National Public Radio (NPR) reported British experts ranked various drugs (alcohol, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, marijuana, etc.) on how destructive they are to both individuals and society. They also took into account how addictive the drugs are and how much lasting harm they do the body.

While the researchers claimed that alcohol was the most harmful drug, other drugs also ranked high when it comes to self-destruction. If you want the express checkout, the best is heroin, crack cocaine and meth. These drugs get you out the door and on your way to the cemetery quickly and efficiently.

However, if you want a death just about as ugly, but one that's slower and destroys as many lives and families as possible along the way, researchers say go with alcohol.

The researchers found that alcohol wreaks the greatest havoc on both individuals and society, partially because it's legal, plentiful and extremely insidious.

According to the researcherfs, marijuana, ecstasy and LSD ranked the lowest. NPR reported that the study was paid for by Britain's Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and was published online November 1 in the medical journal The Lancet.

Researchers concede booze is not going to go away. We tried that once in America. It didn't work. "We cannot return to the days of Prohibition," Leslie King, an adviser to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and one of the study's authors, told NPR. "Alcohol is too embedded in our culture, and it won't go away."

Still, it's curious how our leaders accept that when it comes to booze, but turn into Eliot Ness when it comes to pot and other drugs at the low end of the danger spectrum.

"What governments decide is illegal is not always based on science," Wim van den Brink, a professor of psychiatry and addiction at the University of Amsterdam, told NPR. Although not one of the researchers in the study, he co-authored a commentary in the Lancet.

"Drugs that are legal cause at least as much damage, if not more, than drugs that are illicit," he tells NPR. Alcohol is particularly harmful, he added.

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