Alcohol More Dangerous Than Crack & Heroin

All you lushes who would never do drugs may need to check your moral superiority complexes at the club door. As Reuters reports, researchers found alcohol to be more dangerous than crack and heroin, when considering the overall impact of these drugs on both users and wider society.

British scientists came to this conclusion using a new rating scale they developed to assess and compare the damage caused by various drugs. They measured each drug's harms to the user, including drug-specific or drug-related death, damage to health, drug dependence and loss of relationships, etc. They also measured the impact each drug has in harming others, including crime, environmental damage, family conflict, international damage, economic cost and damage to community cohesion.

Using this scale, they found alcohol to be the most harmful drug, heroin the second most and crack cocaine the third. They found alcohol to be almost three times as harmful as cocaine and tobacco, and eight times as harmful as ecstasy. Frat guys just got a whole lot sketchier.

Professor David Nutt says, "Aggressively targeting alcohol harms is a valid and necessary public health strategy." He also notes, "It is intriguing...that the two legal drugs assessed--alcohol and tobacco--score in the upper segment of the ranking scale, indicating that legal drugs cause at least as much harm as do illegal substances." And, a resounding, "Duh," sweeps across the state of California.

Alcohol is the root cause of 2.5 million deaths a year, which result from alcohol-related diseases (heart and liver disease), road accidents, suicides and cancer, according to the World Health Organization.

Of course, the rate at which people use alcohol far exceeds the rate of use for other drugs, like heroin, crack, and cocaine, so it makes sense that alcohol would have a bigger negative impact on society than those other drugs. Nevertheless, the negative impact that alcohol has on our society is an astonishing reality check.

Yes, we all know that crack is seriously whack. But we shouldn't be cutting booze so much slack. Yep, that rhymed.