Global drug markets are expanding, diversifying, and adapting through new routes, technologies, substances, and consumer patterns, while public policy often struggles to keep pace. The latest UN report shows that drugs are no longer only a matter of substances, but also of markets, public health, inequality, violence, gender, youth, regulation, and state capacity.
The new World Drug Report 2026 from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is the latest update to a global snapshot of illegal substances.
Presented by the United Nations as one of the most comprehensive annual assessments of drug production, trafficking, use, and related harms, the document offers several pieces of news, data, and perspectives, all connected by the same idea: the global drug market no longer moves the way it used to.
It adapts faster, mixes more substances, changes routes, uses new technologies, finds new consumers, and exploits the cracks of the real world better than almost anyone: wars, poverty, weak borders, saturated ports, social media, inequality, lack of treatment, and policies that often arrive too late.
Although the report corresponds to 2026, many of its most important figures go up to 2024: this is a usual lag in global reports, which depend on official data, estimates, and international validation processes.
The overall picture is striking. In 2024, around 331 million people are estimated to have used some drug during the previous year—34% more than a decade earlier. Cannabis remains the most widely used substance in the world, with an estimated 256 million users. Cocaine is estimated to have reached 25 million people. Amphetamines, 32 million. Opioids remain at around 63 million. So far, we are counting users like coins. What comes next is more interesting: a deeper transformation, with more supply, more demand, more substances, and more markets moving simultaneously.
Cocaine: The Business That Keeps Growing
Let’s start with one of the hardest points to ignore in the UN drug report. If there is one substance that emerges with renewed alarm, it is cocaine. Born from the ancestral coca leaf in South America and later derived into an isolated alkaloid, this substance has been circulating through pharmacies, laboratories, legal markets, prohibitions, and illegal economies for more than a century. So the news here is not its existence, but its scale.
According to the report, the global cocaine market appears to have entered full expansion mode: more production, more availability, more routes, more seizures, and also more demand.
From its recent low point, recorded in 2014, the potential manufacture of pure cocaine increased more than fourfold, reaching around 4,100 tons in 2024. Such growth is driven by larger coca-growing areas and higher productivity. Put simply: more is being grown, and it is being produced more efficiently.
And where supply grows, sometimes demand grows too. The global number of people who used cocaine increased by more than a third in the decade leading up to 2024. But the report makes an important distinction: total consumption may have grown even faster than the number of users.
Why does this difference matter? Because it is not the same thing for more people to use cocaine at least once in a year as it is for cocaine to become more frequent, cheaper, more available, or more integrated into everyday life. In other words, the problem is not only how many people enter the market, but how deeply it expands among those already in it.
Where Is Cocaine Being Used?
Today, close to 70% of people who used cocaine in the past year are concentrated in the Americas, Western and Central Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. But emerging markets, especially in Africa and Asia, show signs of dynamism. Cocaine passes through many places, and in many of them, it is beginning to stay.
South America remains at the center of the map. In 2024, the region accounted for 64% of global cocaine seizures, the highest percentage since 1984. Colombia alone accounted for 966 tons seized, equivalent to 40% of the global total. The figure is brutal because it reinforces a double condition: South America is a production zone, but also one of interdiction and, increasingly, consumption.
The report also shows that part of the cocaine destined for Europe is being intercepted closer to its point of origin. Meanwhile, in Western and Central Europe, flows are adapting: less relative weight for major ports such as those in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands; more movement toward Spain, France, Portugal, and smaller ports. Shipments are also getting smaller. Less volume per shipment, less risk per operation.
And if there is one thing drug trafficking seems not to be lacking, at least in recent years, it’s strategy. Traffickers are incorporating several technologies, such as aerial drones, submarines, new forms of surveillance, and concealment methods. Drones are no longer used only to move small loads between countries or smuggle drugs into prisons; they are also used for surveillance and, in some contexts, as weapons. All this paints a futuristic picture, but the business is an old one: move merchandise, dodge controls, maximize profits.
Cocaine and Crack Passed Through Wastewater and Stayed Even After the Night Was Over
In Western and Central Europe, treatment data suggest an increase in crack use from 2015 to 2024. Wastewater analysis shows sharp rises in cocaine consumption since 2015, accompanied by higher demand for treatment. The only temporary decline appears at the start of the 2020 pandemic.
