Drug experts say alcohol worse than crack, heroin

LONDON,  (Reuters) – Alcohol is a more dangerous drug  than both crack and heroin when the combined harms to the user  and to others are assessed, British scientists said yesterday.

Presenting a new scale of drug harm that rates the damage to  users themselves and to wider society, the scientists rated  alcohol the most harmful overall and almost three times as  harmful as cocaine or tobacco.

According to the scale, devised by a group of scientists  including Britain’s Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs  (ISCD) and an expert adviser to the European Monitoring Centre  for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), heroin and crack cocaine  rank as the second and third most harmful drugs.

Ecstasy is only an eighth as harmful as alcohol, according  to the scientists’ analysis.

Professor David Nutt, chairman of the ISCD, whose work was  published in the Lancet medical journal, said the findings  showed that “aggressively targeting alcohol harms is a valid and  necessary public health strategy”.

He said they also showed that current drug classification  systems had little relation to the evidence of harm.

Alcohol and tobacco are legal for adults in Britain and many  other countries, while drugs such as ecstasy and cannabis and  LSD are often illegal and carry the threat of prison sentences.

“It is intriguing to note that the two legal drugs assessed  — alcohol and tobacco — score in the upper segment of the  ranking scale, indicating that legal drugs cause at least as  much harm as do illegal substances,” Nutt, who was formerly head  of the influential British Advisory Council on the Misuse of  Drugs (ACMD), said in a statement about the study.

Nutt was forced to quit the ACMD a year ago after publicly  criticising ministers for ignoring scientific advice suggesting  cannabis was less harmful than alcohol.

The World Health Organisation estimates that risks linked to  alcohol cause 2.5 million deaths a year from heart and liver  disease, road accidents, suicides and cancer — accounting for  3.8 percent of all deaths. It is the third leading risk factor  for premature death and disabilities worldwide.

In an effort to offer a guide to policy makers in health,  policing, and social care, Nutt’s team rated drugs using a  technique called multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) which  assessed damage according to nine criteria on harm to the user  and seven criteria on harm to others.