A new United Nations (UN) report on worldwide drug trends acknowledges that marijuana legalization in the U.S. and Canada may have helped to shrink the size of illicit markets, while at the same time driving significant drops in the number of people arrested for cannabis offenses. It also notes the emergence of what it calls a “psychedelic renaissance.”
“In some jurisdictions, the the size of the illegal cannabis market appears to be shrinking,” say key findings of the 2024 World Drug Report, from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), “and in the United States the number and rate of people arrested for cannabis-related offences [appears] to be decreasing.”
At the same time, sharp racial disparities in marijuana arrests have persisted even as raw arrest numbers drop, and legalization has also popularized new forms of marijuana products that raise concerns about youth use, including vapes, high-THC cannabis concentrates and infused edibles, the UN office says.
As of the beginning of 2024, a number of UN member states—Canada, Uruguay and 27 jurisdictions in the U.S.—had “enacted legal provisions allowing the production and sale of cannabis for non-medical use,” the report says, while others, such as in Europe, “offer varying
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