Time -- How often does life really imitate art? Let’s imagine that a writer has been commissioned to develop a comedic screenplay about the deeply serious business of how to classify and control drugs. The plot is likely to feature that staple slapstick character “the mad scientist,” and since Hollywood tends to choose Britons to portray its eccentrics and villains, the writer makes the scientist a British professor. What’s a good name for a nutty professor? Why not Professor Nutt? The problem with this scenario, as the writer discovers, is that there’s a real Professor Nutt, a campaigning British scientist who avers in a new study, Drug Harms in the U.K., that if you’re looking for the most dangerous drug of all, you have to start with alcohol, which is more harmful even than heroin and crack cocaine. (More on Time.com: 4 Reasons Binge Drinking Is a Public Health Problem)
