When two teenage boys and a 24-year-old woman die and a new - and, at present, legal - drug called mephedrone is the prime suspect in their deaths, parents inevitably panic.

So the last thing they want to hear is that, in fact, alcohol is probably more dangerous than meow meow, as mephedrone is nicknamed, and is certainly more harmful than a host of other recreational drugs, such as LSD, magic mushrooms, cannabis and ecstasy.

But this is the grim warning from fellow parent Professor David Nutt, the former government drugs adviser.

"For me, as a father with four children, aged 18 to 26, the drug that I know could kill my kids is alcohol. It is the drug that has caused the most damage to my kids' generation and I think we have got to be honest about that," says Nutt, sitting in a modest meeting room at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (CCJS) - the independent charity, he jokes, "which is responsible for all this".

By "all this" he means his controversial sacking as chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) by Alan Johnson last October after the CCJS published his paper entitled Estimating Drug Harms: A Risky Business?