Joe Farrugia, the chief executive of Sense Group, does well to point out that the report of the study recently published by David Nutt and others in the Lancet, comparing the harmful effects of alcohol to heroin and crack, could send the wrong signal to our youth.

Prof. Nutt, a pharmacologist based at Imperial College, London, is a highly controversial figure in the UK. He was a chief advisor to the UK government on drugs until he was unceremoniously relieved of his post by the Home Secretary of the former Labour government in 2009 for exceeding his remit. He is recorded as having stated, among other things, in an interview that “horse riding can be as harmful as taking ecstasy”.

In fact, he has persisted in exploiting every opportunity to minimise the terrible addictive and destructive properties of many drugs behind assertions (which nobody questions) of the harmful effects of alcoholism in the UK.

His crusade in the UK has little relevance in our Maltese context except that his repeated comparisons of the harm done by alcohol to that of heroin and crack is not only odious but highly dangerous and probably maleficent when translated to our shores.