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UK: Study: Alcohol, tobacco worse than drugs
Maria Cheng Jordan Falls News
Friday 23 Mar 2007 LONDON - 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. 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. 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. "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. 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. "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. 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." http://www.localnewswatch.com/jordanfalls/stories/index.php?action=fullnews&id=84903
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