Who's In Charge Here?

Alcohol and tobacco `worse' than dope

I am clean and sober and am not advocating drug use. I also am addicted to tobacco. (aspringwind)

Alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than marijuana or ecstasy, according to a new British study.

MariaCheng writing for The Standard

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than marijuana or ecstasy, according to a new British study.
In research published Friday in The Lancet magazine, David Nutt of Bristol University and colleagues propose a framework for classifying harmful substances based on the actual risks to society. Their ranking has alcohol and tobacco among the 10 most dangerous.

They used three factors to determine harm associated with any drug: physical harm to the user, potential for addiction, and the impact on society of drug use.

They asked two groups of experts - psychiatrists specializing in addiction and legal or police officials with special expertise - to assign scores to 20 drugs, including heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, amphetamines and LSD.

The team then calculated overall rankings. In the end, the experts agreed with each other - but not with the existing classification of substances.

Heroin and cocaine were most dangerous, followed by barbiturates and street methadone. Alcohol was the fifth- most harmful drug and tobacco the ninth. Cannabis came in 11th, and near the bottom of the list was ecstasy.

According to existing British drug policy, alcohol and tobacco are legal, while cannabis and ecstasy are illegal. "The current drug system is ill thought- out and arbitrary," said Nutt, referring to the practice of assigning drugs to three divisions, ostensibly based on the drugs' potential for harm.

Tobacco causes 40 percent of all hospital illnesses, while alcohol is blamed for more than half of all visits to hospital emergency rooms. The substances also harm society in other ways, damaging families and occupying police services.

Nutt hopes their paper will provoke debate about how drugs - including alcohol - should be regulated.

"This is a landmark paper," said Leslie Iversen, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University. "It is the first real step toward an evidence-based classification of drugs." Based on the paper's results, he added, alcohol and tobacco could not be excluded.

"The rankings also suggest the need for better regulation of the more harmful drugs that are currently legal, [like] tobacco and alcohol," wrote Wayne Hall, of the University of Queensland in an accompanying Lancet article.

Nutt also called for more education on drugs. "All drugs are dangerous," he said. "Even the ones people know and love and use every day."