Alcohol is by far the most harmful drug in current use in Britain – doing more damage than crack or heroin, experts claimed yesterday.
The analysis was carried out by the former government adviser Professor David Nutt, aided by two other experts and reported in The Lancet.
The experts say they have developed a systematic scale to measure the harm caused by drugs, identifying the harm done to the user and the risk to others.
They conclude that alcohol is the most harmful drug – followed by crack and heroin and surpassing tobacco or cannabis.
They launched their findings as experts gathered for a conference in London, UK, convened by Professor Nutt’s organisation.
Professor Nutt, of Imperial College, London, UK, was controversially sacked last year by the last British government for publicly challenging its drugs policy – despite chairing its drugs advisory committee.
Several experts quit the committee in support of him and he has since formed an "independent scientific committee on drugs".
Out of 100, they awarded tobacco a score of 72 and heroin a score of 55. This compared with cocaine at 27, tobacco at 26 and cannabis at 20.
Hallucinogenic mushrooms scored just five and LSD seven.
Professor Nutt said yesterday: "What a new classification system might look like would depend on what set of harms — to self or others—you are trying to reduce.
"But if you take overall harm, then alcohol, heroin and crack are clearly more harmful than all others so perhaps drugs with a score of 40 or more could be class A; 39 to 20 class B; 19-10 class C and 10 or under class D."
The experts conclude: "Our findings lend support to previous work in the UK and the Netherlands, confirming that the present drug classification systems have little relation to the evidence of harm. They also accord with the conclusions of previous expert reports that aggressively targeting alcohol harms is a valid and necessary public health strategy."
Writing in the same journal Professor Wim van den Brink, of the Amsterdam Institute for Addiction Research, Holland, says legislators would also need to examine "polydrug" effects – caused by users mixing cocktails of drugs, often creating potentially lethal or dangerous combinations.
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