One could argue that the difference is in the harm — perhaps alcohol is a relatively harmless drug, while ecstasy could have a more detrimental impact on the person using it and the people around it. A group of researchers in the UK decided to rank drugs by harm by devising a harm score. The researchers took into account both the harm that the drug inflicts on the person using it and on other people. While alcohol trails behind heroin and cocaine as the most harmful drugs for the user, alcohol is by far the most harmful to other people — and the most harmful when the two measures were added together. Ecstasy was found to have a fraction of the harm of alcohol and basically no harm to other people.