TO OUTSIDERS, it will seem shockingly narrow-minded. At a conference on drug
abuse last year, sponsored by the US government’s Center for Substance Abuse
Prevention, a speaker was shouted down and told to “Shut the fuck up”. Her
crime? Simply saying that government anti-drugs funds should go only to
programmes based on methods that have been shown to work, and for suggesting
that a popular scheme called Girl Talk wasn’t one of them. Only the conservative
media thought the incident worth mentioning: the woman who had been silenced was
a noted conservative.
But for anyone following the debate over US…
