David Nutt

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.

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.

He served on the Committee on Safety of Medicines where he participated in an enquiry into the use of SSRI anti-depressants in 2003.

His participation was criticised as, owing to his financial interest in GlaxoSmithKline, he had to withdraw from discussions of the drug paroxetine.

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, which was later renamed Drug Science.

Through Drug Science, Nutt has released a number of prominent drug policy reports while launching campaigns in support of evidence-based drug policy.

These include Project Twenty21, the Medical Cannabis Working Group, and the Medical Psychedelics Working Group.

Owing in part to criticism over the arbitrary weighting of the factors in the 2007 study, the new study employed a multiple-criteria decision analysis procedure and found that alcohol is more harmful to society than both heroin and crack, while heroin, crack, and methamphetamine are the most harmful drugs to individuals.

Nutt has also written about this topic in newspapers for the general public, sometimes leading to public disagreements with other researchers.

Nutt is also campaigning for a change in UK drug laws to allow for more research opportunities.

In January 2008 he was appointed as the chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), having previously been Chair of the Technical Committee of the ACMD for seven years.

With Nutt in the position of ACMD chairman, government ministers repeatedly clashed with him over issues of drug harm and classification.

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.

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.

In January 2009 he published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology an editorial ("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).

He is the chairman of Drug Science, a non-profit which he founded in 2010 to provide independent, evidence-based information on drugs.

In November 2010, Nutt published another study in The Lancet, co-authored with Les King and Lawrence Phillips on behalf of this independent Committee.

This ranked the harm done to users and society by a range of drugs.

In 2013, Drug Science launched the peer-reviewed Journal of Drug Science, Policy and Law, with Nutt appointed as Editor.

Nutt also hosts the Drug Science Podcast, where he explores drugs and drug policy with drug policy experts, policy-makers, and scientists.

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.

He is an editor of the Journal of Psychopharmacology, and in 2014 was elected president of the European Brain Council.

Starting in around 2014, Nutt began talking about bringing to market a compound that could mimic some of the effects of alcohol (ethanol) – primarily "conviviality" – in humans (impacting the GABA receptor) while avoiding the negative health impacts of alcohol; a safer replacement.

He calls it "Alcarelle", but does not disclose the exact chemical(s).

Early tests used a benzodiazepine derivative, with later adaptations targeting improved efficacy and reduced abuse potential.

In 2018 Nutt's company GABALabs (previously called "Alcarelle") applied for patents for a series of new compounds, branded as Alcarelle, that more closely mimic the "conviviality" effects of alcohol.

As of October 2019, none of these compounds were available to consumers, their long-term health impacts were not known and there has been no published research about them.

The science team at GABA Labs has produced a "Nootropic" which was released to the market in the form of the drink Brand "Sentia" in January 2021 as a "botanical spirit" aimed at produced the relaxed and social effects normally associated with alcoholic drinks.

In collaboration with Amanda Feilding and the Beckley Foundation, David Nutt is working on the effects of psychedelics on cerebral blood flow.

Nutt worked as an advisor to the Ministry of Defence, Department of Health, and the Home Office.