This risk is multiplied the more inexperienced or disenfranchised the user is. Young people are vulnerable to overdosing because they are inexperienced, while people addicted to drugs such as heroin and other opiates contribute to a large number of global drug deaths.

The alphabet soup of substances now being illegally produced and sold across the world—from obscure research analogues and fake prescription pills to fentanyl and high strength ecstasy—has turned using drugs into a far more hazardous activity than ever before.

According to the report, Taking stock: A decade of drug policy , governments and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime have overseen a decade of fruitless carnage, where millions of people have been murdered, disappeared, or internally displaced amid a blizzard of overdoses, spiralling addiction, executions, extrajudicial killings and incarceration. Despite this, on almost every measurable level, this war on our own citizens has abjectly failed. Drug use and drug deaths have risen. Drug production has rocketed. Organised crime groups continue to use the drug trade as a vital supply line of cash.

This week the most detailed analysis yet of the last ten years of the global war on drugs was published by the International Drug Policy Consortium, an influential global network of 175 NGOs. It's the first report of its kind , and it’s devastating.

While there has been progress on policy and narratives around drugs, governments around the globe have continued to fail miserably in their attempts to quell drug use through criminalization.

This expands out to selling too. Young, often exploited, street heroin and crack sellers and people who sell to feed their own habit are more likely to be scooped up by police dragnets than middle class coke dealers in a bar. From the heroin user dealing to feed a habit or the teenager who ends up being a drug gang's gofer on the streets as a way to earn a living, huge numbers of non-violent people face ruined lives while the big players and boutique vendors rack up the cash.

In June 2017, US federal agents arrest a man suspected of murder as part of a series of drug- and gang-related arrests at a California home being operated as a rehab center. (Photo by Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Yet despite those lofty aims, in the years since the policies were published, cultivation of opium poppy has increased by 130 percent, and coca bush by 34 percent. Likewise, aims to eliminate or reduce the production of synthetic drugs and precursors, and crack down on narco-money laundering, have all been unsuccessful.

In 2009, the UN published an updated set of policies meant to guide member countries in fighting drug use. One of the major aims of the UN's drug strategy was to “establish 2019 as a target date for States to eliminate or reduce significantly the illicit demand for narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances”. This fantasy goal of eliminating drug use was repeated by President Trump at a UN General Assembly meeting he convened only last month, where he said, “The United States looks forward to working with you to strengthen our communities, protect our families, and deliver a drug-free future for all of our children.”

The UN itself estimated that at the very least 275 million people worldwide—one in 17 citizens—took an illegal drug in 2016. The IDPC report says there has been a 31 percent increase in global drug use since 2011. This isn’t some kind of freak flag subculture. Drug users run the entire spectrum of citizenry, and yet global drug policy has almost exclusively treated them as a problem to be disposed of.

Over the last decade, the report reveals, there has been a 145 percent increase in drug-related deaths, mounting to nearly half a million fatalities a year worldwide. There were more than 71,000 overdose deaths in the United States in 2017, fueled in part by an increasingly-hazardous list of synthetic drugs, including fentanyl, appearing on the scene as a direct response by suppliers to clampdowns on the traditional heroin trade.

It’s time to do away with the myths and hyperbole so often used when talking about drugs.

It doesn't stop at drug poisoning. Over the last decade, at least 3,940 people have been executed, many for non-violent drug offences with 33 countries retaining the death penalty for drug crimes. And that's just official state executions: The IDPC estimates there have been 27,000 extrajudicial killings in drug crackdowns. Many of these have been carried out by Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, whose tactic of killing drug users and dealers without trial has been praised by President Trump. (Trump once told Duterte he was doing an "unbelievable job on the drug problem.") One in five prisoners in the world’s jails are inside for drug offences. In some Latin American countries and Thailand, over 80 percent of women in jail are serving sentences for drug-related offences.