Question: where is the most drugs sold

Roisin Jones answered on 10 Nov 2016:

I’m not sure about medicinal drugs, although I suspect Michel is probably right, but for illegal drugs, it’s a little more difficult to tell. The source of most of the information on global use of illegal drugs comes from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and telling where the most drug users are (and therefore where the most drugs are sold) is complicated for a number of reasons: the figures of drug users are reported as a percentage of population, which obviously varies widely from country to country: 0.5% of the population in Canada is not the same as 0.5% of the population in the United States! Furthermore, a lot of drug users are what are known as ‘polydrug’ users, which means that they use more than one drug, often one after another, which also skews the figures. Finally there are some countries in which the prevalence of drug use is uncertain, because the government are unable or unwilling to give estimates to the UNODC, which means we have no idea how prevalent drug use is in those countries. However, looking at the data, my best guess is that the most amount of drugs are sold in China and India, based on their massive population size, although the US and Australia are also well up there. Hope this answers your question!