Cocaine and methamphetamine trade hits record highs as synthetics reshape global drug market, UN reports
VIENNA — The global trade in illicit drugs is booming, with cocaine production and methamphetamine seizures at record levels and a wave of new synthetic substances rushing to fill the gap left by a collapse in heroin supply, the United Nations said in its annual World Drug Report.
An estimated 331 million people used a drug in 2024, the latest year on record — about 6.2% of the world’s population aged 15 to 64, up from 5.2% a decade earlier. Cannabis remained the most widely used drug by a wide margin at 256 million users, followed by opioids, amphetamines, cocaine and ecstasy.
“We have seen an unprecedented spike in new types of drugs on the market, and worryingly, some are more potent or dangerous than before,” said Monica Juma, executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), in a statement. She urged governments to step up deterrence, intelligence-sharing and joint operations “while investing more in prevention and treatment.”
A cocaine market still accelerating
Cocaine production surged to roughly 4,100 metric tons of pure product in 2024 — a fourfold increase within a decade — driven by expanding cultivation and rising yields. Both supply and harder-to-measure demand continued to climb strongly, the report said, with purity rising and prices falling in many markets.
Rather than saturate their established strongholds in Western and Central Europe, North America and Oceania, organized crime groups are now pushing aggressively into new destination markets across Africa and Asia to offload the surplus. Some countries in those regions, despite still-modest seizure volumes, posted the fastest cocaine-seizure growth rates in the world between 2020 and 2024.
The way cocaine is consumed is also shifting. The report pointed to an expansion of use beyond nightlife settings into everyday routines, an upswing in crack cocaine use among socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, and a notable rise in crack use across Western and Central Europe dating to around 2015.
Methamphetamine goes global
Methamphetamine seizures grew an average of 13% a year, with the drug spreading well beyond its traditional base in East and South-East Asia into the Near and Middle East, Africa and parts of Europe. While Myanmar remains the dominant source country, high demand has drawn in suppliers from North America, West and Southern Africa, and South-West Asia.
North American methamphetamine is now crossing the Pacific to the Western Pacific Rim, fueling rising trafficking and use in Pacific Island nations. In the Middle East, the collapse of the “captagon” trade after the fall of the Assad government in Syria in December 2024 — and a subsequent doubling of tablet prices in some areas — may be pushing former captagon users toward methamphetamine.
A turning point for heroin and a synthetic surge
Opium production in long-dominant supplier Afghanistan plummeted after the Taliban banned it in 2022 and has not recovered, sharply constraining the global supply of heroin. A rise in Myanmar’s output — to more than 1,000 tons by 2025 — has not come close to offsetting Afghanistan’s fall from more than 6,000 tons in 2022.
Into that vacuum has come a sharp increase in novel synthetic opioids such as fentanyls, nitazenes and “orphines,” which the UNODC said could be filling at least part of the gap. Reports of NPS synthetic opioids climbed across most regions in 2023 and 2024, but most prominently in Europe, Oceania and Africa. In North America, where fentanyl has largely displaced heroin, the number of such substances identified in 2024 rose around 10% year-over-year — while that figure jumped more than 80% in Europe and 150% in Oceania.
A lasting turn away from plant-based opiates toward synthetics, the report warned, could permanently reshape the global opioid market and the harms that come with it.
Innovation outpacing regulation
Illicit manufacturers are inventing new compounds faster than authorities can schedule them, with five times as many drug types turning up in seizures in 2024 as before 2000. The number of new psychoactive substances circulating reached 755, including 118 reported for the first time.
This year’s report also devoted its thematic chapter to the impact of drug use on safety and security, noting that links between drugs, crime and violence are heavily mediated by poverty, homelessness, poor mental health and a lack of access to treatment — conditions the agency framed as entry points for prevention as much as drivers of harm.
Read the full World Drug Report 2026