Hamish Champ: Is it me, or has everybody gone mad?

"Is me, or has everybody gone mad?" Not my words, dear reader, but the words of Brian Potter; owner and operator of the Phoenix Club, one of the UK's best-loved - albeit fictional - working men's clubs.

I pose the question Potter asked in the wake of the furore about alcohol supposedly being more harmful than crack.

Quite honestly I couldn't see what all the fuss were about (I'm still in Brian Potter mode, see?). Professor Nutt wasn't simply​ saying that alcohol was more harmful than a number of class A drugs, instead his research and that of others was pointing out that across the board in the UK the consumption of alcohol had a greater impact on society than did that of smack 'n' crack.

If you read Nutt's research paper in the Lancet - and believe me, I had a go - you'll see he doesn't suggest that heroin and crack are better to imbibe than booze. The research findings suggest - and I quote - "Many of the harms of drugs are affected by their availability and legal status."

Sure, in a graph appended to the report showing the 'harm to user' and 'harm to others' of various narcotic substances, alcohol tops the list. But it does so largely because of 'harm to others' - which is greater in size than its 'harm to user' - and the impact of its being taken on a wide scale. Whereas heroin, the next most 'dangerous' drug, is more 'harmful to the user' than to 'others'.

The incidence of taking heroin is much smaller than that of drinking alcohol. It figures that alcohol, a drug, is more impactful on society than heroin, another drug. Incidentally, mushrooms came last on the list, with no harm to others whatsoever. Food for thought, clearly.

Any road up, I think Nutt was merely highlighting that what alcohol, being a drug, can do within society needs to be assessed. He wasn't saying it was all bad though.

He wasn't saying ban people from having a few pints on the way home from work or a social drink with mates at the weekend - as some in the pub industry seemed to infer he was suggesting.

Nor was he saying what the more hysterical commentators in the mainstream media (oh alright, the Daily Mail​) suggested he was saying, eg, that on an ounce-for-ounce basis booze is worse than chasing the dragon.

It's the availability of booze, its legality and its common usage that can - and evidently does - lead to harm. That's what he focused on.

I challenge anyone to plough through the report, which is snappily entitled 'Drug harms in the UK: a multicriteria decision analysis​' and find any reason to beat one's chest or to pull out one's hair.

OK, in the current climate of binge drinking and potential for further government shilly-shallying with the pub and drinks industries the report might have fuelled a few fires here and there. It presumably was this which got industry representatives into such high dudgeon last week.

But those in the media who used the report to bash alcohol, or suggested that it was something to be afraid of, were clearly tilting at windmills. Hopefully anyone with an ounce of common sense would have realised that.