The research evaluates recreational drugs on a wide range of factors, weighing up the mental and physical damage users suffer alongside crime and costs to the community.
It found the most dangerous drugs to individual users were heroin, crack cocaine and crystal meth.
But when all factors were taken into account alcohol was found to be most harmful, followed by heroin and crack.
Ecstasy and LSD were found to be the least damaging.
The study ranks alcohol as three times as harmful as cocaine or tobacco and eight times more harmful than ecstasy.
It also contradicts the Home Office's decision to make so-called legal high mephedrone a Class B drug, saying it is only one-fifth as damaging as alcohol.
If you take overall harm, then alcohol, heroin and crack are clearly more harmful than all others.
Professor David Nutt
The study was led by drugs expert Professor David Nutt, who has hit the headlines before for arguing that the current approach to regulating recreational drugs is fundamentally flawed.
He was sacked a year ago from his post as the Government's top drugs adviser
for criticising ministers' decision to upgrade cannabis from class C to class B. His comment that "you are more likely to die riding a horse than you are by taking cannabis or ecstasy" was widely reported at the time. Since then he has formed the
Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD), and is urging ministers to do more to tackle alcohol abuse and change the way recreational drugs are regulated.
http://news.sky.com/sky-news/content...3/15760424.jpg
According to Prof Nutt drinking alcohol is even worse than taking heroin "What a new classification system might look like would depend on what set of harms to self or others you are trying to reduce," he said. "But if you take overall harm, then alcohol, heroin and crack are clearly more harmful than all others."His study's findings run contrary to
the Government's long-established drug classification system. But the authors argue their system - based on the consensus of experts - provides an accurate assessment of harm for policy makers."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," the paper says. "They also accord with the conclusions of previous expert reports that aggressively targeting alcohol harms is a valid and necessary public health strategy."
