1)  The Lancet

David J Nutt , Leslie A King, et al. Drug harms in the UK: a multicriteria decision analysis, The Lancet, Early Online Publication, 1 November 2010, doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(10)61462-6

            “Drugs including alcohol and tobacco products are a major cause of harms to individuals and society. For this reason, some drugs are scheduled under the United Nations 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances. These controls are represented in UK domestic legislation by the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act (as amended). Other drugs, notably alcohol and tobacco, are regulated by taxation, sales, and restrictions on the age of purchase. Newly available drugs such as mephedrone (4-methylmethcathinone) have recently been made illegal in the UK on the basis of concerns about their harms, and the law on other drugs, particularly cannabis, has been toughened because of similar concerns. 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”.

2) The Guardian

Sarah Boseley, Health Editor, reports on the paper by Nutt et al published on the Lancet ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/nov/01/alcohol-more-harmful-than-heroin-crack)

            “Nutt was sacked last year by the home secretary at the time, Alan Johnson, for challenging ministers' refusal to take the advice of the official Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which he chaired. The committee wanted cannabis to remain a class C drug and for ecstasy to be downgraded from class A, arguing that these were less harmful than other drugs. Nutt claimed scientific evidence was overruled for political reasons. Today's paper, published by the respected Lancet medical journal, will be seen as a challenge to the government to take on the fraught issue of the relative harms of legal and illegal drugs, which proved politically damaging to Labour. Led by the sacked government drugs adviser David Nutt with colleagues from the breakaway Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, the study says that if drugs were classified on the basis of the harm they do, alcohol would be class A, alongside heroin and crack cocaine”.

3) Blog of the King's College Centre for the Humanities and Health

Natalie Banner comments upon the article by Nutt published on the Lancet: “Alcohol vs. Heroin: What's the Harm?” (http://humanitiesandhealth.wordpress.com/2010/11/02/alcohol-vs-heroin-whats-the-harm/)

            “Two factors therefore combine to justify the intentionally provocative conclusion that alcohol is more harmful that heroin. Firstly, the ‘harms’ recorded are those which fall within the domain of health and social services. This excludes the ordinary drinking habits of the vast majority of ‘social’ drinkers. Secondly, as a public health issue, the scale of alcoholism or alcohol dependence as compared to heroin addiction does entail that alcohol causes greater health and social problems than heroin in this country. But I guess with those caveats the headline doesn’t sound as snappy”.

4)Lancet Oncology

Richard Sullivan, Arnie D Purushotham:  The Goldilocks' problem of cancer medicines, The Lancet Oncology, Volume 11, Issue 11, Pages 1017 - 1018, November 2010, doi:10.1016/S1470-2045(10)70224-2.

            “Rarely does a week go past without a further addition to the already monumental corpus of literature on pharmaceutical policy. Cancer medicines and particularly NICE-related issues in policies and access to cancer drugs have now become the major news item for the UK media, adding fuel to an already flammable mixture of pharmaceutical industry and politics. In the heat of these ongoing debates, however, serious policy issues of cancer drug access, affordability, and usage remain ever present”.