argued: Scott Morgan reports how he once attended a discussion of Peter Reuter and David Boyum's book An Analytic Assessment of U.S. Drug Policy, in which the authors admitted ignoring the legalization option in their analysis. Boyum claimed that there was no legitimate political support for ending the drug war and that he and Reuter had therefore confined themselves to recommendations that they thought were politically viable. Arguments against political calculation The deaths of two teenage boys in the United Kingdom in March 2010 sparked a nationwide controversy over the amphetamine drug mephedrone, which had gained popularity as a legal high. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) recommended a ban on the drug, which was quickly passed into law, but the decision was criticised for being politically rather than scientifically driven and led to the resignation of the ACMD's Eric Carlin, the eighth member of the council to leave in five months in protest at what was seen as political interference. Toxicology reports released in May revealed that the boys had never taken the drug. In a later commentary, David Nutt noted that the pharmacology of mephedrone was not known at the time it was banned, and that the decision was so knee-jerk that the ACMD accidentally banned the wrong enantiomer for about a year. Professor Colin Blakemore, professor of neuroscience at the University of Oxford, said: "This shocking news should be a salutary lesson to tabloid journalists and prejudiced politicians who held a gun to the heads of the ACMD and demanded that this drug should be banned before a single autopsy had been completed ... The politicians talk about using drug classification as a way of sending 'messages' to young people. I fear that the only message that will be sent by the hasty decision on mephedrone is that the drug laws deserve no respect." Professor David Nutt, the former chairman of the ACMD, said: "the previous government's rush to ban mephedrone never had any serious scientific credibility – it looks much more like a decision based on a short-term electoral calculation. This news demonstrates why it's so important to base drug classification on the evidence, not fear, and why the police, media and politicians should only make public pronouncements once the facts are clear." Public opinion Public opinion on prohibitive drug laws A direct example of societal attitudes driving the International Drug Conventions is