According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime World Drug Report of 2012, ‘About 230 million people, or 5 per cent of the world’s adult population, are estimated to have used an illicit drug at least once in 2010’.
The report also deliberated that the global levels of ‘use, production and health consequences of illicit drugs’ has not changed significantly, other than the opium production levels which have risen after the ‘disease of the opium poppy and subsequent crop failure in 2010’.
It was found that the illegal drug use levels of between 3.4 and 6.6 per cent of adults (being persons aged 15-64) has remained stable for the past 5 year leading up to and including 2010.
With 10-13 percent of drug users continuing to be what you call ‘problem users’ which are those with a drug dependency and/or drug-use disorder, along with ‘the prevalence of HIV (estimated at approximately 20 per cent), hepatitis C (46.7 per cent) and hepatitis B (14.6 per cent)’ being among the drug users, the global affliction of disease continues to increase and leaves ‘approximately 1 in every 100 deaths among adults’ credited to the use of illicit drugs.
Although there is limited data regarding their production, the most prominent illicit drug circulated and used remains to be cannabis and coming in second, amphetamine type stimulants (ATS), excluding “ecstasy”.
Although cannabis and ATS’s being the more used the ‘dominant drug type accounting for treatment demand’ worldwide (predominantly in Asia and Europe) vestiges to be opioids.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime have been continuously working on the implementation of ‘integrated regional programmes, as well as promoting interregional and inter-agency responses’, in another words, international drug control systems. These programs focus on ‘restricting the use of drugs to medical and scientific purposes, supply reduction, demand reduction and the need for a balanced approach’. These measures are intended to target both the supply and demand sides of drug trade.
The main method of controlling the drug trade is to not only increase the risks for producers, traffickers and users of illicit drugs, but to intensify the law enforcement response to them also. The heightening of drug prices also contribute.
Drug control interventions not only have increasingly effective outcomes of ‘containing the expansion of the drug problem and of limiting the spread of illicit drug use and addiction’ but also results in unintended effects such as the development of black markets and the opportunities they make for organised crime.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime World Drug Report of 2012 conclusion goes as follows;
‘Drugs have been consumed throughout history, but the contemporary drug problem, which started to unfold in the 1960s, is characterized by both an expansion and a relative concentration of illicit drug use among young males living in urban settings. The drug control system has not averted the problem, but seems to have contained it to much lower levels of use than those society has experienced with more readily available legal psychoactive substances.’
For more information read; the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime World Drug Report of 2012
The UNODC also published an extended version of chapter 2 of the World Drug Report 2008, as a second report titled A Century of International Drug control. This report notes the progress made over the past 100 years in international drug control.
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