Between 2015 and 2023, the retail purity of cocaine increased and inflation-adjusted prices fell. It is the perfect equation of availability: stronger, more accessible, more present.
In addition, qualitative research from 2024 detects an expansion of use beyond nightlife. Cocaine appears integrated into everyday routines, not only party settings. There is also an increase in crack use among socioeconomically disadvantaged groups and, in some contexts, a shift from heroin to crack.
At that point, the report changes tone. It moves from speaking only about international trafficking to focusing on public health problems, inequality, and retail markets that are becoming more deeply rooted.
There is also an alert in the Americas. In some major markets on this continent, cocaine-related deaths show recent increases. The UN report suggests that this may reflect dynamics among marginalized populations that do not always appear in general drug surveys. South America is already more than a factory: it concentrates close to one fifth of the people who used cocaine in the past year, both in salt form and in smokable base products.
Africa, Asia, and Southeastern Europe complete the map of expansion. In West, Central, and North Africa, trafficking toward Europe appears to have reactivated routes, but also local markets. In North Africa, treatment and seizure data indicate that cocaine has already penetrated retail markets. In West and Central Africa, crack appears alongside intranasal cocaine. In Asia, levels remain low compared with established markets, but countries such as China, India, and Vietnam recorded record or historically high seizures in 2023 or 2024.
Cocaine, the report suggests without outright saying it, continues hunting for new customers.
Cannabis: More Global Cultivation and New Routes
Cannabis occupies another leading place in the UN drug report. It remains the most widely used substance in the world and is cultivated in practically every country. But the new point is not its global presence, but the way it moves.
Historically, marijuana trafficking has been more regional than intercontinental. That remains mostly true, but interregional trafficking is growing. And the new trend does not appear to be led by traditional actors such as Afghanistan, Morocco, or the Netherlands: according to the report, the point of origin increasingly appears to be North America.
Between 2015 and 2024, 57 countries or territories outside North America mentioned countries in that region as the origin of cannabis shipments. Between 2005 and 2014, only 11 had done so. The jump is hard to ignore.
The UN drug report also suggests that some countries where cannabis entered commercial supply chains, even temporarily, may be used to supply illicit markets elsewhere. In addition, European ports historically associated with other drugs, such as Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Hamburg, are appearing more and more in connection with marijuana trafficking through new routes.
There is an uncomfortable but necessary tension here: the interaction between legal, semi-legal, and illicit markets may be pushing greater product variety and higher potency. That does not mean regulation is the problem in itself. It means that poorly designed or incomplete regulation disconnected from international trade can coexist with more sophisticated illegal markets.
Synthetics: The Ideal Drugs for Modern Trafficking
If cocaine shows expansion, synthetic drugs show adaptation. They are, in many ways, the logistical dream of modern trafficking. They do not depend on illicit crops. They don’t require a specific climate, or large stretches of land. They take up less space, and can be produced closer to destination markets, which reduces the risk of interception. Their main limits are chemical knowledge, precursors, and equipment. But in a globalized, digitized world with multiple channels of international trade, those limits weigh less and less.
Diversification appears in the data: according to the UN report, the number of drugs present in the market has skyrocketed over the past 20 years, and the different types of substances reported in seizures have increased fivefold compared with before the year 2000. Many are synthetic. In 2024, early warning systems recorded 755 new psychoactive substances; a global record.
The methamphetamine market is the largest synthetic drug market in the world and continues expanding beyond its traditional zones: North America, East and Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Myanmar has remained the main regional supplier in East and Southeast Asia since the late 2000s, although the report detects competition from new routes from North America and Africa.
Colorful, Happy, Marketable Drugs
Digging deeper into the UN report, we discover that the problem is not only how many drugs there are, but what’s in them.
Traffickers and distributors use attractive marketing, catchy names, and novel formulations to capture consumers, especially young people. And many people do not know what they are really consuming. Analyzed samples show highly variable compositions and, in some cases, especially harmful substances such as synthetic opioids.
