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
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 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, 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 Britain's Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs , 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.
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.
Drugs were scored out of 100, with 100 given to the most harmful drug and zero indicating no harm at all.
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