Drugs cost lives.

That’s the opening sentence of the preface in the 2021 World Drug Report released June 24 by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which suggested a worldwide ban on cannabis advertising.

According to the five-booklet report, there is evidence that delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is responsible for the development of mental health disorders in long-term, heavy users of cannabis, and that there’s a correlation between THC potency and harm. But the report offered no study, nor did it cite a scientific entity to back up its claim that cannabis has a causal relationship with mental health disorders.

Cannabis Business Times has reached out to the UNODC multiple times since June 24 seeking clarity on those claims but has yet to receive a response as of July 2.

In the World Drug Report’s preface, UNODC Executive Director Ghada Waly went on and said, “In an age when the speed of information can often outstrip the speed of verification, the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that it is crucial to cut through the noise and focus on facts, a lesson that we must heed in order to protect societies from the impact of drugs.”

In the 87-page “Executive Summary” booklet of the report, the UNODC provides a graph that shows the number of deaths caused by cocaine use, amphetamine use, opioid use, cannabis use, HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C, with combined numbers growing from roughly 240,000 deaths in 1990 to nearly 500,000 deaths by 2019. The color code for deaths attributed to cannabis use did not register on the graph, which instead shows more than half of deaths were attributed to liver diseases resulting from hepatitis C and an increase in overdose deaths attributed to opioid use.

Meanwhile, the Executive Summary failed to mention that 10,142 Americans died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes in 2019, accounting for 28% of all traffic-related deaths in the U.S., according to statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

And it failed to mention that tobacco use causes more than 7 million deaths worldwide per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which attributed that claim to a World Health Organization’s 2017 report on the global tobacco epidemic.

While the UNODC opened its Executive Summary by stating “drugs cost lives,” alcohol and tobacco were mentioned once each in that 87-page booklet. Cannabis was mentioned 70 times. And although the UNODC’s preface preached about focusing on the facts, it chose to omit several in its World Drug Report. Pushing alcohol and tobacco to the side while lumping cannabis in with opioids and other drugs, one can conclude the U.N. office views the worldwide war on cannabis still winnable.

In the U.S., where countless lives have been lost or altered from incarcerating non-violent cannabis users with unduly harsh sentences as their families and communities suffer, Americans know better. With Connecticut, New Mexico and Virginia officially enacting policies to abolish criminal penalties for cannabis this week, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws reported 44% of all Americans now live where cannabis is legalized.

-Tony Lange, Associate Editor