New research reveals that while prescription painkillers such as codeine, vicodin and oxycontin result in "more than half of the estimated 78,000 drug-related deaths worldwide" each year, marijuana is the most commonly used used illicit drug, the Daily Mail reports.
Even though cannabis illegal in most countries and for recreational purposes, marijuana legalization advocates argue that compared to many legal drugs, it is a relatively harmless one. And unlike alcohol, a recreational substance that's use is deeply embedded within American and European culture, the risk of physical addiction is arguably non-existent. Marijuana has medical benefits, causing it to be legalized medically in some 20 U.S. states, including California, Alaska, Oregon and New Mexico. Washington and Colorado have legalized the drug for recreational use, but marijuana is still banned under U.S. federal law and in most countries around the world.
In the first study on worldwide drug use and abuse published in The Lancet, researchers from the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation discovered that cannabis tops the list as the most commonly used illicit substance around the world, and found that countries with the highest rates of drug abuse include Australia, the U.K., Russia and the U.S., while countries in Asia and Africa had the lowest rates of drug abuse.
Drug-related deaths were found to be more prevalent in countries with stricter policies against drug abuse than in ones that offer methadone clinics and needle exchange clinics for addicts and abusers.
"A decriminalized drug policy could potentially transform the public health approach to drug use," Vikram Patel, of the Centre for Global Mental Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told the Daily Mail. "The enormous savings in the criminal justice system could be used to fund addiction treatment programs."
Overall, the researchers found that drug abuse is problematic around the world, and that "depression, schizophrenia and cocaine addiction [related to drug abuse and mental health issues] kill more people worldwide than AIDS, tuberculosis, diabetes or road accidents," as the Daily Mail reports.
"It's possible in another 20 years, patterns will again change in ways we can't predict," Michael Lysnkey, who co-authored the study, said to the Daily Mail. He added that America's issues with prescription drug abuse has become particularly problematic within the past decade.
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