The UN's new numbers say cannabis is still winning the global drug-of-choice race

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime released its World Drug Report 2026 on June 26, and the headline number for this audience is straightforward: cannabis use has grown 40% over the past decade, with global prevalence among people aged 15–64 climbing from 3.8% in 2014 to 4.8% in 2024. An estimated 256 million people used cannabis that year.

Put next to the rest of the field, that figure isn't close. Opioid users came in at 63 million, amphetamines at 32 million, cocaine at 25 million, and ecstasy at 21 million — meaning cannabis users outnumber all four of those categories combined by a wide margin. The UN's own framing credits shifting public perception and the spread of legalization and decriminalization as the drivers of that growth, not the other way around.

That's a genuinely useful data point to have on hand, separate from any single country's legalization debate: this isn't a story about American state markets outgrowing prohibition, it's a global-use trend that predates and outpaces any one jurisdiction's policy choice. Legalization looks less like the cause of rising use and more like governments catching up to behavior that was already there.

For anyone in the business of talking to the public about cannabis — creators, brands, retail — that's the more durable message than any single state's ballot fight: normalization is a worldwide trend line, not a local news story, and the data backs it up.