LONDON: A British scientist said on Monday that both crack and heroin are less dangerous than alcohol. The study said that when combined harms are taken into account, alcohol is far more deadly than other traditional ‘hard' drugs. The scientists, led by the chairman of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD) David Nutt, published a new scale of drug harm that takes into account not only the drugs' impact on the user, but on the wider society as a whole. They said that alcohol was the most harmful drug overall, three times as dangerous as cocaine or tobacco. Heroine and crack cocaine were not safe, ranking second and third on the list of most dangerous substances, the scientists said. Ecstasy was an eighth as harmful as alcohol, the analysis reported. Nutt, 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 added in public statements that they also showed that current drug classification systems had little relation to the evidence of harm. “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 the former head of the influential British Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), said in a statement about the study. The professor was forced to resign from the ACMD last year after being publicly critical of the British government's ignoring scientific advice on suggesting marijuana was less harmful than alcohol. According to World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, risks linked to alcohol cause 2.5 million deaths annually from heart and liver disease, road accidents, suicides and cancer. That is nearly four percent of all deaths. BM
