Alchohol more harmful than heroin, crack: UK study

"Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker" wrote Ogden Nash, American writer of humourous poetry, but he probably did not mean liquor is quicker in quite the same way as a team of British scientists has discovered.

According to the scientists, alcohol is a more dangerous drug than both crack and heroin on an assessment of the combined harms to the user and to others.

Presenting a new scale of drug harm that rates the damage to users themselves and to wider society, the scientists said alcohol beats all other drugs hands down on the 'harm' scale. And guess, what alcohol is three times as harmful as cocaine or tobacco.

According to the scale, devised by the scientists which included 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 take the second and third spot as the most harmful drugs.

Ecstasy comes in at number eight, according to the analysis.

According to professor David Nutt, chairman of the ISCD, whose work was published in the Lancet medical journal, the findings showed that the harms from alcohol warrant aggressive targeting as a valid and necessary public health strategy.