The report mentions 2C-B, “tussy,” or “pink cocaine,” sold as a powder in nightclubs, mainly in the Americas, which may contain ketamine, MDMA, methamphetamine, cocaine, opioids, and other substances. It also refers to happy water, a drinkable mixture seized in East and Southeast Asia that may include anything from ketamine to MDMA.
In the same region, party lollipops have appeared: lollipops containing benzodiazepines, tramadol, ketamine, and other substances. In Hong Kong and Singapore, the sedative etomidate was detected in vaping products used by young people, known as space oil or K-pods. In West Africa, kush may contain synthetic cannabinoids, nitazenes, and other chemicals. In North America and Europe, vaping products have been found to contain synthetic and semi-synthetic cannabinoids and, in some cases, cocaine or heroin.
The drug of the future does not always look like a drug. It doesn’t always look like a shady dealer in a trench coat standing at the end of a dark alley. Sometimes it looks like candy, a colorful lollipop, a little bag with a very cute and funny sticker that makes you forget that, in reality, you do not know what’s inside.
Fentanyl, Nitazenes, and the Ghost of Substitution
The report also returns to the synthetic opioid crisis. Fentanyls continue to cause most of the harms associated with non-medical use of synthetic opioids, especially in North America. Canada and the United States went through a crisis that caused nearly one million deaths during the first two decades of this century. This crisis began with prescription opioids such as oxycodone and was then taken over by illegally manufactured fentanyls.
The document notes that the worst of that crisis seems to have passed: in 2024, fentanyl-related deaths in Canada and the United States decreased. But that does not amount to a happy ending. Fentanyls remain responsible for most overdose deaths linked to synthetic opioids worldwide, and the vast majority occur in those two countries.
Outside North America, Estonia and Sweden showed signs of increased demand for fentanyl, although since 2018 overdoses involving that substance have fallen considerably in both countries, possibly due to lower supply, lower availability, greater access to lifesaving interventions, and changes in consumption patterns.
But new threats are also emerging. Nitazenes and orphines, some even more potent than fentanyls, have generated acute emergencies and deaths in more countries. Since 2019, nitazenes have been detected in 37 countries. Since 2022, several hundred nitazene-related deaths have been recorded in Western and Central Europe, and the UN report warns that the real figures could be higher because new drugs are not always systematically tested.
Recent history has already shown that when synthetic opioids occupy the space of traditional opioids, harm can escalate quickly. And that is exactly what appears to be happening: conflicts in Southwest Asia are causing Afghan opium, a traditional opioid, to decline, pushing more markets toward synthetic substitutes.
Southwest Asia, Afghanistan, and the Domino Effect
The Southwest Asian region is going through a new cycle of conflicts and post-conflict transitions that could alter entire markets.
Afghanistan is a central piece of the puzzle. For years, it was the world’s main supplier of opium, the base of heroin. But after the drug production ban imposed in 2022 and enforced since 2023, opium cultivation and production collapsed by 95%. At first glance, it might sound like a “victory.” Less opium, less heroin, less market. But the UN drug report warns that the story may not end there.
When a plant-based substance becomes scarce, the market does not necessarily disappear. Sometimes, it mutates. And that may push traffickers and users toward more potent and dangerous synthetic opioids such as fentanyls, nitazenes, or other variants. In other words, closing one tap can open another, harder-to-control one.
Syria also appears as a turning point. The end—or nearly so—of the conflict and the change of government in late 2024 hit captagon production and trafficking networks. Captagon is an illicitly manufactured substance that usually contains amphetamine, and had grown alongside the war. According to the UN drug report, laboratories and storage facilities have been dismantled since December 2024. The immediate result was a market shock: attempts to liquidate stock, more seizures, and a sharp price increase. In Lebanon, the price of captagon more than doubled.
But, once again, the market does not sit still. Alongside the decline or disruption of captagon, methamphetamine is gaining ground in the region. In Saudi Arabia, the report ranks it among the three most consumed drugs, along with cannabis and captagon. The substance reportedly arrives mainly from countries farther east, crossing Iran or entering by sea into the Arabian Peninsula. And because methamphetamine and captagon share precursors, the document does not rule out that, in some cases, they may be produced in similar or even shared facilities.
What changes, then, is not only the drug of the moment, but the whole ecosystem.
