Alcohol, Tobacco Worse Than Illegal Drugs?

British Study Finds Them More Dangerous Than Some Illegal Narcotics

(AP)  New "landmark" research finds that alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than some illegal drugs like marijuana or Ecstasy and should be classified as such in legal systems, according to a new British study.

In research published Friday in The Lancet magazine, Professor David Nutt of Britain's Bristol University and colleagues proposed a new framework for the classification of harmful substances, based on the actual risks posed to society. Their ranking listed alcohol and tobacco among the top 10 most dangerous substances.

Nutt and colleagues used three factors to determine the harm associated with any drug: the physical harm to the user, the drug's potential for addiction, and the impact on society of drug use. The researchers asked two groups of experts — psychiatrists specializing in addiction and legal or police officials with scientific or medical expertise — to assign scores to 20 different drugs, including heroin, cocaine, Ecstasy, amphetamines, and LSD.

Nutt and his colleagues then calculated the drugs' overall rankings. In the end, the experts agreed with each other — but not with the existing British classification of dangerous substances.

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

According to existing British and U.S. drug policy, alcohol and tobacco are legal, while cannabis and Ecstasy are both illegal. Previous reports, including a study from a parliamentary committee last year, have questioned the scientific rationale for Britain's drug classification system.

"The current drug system is ill thought-out and arbitrary," said Nutt, referring to the United Kingdom's practice of assigning drugs to three distinct divisions, ostensibly based on the drugs' potential for harm. "The exclusion of alcohol and tobacco from the Misuse of Drugs Act is, from a scientific perspective, arbitrary," write Nutt and his colleagues in The Lancet.

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 that the research will provoke debate within the UK and beyond about how drugs — including socially acceptable drugs such as alcohol — should be regulated. While different countries use different markers to classify dangerous drugs, none use a system like the one proposed by Nutt's study, which he hopes could serve as a framework for international authorities.

"This is a landmark paper," said Dr. Leslie Iversen, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University. Iversen was not connected to the research. "It is the first real step towards an evidence-based classification of drugs." He added that based on the paper's results, alcohol and tobacco could not reasonably be excluded.

"The rankings also suggest the need for better regulation of the more harmful drugs that are currently legal, i.e. tobacco and alcohol," wrote Wayne Hall, of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, in an accompanying Lancet commentary. Hall was not involved with Nutt's paper.

While experts agreed that criminalizing alcohol and tobacco would be challenging, they said that governments should review the penalties imposed for drug abuse and try to make them more reflective of the actual risks and damages involved.

Nutt called for more education so that people were aware of the risks of various drugs. "All drugs are dangerous," he said. "Even the ones people know and love and use every day."

[bragdonec0]

viva la revolution!!

[jasonmcj]

Why is this news. Everyone knows this. Sadly, there is a huge philosophical gap bewteen what we preach as a nation and what we practice.

Pot is harmless, why is it illegal.

Answer: Drug companies lobby to keep it that way so they can seel you dangerous drugs that pot will cure without side affects. See: nausea medication.

[michellem99-2009]

I have talked this over with my friend. What it comes down to is this the states are making money from sale of items in this story. We know that smoking and drinking is a health issue but money wins. I would like to see the drink ads banned in the same way smoke ads are. I hate 2rd hand smoke. If they made them illegal the states lose money and crime would go up. So the states tax them. They will never legalise grass/pot, I have never smoked.

[gunownerdan]

WHY IS MARIJUANA STILL ILLEGAL??????

I'll tell you why.

- Legalization would endanger billions of dollars
in prison and law enforcement spending, thousands of jobs would be at stake.

- It is useful in society to have some laws which virtually everybody breaks - that way undesirables can be arrested at will.

- Legal drugs would interfere with the existing pharmaceutical industry.

- Fully legal hemp would interfere with existing paper, rope, clothing and other industries.

- The war on drugs provides a convenient cover under which to project U.S. influence into many countries, particularly in South America and South Asia.

- The war on drugs is a critical revenue source for the prison industry, the CIA, and the DEA.

Help STOP THE MADNESS!

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition:
http://www.leap.cc

Marijuana Policy Project:
http://www.mpp.org

[bildooreilly]

It's not a Sham, it's BIG BUSINESS, the biggest business in our country... Here's how it works... First of all you have the CIA and DEA themselves smuggling in the drugs and distributing it across the country through their operatives (some of the biggest dealers are cops they have working for them) this has all been documented millions of times and if you don't believe me I can start posting tons of info on this... Then they arrest their competition and low level users, and throw them in prisons which are currently THE BIGGEST INDUSTRY IN THE NATION... then they charge taxpayers $30,000 a year to warehouse these people, then they sell them off as corporate slave labor to their corporate buddies for 17 cents an hour. In 1970 there were only 200,000 people in jails and prisons in our country, we now have over 2.5 million and growing fast, more per capita than any other country in the world has ever had at any point in history, and they claim we're a "free country." What we have here folks is an out of control machine, I'm all for locking up dangerous criminals, but the fact is most of those people don't belong in prison, these are our family and friends, somebodys anyways, and everyones just happily sacrificing them to this evil machine hoping it isn't going going to eat them, well let me tell you folks, it's going to eat you too, burying your head in the sand isn't going to save you, we'll all probably get our turn in the gulags of america.

[rray52]

Got some free time? Read the article and see if you notice what%u2019s wrong with this headline that CBS used.

"Alcohol, Tobacco Worse Than Illegal Drugs?
British Study Finds Them More Dangerous Than Some Illegal Narcotics"

Hint: definition of narcotic refers to opium, opium derivatives, Controlled Substances Act also includes coca and cocaine.

[scott4261]

The epidemic of drug use is much more widespread than anyone wants to admit. I am against prohibition, because people 21 and over should be able to make that choice for themselves. Prohibition did not work for alcohol and it has not and will never work for drug use. Better to regulate it and tax it. And if that is done, then crime will drop dramatically because the underground market will disappear.

[agnim]

Tampering with tobacco by adding chemicals is what, along with increased pollutions in the environment, are what have caused tobacco to appear to harmful today.

And alcohol is definitely a stinker.

However, as Nutt case correctly noted, ALL drugs are dangerous.

Pumping smoke of ANY kind into the respiratory system is definitely choking off oxygen supply.
Lungs were designed to breathe fresh air not pollution, and definitely not deliberate pollution.

[cosmicfluke]

oh please, benevoloent and always-to-be-trusted, almighty Government, protect me with your prison industry, with your corrupt laws that jail innocent people for doing nothing and then putting them to work for 70 cents a day for Nike and Microsoft, among others...

I wonder if the fact that just about everyone I know that smokes pot is a liberal has anything at all to do with the laws that threaten us in this "free" country??

[interested4]

For anyone interested in truth in journalism, I strongly suggest you look deeper into this article and it's sources. There are some grave misstatements made, and even their own sources don't say them. This is pure propaganda, unsupported by fact and skewered to make things out as worse than they actually are.

For instance, the article claims that 40% of hospital admissions are tobacco related and more than 50% are alcohol related. Aside from the blatant stupidity of that statement, they are unsubstantiated. In the full article in "The Lancet", the source for that statement doesn't even say it. In fact, it says nothing at all about tobacco as a cause of hospital admissions, and only relays an estimate of UP TO 33% MAY be alcohol related; this alone should throw suspicion on the entire study. Don't believe me? Look into it yourself, it's all there if you want to search for it.