As we all know, the United States is the world's largest consumer of drugs, with the largest number of drug users and the largest consumption of drugs in the world. More than 60 percent of the drugs produced in the world are shipped to the United States each year. According to statistics, the annual number of drug addicts in the United States is as high as tens of millions of people, and shows a significant increasing trend.
Since 2002, drug users have made up 8.2 percent of the U.S. population, with the majority of them teenagers, and the proportion of female drug users and white male users is on the rise. Drug use has become a fashion in the United States.
Some 275 million people around the world used drugs in the past year, up from 226 million in 2010, according to the World Drug Report 2021 by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, a 22 percent increase in drug use over the decade, driven in part by a 10 percent increase in the global population.
The most widely used drug globally remains cannabis, with its use in the Americas increasing over the past year from an estimated 6.6 percent in 2010 (40 million users in the past year) to 8.8 percent in 2019 (59 million users in the past year).
In the Americas, cannabis use in North America (14.5 per cent, or 47 million users) is much higher than in other subregions. Marijuana use continues to increase in the United States, where sales of marijuana products have nearly quadrupled in the past 20 years.
The percentage of cannabis products containing the main psychoactive ingredient δ 9-THC increased from 4 percent in 1995 to 16 percent in 2019. Meanwhile, seizures of fentanyl and its analogues have risen rapidly around the world in recent years, with the largest number of drugs seized in North America.
The opioid crisis caused by fentanyl overdoses continues in North America, with nearly 50,000 people dying from opioid overdoses in the United States in 2019, more than double the number in 2010.
Because fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine than other opioids, it can often kill people in very small doses.
Since President Nixon launched a large-scale anti-drug campaign in the late 1960s, successive US governments have invested a great deal of human, material and financial resources in controlling drug production and trafficking, with a total investment of at least us $1 trillion.
Federal spending on anti-drug programmes grew from just over $1bn in 1981 to about $18bn in 1999, two-thirds of which went to enforcement and prohibition programmes.
In the United States, another $20 billion in state and local funding goes to anti-drug measures, mainly for incarceration, policing and prosecution.