Every drug here can hurt you. They are not equally harmful.
Thirteen drugs, scored on five different kinds of harm, from published research. The scores are rough and the ranking depends on what you think counts — so this site shows you the working and lets you set the weights yourself.
Nothing on this site is a recommendation, and nothing here is called safe. The lowest-scoring drug on the page has still hurt people. If you or someone close to you is using: carry naloxone, test the supply, and don't use alone. Full safety information.
The harm is spread out, and the law does not track it.
Each row is one drug. Each dot is one of the five kinds of harm, placed from 0 to 100. The pale band behind each dot is the plausible range — how uncertain that single number is. The grey bar shows how far apart a drug's five harms are from each other.
Rows are ordered by the average of the five scores. That is one choice among many, not the answer. Averaging treats "one bad night" and "damage to others" as equally important, which is a value judgment, not a finding. Change that judgment and the order changes — which is the entire point of the ranking page. Where a score is marked withheld, a value existed but was withdrawn as not comparable with its neighbours. A blank is never treated as a zero.
They differ enormously
Across these five measures the scores run from 6 to 79 on a 0–100 scale. Treating every drug on this page as one undifferentiated category throws away almost everything the evidence says.
Legal status is a poor guide
The highest-scoring drug here, alcohol, is legal at 21. The lowest-scoring controlled drug, LSD, is illegal. Legal-at-21 drugs reach 79 on this scale; illegal ones start as low as 11. Whatever the law is tracking, it is not this measurement.
Four things worth knowing before you trust a score.
- A score is a comparison, never a verdict. 8 out of 100 does not mean safe. It means less harmful, on these measures, than the things scored higher.
- The ranges matter more than the dots. Where two drugs' ranges overlap, the evidence cannot really tell them apart. The ranking page groups drugs into bands for exactly this reason instead of listing them 1 to 13.
- "Harm" is five different things. one bad night, damage to your body, getting hooked, danger in quitting, damage to others. A drug can be near-harmless on one and severe on another.
- Someone made these judgments, and it was one person. Every score, its source, and how good that source is are published and checkable. This is a single-author project that has not yet been independently reviewed.
Where do you want to go?
What this is, and what it is not yet.
The ranking chart is a transparent single-author model, published with its full working. The research framework alongside it is a separate, slower effort to do one narrow question properly.
- It is not a completed systematic review, a clinical recommendation, or a population-wide safety claim.
- It has not been independently reviewed, prospectively registered, or run through a full database search.
- The one released estimate from the evidence work is a secondary, attribution-based outcome with very low certainty. See the certainty page.
- Everything is checkable. Data, protocols, and validators ship with the site.