Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC.

I'm Manuel Salarosa.

In this edition, are most countries' policies on drugs simply irrational?

I don't think society should say, if you're going to have fun,

you've got to poison your brain with alcohol,

knowing that that's going to take maybe 15 years off your life, when as far as I know, there's no evidence that using

cannabis takes any years off your life. We ask what's led to hugely divergent policies on drugs

around the world, from tolerance in the Netherlands to assassination squads in the Philippines,

all while the market for illegal drugs continues to thrive.

That's here in Business Daily from the BBC.

In most countries, marijuana, cocaine, heroin and a range of other drugs are prohibited.

There's been some liberalisation here and there recently in the US and around the world,

but broadly speaking, prohibition is the global rule.

Yet prohibition has hardly stopped the number of users and the drugs trade.

The United Nations' most recent world drug report found that in 2015,

about a quarter of a billion people around the world were drug users. It also noted that the

range of drugs on offer has increased that opium production is up and that the cocaine market

is thriving. Given these statistics, are most governments' current drug policies simply

irrational? It's a question we'll tackle in just a moment. First, though,

some countries have gone to extremes. Take the Philippines, where President Duterte's crackdown

on drug users and dealers, has claimed thousands of lives, with sometimes dozens of suspects being

gunned down in a single raid. We see a lot of ranting about human rights in my campaign against drugs.

...