The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) recently released its World Drug Report 2026, finding that an estimated 256 million people have consumed cannabis within the last year, and that “cannabis remains the most widely used drug by far.” It is worth noting that alcohol and tobacco were not included in the analysis.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 2.3 billion people are alcohol consumers globally, more than 3 million people die annually due to alcohol, and “alcohol causes more than 5% of the global disease burden.” Additionally, WHO estimates that 1.2 billion people are tobacco consumers, and that tobacco use is “responsible for over 7 million deaths annually as well as disability and long-term suffering from tobacco-related diseases.” Both substances are legal and readily available across the globe, while cannabis commerce is still largely prohibited across the world.
“Cannabis production, trafficking and use are all evolving, likely in part due to the ongoing changes in perception towards the drug around the time when many jurisdictions, notably in North America, adopted legalization and/or decriminalization policies.” the UNODC wrote in a press release announcing the publication of its World Drug Report 2026. “The number of people using cannabis has grown by 40 per cent over the past decade, while the prevalence of its use increased from 3.8 per cent of the population aged 15-64 in 2014 to 4.8 per cent in 2024. Cannabis seizures also reached historically high levels in 2024.”
“Historically, most cannabis trafficking has been within regions, largely because cannabis can be grown virtually anywhere. Yet inter-regional trade, with supply coming from North America, is growing: over 2015–2024, 57 countries or territories outside North America identified it as a source region for cannabis seizures, up from just 11 in the preceding decade.” UNODC added.
If there is one major cannabis-focused takeaway from the World Drug Report, it is that cannabis prohibition does not work. Hundreds of millions of people around the world consume cannabis, whether it is legal or not. Cannabis prohibition does not eliminate use. Rather, it shifts the market profits toward organized crime and results in consumers and patients using untested cannabis products.
Furthermore, cannabis prohibition results in limited public resources being diverted away from more worthy efforts toward investigating, arresting, and incarcerating people for cannabis activity. Nearly every morning, people can read headlines about ‘major cannabis busts’ around the world involving large amounts of cannabis being seized. Every one of those headlines should serve as a reminder that there is a better, more sensible approach to cannabis commerce.
Thankfully, an increasing number of jurisdictions are modernizing their cannabis policies and regulations to permit medical and adult-use cannabis commerce. Those policy modernizations don’t just benefit people who consume cannabis; they also provide benefits to all members of society in direct and indirect ways.
For starters, legalized cannabis commerce creates jobs, generates taxes and fees, and boosts local economies. Also, cannabis legalization results in direct savings to national and local governments when they no longer waste money enforcing failed cannabis prohibition. For example, France spends an estimated €570m annually on cannabis prohibition enforcement. That money could either be returned to taxpayers or spent on other things that benefit society as a whole.
Another major benefit of modernized cannabis laws and regulations is affording patients and consumers the ability to acquire and use tested cannabis products. That, in turn, boosts public health outcomes. Allowing legalized cannabis commerce to boost public health outcomes is a major premise behind recent adult-use policy modernizations in Europe. Legalization works, and prohibition does not. Anyone who claims otherwise is likely benefiting in some way from prohibition, including politically and/or economically.
Hellbound and Down 