The aging European population has access to more extensive health care systems, which may be more willing to prescribe drugs to reduce aches and pains, he noted. The high use of performance-enhancing drugs in the Americas may be at least partly explained by the prevalent sense of competition there, the report indicated. In particular, Okun said the board was concerned about over-prescription in the United States of methylphenidate, sold as the drug Ritalin, to treat children with attention deficit disorder. American patients are consuming 330 million daily doses of the substance compared to 65 million for patients in the rest of the world, the report found. The agency also warned that more and more North Americans are smoking heroin and said Europe has emerged as a producer of cannabis and synthetic drugs.
Cannabis continues to be the most commonly abused drug in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
And it repeated its concern that painkillers such as morphine are increasingly hard to come by in the developing world, though they are widely available in the industrialized world about 100 times more available in the world's top 20 industrialized countries than in the bottom 20. These were among the trends discussed in the annual report of the International Narcotics Control Board, an independent panel that oversees implementation of United Nations drug control treaties. The board is responsible for monitoring and promoting compliance by signatory countries in controlling 116 narcotic drugs and 111 psychotropic substances, a category that includes hallucinogens, stimulants and depressants. The report notes that there is no clear-cut explanation for the differences in usage between Europe and the Americas. But it speculates that they could be linked to such factors as culture, the effects of advertising and differences in doctor-patient relationships.