The UK government doesn’t want to have to appoint scientific experts to its independent drugs advisory group, according to proposals published last week. The idea of allowing the government to opt out of receiving science advice on drugs policy has re-kindled old resentments. Judging by scientists’ comments so far, the proposal may result in another heated row over policy-makers’ treatment of scientific evidence.

Campaigners against the new proposal remember last year’s sacking of the then-chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), psychopharmacologist David Nutt. A number of members of the ACMD resigned in protest at Nutt’s treatment, and the affair led to the government reformulating the terms of engagement between scientists and policy-makers.

The ACMD was created to require at least six scientists among its 20 members (as the BBC’s Mark Easton explains in detail). But the Police Reform and Social Responsibility BIll, introduced to Parliament on 30 November, includes a paragraph that would sweep away this requirement. (A second clause would allow the Home Secretary to ban a substance for a year without asking the ACMD at all).

“It’s incredible that the government are trying to take us back to the time of ‘minister knows best’. Scrapping the need for expertise on the drugs advice is not only bad science. It’s also terrible politics,” Imran Khan, director for the Campaign for Science and Engineering, told The Guardian.

Crime prevention minister James Brokenshire said the proposal to remove the statutory requirement for six scientists would simply give the government greater flexibility in who it appointed to the ACMD. “Scientific advice is absolutely critical to the government’s approach to drugs and any suggestion that we are moving away from it is absolutely not true,” he said.

But, Khan points out that with another 14 posts at the government’s discretion, the flexibility argument is “unclear at best”. It may refer to the Home Office’s struggles to ban mephedrone in April, when difficulties emerged because no expert in veterinary medicine was on the council, notes the BBC’s Easton, who adds that present members of the ACMD seem onboard with the new proposal.

“I think another look at the range of expertise that was required statutorily on the advisory council was overdue. But the deliberate exclusion of any reference to any scientist on the committee is obviously worrying,” neurobiologist Colin Blakemore, former chairman of the UK’s Medical Research Council, told the BBC.

Science minister under the former government, Lord Drayson, tweeted: “Just heard about govt proposals to drop the need for proper advice from scientists. Complete madness obviously. Ministers do NOT know best.”

The Police Reform and Social Reponsibility Bill sees its first debate in the House of Commons on 13 December.