In its most recent issue, authoritative medical journal The Lancet published a study co-authored by Professor David Nutt, a former UK government advisor who was dismissed for suggesting that drugs should be classified according to harm, which used 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’,’ in order to determine just how harmful certain drugs really were.
Its controversial conclusion: Alcohol is more harmful to society than meth, crack, and heroin.
From the report:
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. […]
They also accord with the conclusions of previous expert reports that aggressively targeting alcohol harms is a valid and necessary public health strategy.