But the citation doesn't support his post. Overall it cites the researchers as listing alcohol causing less mean physical harm than heroin and cocaine, less acute physical harm than both, and almost as much chronic physical harm as heroin (both rated higher than cocaine). The only category it rates alcohol the highest in is social harm caused by intoxication.

edit: I may be looking at a different study (I can't read that economist link). I'm referring to "Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs," though I do see another study "Drug harms in the UK: a multi-criteria decision analysis" that corroborates his post.