With the secrecy surrounding drugs it can sometimes be easy to forget that it is a worldwide occurrence. Drug related use, deaths and treatment programmes are on the rise, but it is difficult to understand the breadth of these issues without first knowing each country's separate contributions to the situation.

Taking into account overall use of multiple substances it has been found which countries have the highest amount of drug use, and for what drug. Looking at statistics for cannabis, cocaine and opioids it was found that the highest use for cannabis were in countries such as Iceland and the USA. The highest use of Cocaine was in countries such as Scotland and Spain and the highest use of opioids was reported in the USA and Australia. Looking at the data for the two highest countries in categories for these substances only it would appear that Australia and the USA have the largest drug use overall, as they are both mentioned in more than one category.

Unsurprisingly due to the rise of or continuous high amount of drug use there are a huge amount of treatment programmes appearing throughout the world. What is surprising however is the countries that have the highest amount of treatment for cannabis, cocaine and opioids, as none of them feature in the top two for use of these drugs. The top countries for treatment of cannabis were Ghana and Botswana, the top countries for treatment of cocaine were Chile and Uruguay and for treatment of opioids they were Syria and Oman. These statistics seem to suggest that even though treatment programmes are appearing swiftly, they may not be appearing in the right places, however they could also be suggesting that the programmes are in the right place, and the reason for low usage is simply that the treatments are working in the previously mentioned countries and need to be introduced into the more troubled ones. Data that back this up is the fact that the USA, Australia and Iceland are in fact some of the highest ranking in drug treatment overall when not specific to certain drugs.

Unfortunately as many are aware misuse or excessive use of drugs can result in injury or even death. Statistics were also found on the amount of drug related deaths per 1M inhabitants per country. Unsurprisingly with their apparent high drug rates the USA and Australia are one of the highest ranking in these statistics, suggesting more needs to be done to secure the safety of citizens who are using drugs. However, other countries that also feature quite high in these rankings are places such as Canada, Russia and the UK, who so far have not had much prominence in other categories regarding drug use and treatment. Which suggests that there is less drug information, help and recording in these countries as it would be difficult for countries with such low recorded use rates to have such high amounts of death from substances.

When looking at information available for all of the countries mentioned in this article it is possible to use further statistics to make connections between the use of a country's judicial system and its treatment programmes to face their drug use. The common trend when looking at the data is that countries appear to attempt to treat users and jail offenders equally or similarly. Meaning the more or less people treated for drug use, the more or less times people are charged with drug related offenses. This can be shown by results given by the USA, showing around a 50% imprisonment rate alongside 8K treated users per 1M residents compared to results shown by Spain, who show a lower incarceration rate of around 25% alongside treatment for around 2K residents. Canada are a slight anomaly with around a 15% imprisonment rate with 3k resident treatment, but it still supports the idea of a low imprisonment rate accompanies a low treatment rate. Exceptions to this assumption are Iceland and Australia. This is because Iceland's imprisonment percentage of around 20% alongside 8k treatments, and Australia's rates of 10% imprisonment with 8k treatments also show a much larger gap between the rates of prisoners with drug related offences and the amount of treatment offered by the country. Both of these countries show a higher amount of treatment, which may be the cause of the low imprisonment rate.

Reference - http://recoverybrands.com/drug-treatment-trends/