UK Study: Alcohol Is The Worst Drug

It seems self-apparent to me, but a new study out of the UK declares that alcohol is the worst drug for society, based on the number of people whose lives it affects adversely. According to the study's authors, governments should be focusing more on alcohol abuse than the war on drugs.

The study involved 16 criteria, including a drug's affects on users' physical and mental health, social harms including crime, "family adversities" and environmental damage, economic costs and "international damage". The modeling exercise concluded that heroin, crack and methylamphetamine, also known as crystal meth, were the most harmful drugs to individuals, but alcohol, heroin and crack cocaine were the most harmful to society. When the scores for both types of harm were added together, alcohol emerged as the most harmful drug, followed by heroin and crack. The findings run contrary to the government's long-established drug classification system, but the paper's authors argue that 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."

The startled television reports I saw last night completely missed the point of the study and openly wondered "how in the world" booze could be worse than crack. Oy.