition emailed this morning
to highlight an amendment that Chuck Grassley is offering to a bill
that would create a National Criminal Justice Commission.  Here's the
amendment:

   " The Commission shall have no authority to make findings....that
involve, support, or otherwise discuss the decriminalization of any
offense under the Controlled Substances Act or the legalization of any
controlled substance listed under the Controlled Substances Act."

See?  If you want to make sure your experts don't come to conclusions
you dislike, just prohibit them from talking about those conclusions.
Then they don't really exist.  That's the American way of science.

And it's becoming the British way of science too, at least when it
comes to drug policy.  The Brits used to at least pretend to listen to
their experts, but, as Mark Kleiman explains:

    '   That has changed under the New Labour government, which has
also taken a number of other steps to “Americanize” British
governmental practice, for example by building up the power of the
Prime Minister’s office vis-a-vis the ministries, in which the
ministers are famously captives of their civil-service officials.  In
some ways, this is a “democratizing” step, elevating the importance of
the beliefs and values of elected politicians over those of unelected
experts.  But that doesn’t mean that those of us in the business of
being, and training, experts have to like it, and insofar as expert
beliefs track objective reality more closely than do voters’
prejudices, it also means making decisions with a weaker connection to
the actual phenomena.

    When the head of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs
gave a careful, analytic lecture arguing that cannabis and LSD were
over-controlled compared to more harmful drugs such as alcohol, the
Home Secretary promptly sacked him on the grounds that for a
scientific advisor to express an opinion touching policy made it
impossible to have confidence in the adviser’s objectivity.   This is,
not to put too fine a point on it, bullsh*t.  What the Home Secretary
clearly means is that the Government is committed to the War on Drugs
and isn’t interested in any advice that might get in the way.  '

More here on the British dustup.