UN Report Finds a Buzz Over Pot

A U.N. report released Friday finds that while marijuana is enjoying a high in both legal and illegal usage, cocaine is coming off the high it enjoyed in prior decades.

Those that do use marijuana, whether illegally or through increasingly accessible legal options, are consuming a stronger narcotic nowadays, the report found.

The U.N. found increasing demand for the drug as U.S. states experiment with legalizing or decriminalizing the hallucinogen. But efforts to eradicate supplies of cocaine appear to have worked in places like Colombia and Peru, which have decreased demand from a shrinking number of addicts. 

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The demand for drugs remains, however, especially in places like Afghanistan, where production of opium reached record highs last year since the first record-keeping on drugs in that nation began in 1998, according to the World Drugs Report by the United Nations Office on Drugs & Crime.

“It is estimated that almost a quarter of a billion people between the ages of 15 and 64 years used an illicit drug in 2013,” according to the report, which adds that overall level of drug use has remained relatively stable in recent years.

Global cultivation of cocaine shrank 10 percent between 2012 and 2013, and seizures of the drug also dipped 9 percent between 2008 and 2013, the UN reports. Marijuana is in a boom period, however, not just in sales but also "rapid advancement in cannabis plant cultivation techniques,'' to improve the concentration of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which is the active chemical in cannabis, the report adds.

Potency of marijuana has risen in the U.S., as THC levels increased from less than 3.4 percent in 1993 to 8.8 percent in 2008, according to the report. The seizures of herbal cannabis worldwide shrank 14 percent between 2008 and 2013, but seizures of cannabis resin drugs including hash increased 11 percent during that time.

The combination of competition from the growing legal marijuana industry in  the U.S. and the waning demand for cocaine, once a cash crop for drug dealers, has hit cartels hard, says Carl Meacham, the director of the America’s program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. The criminal organizations of Mexico are also still recovering from a war between law enforcement in that nation and against other cartels, he adds.

“They will lose a lot of money because of law enforcement, but it is still lucrative enough for them to do this business,” he says.

Votes to legalize pot in Colorado, Washington State, Alaska, Oregon and Washington, D.C. have stimulated demand for the drug which has cut into the business of illegal dealers.  Banks are reluctant to do business with marijuana businesses but there is a great demand to open shops – including among the Mexican cartels, he explains. 

“It’s like right after the end of alcohol prohibition, when all the illegal bootleggers made legal their business when it became legal,” he says.