HORIZON - Is Alcohol Worse than Ecstasy? - BBC2 (aired on 5th Feb 2008)

Watch Horizon's Britain's Most Dangerous Drug, an investigation of the dangers associated with 20 commonly used drugs, and whether their relative harms are accurately reflected in the current classification system.

This programme has its roots in one of the most important outcomes of the Beckley Foundation seminars, a seminal article in The Lancet in 2007 by Profs. Colin Blakemore, David Nutt et al., outlining an evidence-based alternative to the thoroughly unsatisfactory classification system in the UK. Following the debate generated by this article, Horizon approached Prof. Dave Nutt, Amanda Feilding, director of the Beckley Foundation, Prof. Val Curran and others, about making a film on the subject.

This system of classification the programme highlights, based on the scoring of harms by experts, on the basis of scientific evidence, has much to commend it and has long been recommended by the Beckley Foundation. This approach provides a comprehensive and transparent process for assessment of the danger of drugs. The system is rigorous and transparent, and involves a formal, quantitative assessment of several aspects of harm. It can easily be updated as knowledge advances. This system could therefore be usefully developed to aid in decision-making by regulatory bodies—e.g., the UK's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and the European Medicines Evaluation Agency—to provide an evidence-based approach to drug classification.

The graph below shows the final ranking of all the drugs included in the ranking procedure. It also shows the classification of each substance under the Misuse of Drugs Act. Although the two substances with the highest harm ratings (heroin and cocaine) are class A drugs, overall there was a surprisingly poor correlation between the relative harm rating of each substance and their classification under the Misuse of Drugs Act.