The Uncomfortable Data Point: Cannabis, Alcohol, and Violence
The chapter on Drugs, Security, and Violence is one of the most interesting parts of the UN report because it avoids the easy headline. It does not state that drugs cause crime. It says something much more complex: the link between use, violence, and security exists, but it is contextual, probabilistic, and depends on many factors.
It depends on the substance in question, yes. But also on dose, frequency, mental health, polydrug use, withdrawal, poverty, access to treatment, environment, gender, age, the presence of weapons, stigma, and police response.
To explain it, the report uses three pathways:
- The psychopharmacological pathway: when intoxication or withdrawal alters perception, judgment, or impulse control.
- The economic-compulsive pathway: when someone commits crimes or risky behaviors to finance consumption.
- The systemic pathway: when harm appears because of the social and market environment surrounding use, such as debts, coercion, open drug scenes, community violence, or neighborhood fear.
These three pathways often overlap. A person may exchange sex to obtain money for drugs and, at the same time, use drugs to get through that situation. In that case, for example, economic vulnerability, violence, the market, gender, the body, and trauma all intersect.
At this point, one particular finding in the report complicates the public debate around marijuana quite a bit. In a sample of people arrested in Australia in 2021, 50% of those who used methamphetamine said that drug contributed to their arrest, either through its use or acquisition. For heroin, the figure was 45%. For cannabis, 14%, while nearly 30% attributed the offense to alcohol.
The data does not allow us to say cannabis has no risks; let’s be clear on that. The report mentions, for example, associations between daily or near-daily use of high-potency weed, psychosis, and violence, especially among young people. But it does allow us to challenge a narrative: cannabis does not appear in the report as a major driver of violence or crime.
In fact, security risks often appear more closely associated with methamphetamine, heroin, stimulants such as cocaine or crack, withdrawal, polydrug use, poverty, exclusion, lack of treatment, and alcohol. Let’s remember that alcohol is legal, available, normalized, and advertised. The same UN report notes that the combined use of drugs and alcohol may be especially associated with security threats, and that alcohol is strongly linked both to perpetrating violence and to being a victim of it.
In Cape Town, for example, the interviews in the report give local names to that complexity. Methamphetamine, known as tik, is associated by local informants with aggression, interpersonal violence, trauma, and traffic deaths, alongside heroin, cannabis, and alcohol. Nyaope, a mixture linked to heroin combined with other substances, was described as a cocktail capable of altering judgment, increasing risky decision-making, and pushing vulnerable people into violent or dangerous situations.
That raises an uncomfortable question: why do certain substances carry the full symbolic weight of insecurity while others, legal and socially accepted, appear again and again in accidents, violence, and harm? The report makes one thing clear: reducing the debate to “drugs equal crime” explains nothing and isn’t useful.
The UN drug report pays special attention to teenagers and young people, recognizing the particular vulnerabilities associated with adolescence. Use at that stage can affect behavior, emotions, cognitive functions, and mental health, and is also associated with low academic performance, risky behaviors, and later socioeconomic consequences.
Globally, drug use is concentrated mainly among people aged 15 to 34. Young people are more likely to engage in high-risk behaviors, use psychoactive substances, and experience violence and drug-related crimes. But the UN report also clarifies that both criminal behaviors and problematic drug use usually decrease with age.
Among recent trends, non-medical ketamine use appears, especially in recreational contexts, nightlife settings, and among gay men in chemsex contexts. The availability of this drug on the dark web and on social media is increasing, with prices lower than those of substances such as cocaine—making it potentially more appealing to young users.
In addition, the days when social media was merely a space for conversation are long gone. Today, it is also a channel for acquisition. In a 2024 European online survey, 19% of participants said they had bought drugs on social media platforms, compared with 4% who said they had done so on the dark web. An online survey in New Zealand showed similar results.
The market, then, understood early where young people are: on the screen.
At the same time, the UN report detects signs of a recent decline in adolescent use of drugs such as alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis in some high-income countries. Among the possible reasons, it mentions the diversity of new products, the popularity of vapes, widespread use of social media and video games, and less face-to-face contact with peers.
