Illegal drugs ratings criticised

By Tim Castle

LONDON (Reuters) - Leading medical experts on Friday said Britain's classification of dangerous drugs was arbitrary and should include alcohol and tobacco, in the second report in a month criticising UK drugs policy.

But the government said it had no intention of reviewing its drugs classification system, which divides illegal substances into three classes with increasing penalties for possession or distribution.

In a study published in the medical weekly the Lancet, the experts said the split of drugs into classes A, B or C was based on "prejudice and assumptions" and did not match the harm the substances cause.

The authors, led by Bristol University Professor of Psychopharmacology David Nutt, said tobacco and alcohol together accounted for 90 percent of all drug-related deaths in the UK.

"Our results ... emphasise that the exclusion of alcohol and tobacco from the Misuse of Drugs Act is, from a scientific perspective, arbitrary," they wrote.

They said if the three-category classification was retained, alcohol should be ranked with heroin and cocaine in a revised class A -- the most serious category.

Tobacco would be a class B drug, while cannabis would remain in the lowest class C category, alongside LSD and ecstasy -- both currently ranked as class A narcotics.

In their study the authors asked two panels of drugs and addiction experts to rank 14 drugs by their physical harm to the user, the dependence they caused and the wider social damage they created.