Government accidentally admits real reason for withholding drug policy info

There's a fascinating blogpost on the BBC website today from Martin Rosenbaum.

It describes how the Home Office postponed the release of research from a Freedom of Information request from Transform Drugs Policy Foundation and then when they did finally release it, some annotations that were clearly never meant for external eyes had accidentally been left in that showed the real reason for the delay.

Here are the snippets:

and

It's worth reading the full blogpost for the background details but what this demonstrates to me is that firstly, government departments sometimes withhold FOI requests for political reasons which is utterly against the way they are supposed to be used.

But secondly and most importantly they fear that the research that underpins their drugs policy will not stand up to scrutiny and could actually be used to make the counter argument.

So much for evidence based policy eh?