Consequences Vary by Gender
The UN report also marks gender differences when talking about drugs. In general, men use drugs much more than women: approximately three times more. They also tend to start earlier, and among young men, the reasons for initiation are linked to peer pressure and sensation-seeking.
Among women, the report frequently observes reasons linked to self-medication for pain or mental health problems. It also points to the so-called “telescoping effect”: women tend to progress more quickly toward dependence once use has begun.
But the hardest point appears in violence. Women who use drugs, people with diverse gender identities, and those involved in transactional sex appear as groups particularly vulnerable to exploitation, abuse, and violence. Intimate partner violence is common among people who use drugs or live with people who use drugs, but women suffer more repeated violence and victimization.
That violence may include physical assault, sexual coercion, psychological abuse, financial abuse, and controlling behaviors. The interviews in the UN report describe cases of women and men forced to have sex with police officers to avoid drug-related charges. They also describe the sexual exploitation of women and trans people who exchange sex for money or drugs, often while intoxicated and in conditions of extreme vulnerability.
Here we move very far away from talking about simple “use” as such. This is a context shaped by struggles for power, inequality, and physical and psychological vulnerabilities.
The Market, the State, and the Street
The systemic pathway in the report analyzes how drug demand and the markets around it affect security. Since illegal trade is usually managed by criminal actors, it generates additional threats for neighborhoods, communities, and societies: corruption, weakening of the rule of law, loss of institutional trust, community violence, and marginalization.
But it also produces more immediate harms: unsafe consumption practices, overdoses, victimization, domestic violence, coercion, financial deprivation, social isolation, risks in public spaces, and impacts on businesses, housing, health, and social services.
Stigma appears as a key piece. It can come from the community, health services, law enforcement, or family. It isolates, reduces access to treatment, discourages people from asking for help, and increases risks of violence or exploitation. Among women who use drugs and engage in sex work, the UN report speaks of a double stigma. Some women said criminalization made them less likely to report overdoses or violence, for fear of being accused of possession or use.
That point is central: when public policy turns a person into a threat before recognizing them as a patient, neighbor, daughter, mother, friend, or citizen, it often pushes them further away from the system that could help them.
Security: The Report That Dismantles the Slogan
The most politically sensitive part of the UN report is perhaps the most useful, because it analyzes the link between drug use and security—while avoiding the punitive reflex. It does not say there is no relationship; it says that this relationship isn’t that simple.
Drug use can be linked to acquisitive crime, family violence, violence in social groups, and victimization of people who use drugs. But those outcomes depend on context: poverty, homelessness, mental health, lack of treatment, personal histories, stigma, social isolation, community environment, and state response.
The document is clear on one point: not all people who use drugs commit crimes to finance their use. The qualitative interviews included in the report help bring the theory down to earth. There are 86 interviews with people with lived experience, service providers, and law enforcement personnel in São Paulo, Nairobi, Dakar, Cape Town, Delhi, and Bangkok. In several cities, the same sad melody persists: poverty, the street, migration, trauma, lack of family support, stigma, difficulty accessing health care, drug use, violence, and minor crime forming circles that feed into one another.
The UN drug report suggests that responses centered on health and social assistance can improve community safety. It mentions treatment, opioid agonist therapies, low-threshold services, shelters, housing for unsheltered people, social support, and reintegration. In São Paulo, one informant said some unsheltered people stopped problematic drug use when they had a place to live, a daily meal, and the chance to work. Sometimes, what reduces harm is not more punishment, but less abandonment.
A World Moving Faster Than Its Policies
The World Drug Report 2026 leaves an uncomfortable feeling: drug markets are understanding the 21st century faster than many states. They change routes, shrink shipments, use drones, take advantage of secondary ports, exploit social media, reformulate substances, sell mixtures with attractive names, and adapt to wars, prohibitions, and new demands.
Meanwhile, consumption grows, harms diversify, and responses remain too tied to reflexes that have already aged out. More prohibition does not necessarily lead to a smaller market. Less cultivation does not always mean less harm. More seizures do not always mean less availability. And more punishment does not always mean more security.
The UN report makes one thing clear: the global drug problem can no longer be read only as a mere matter of substances. It is a problem of markets, public health, inequality, technology, violence, gender, youth, regulation, and the state, among many other issues.
