So which country has the highest marijuana use in the world? The answer is not the Netherlands, even though pot is legal there (so much for the theory that we’d all walk around high 24-7 if weed was legalized).

The answer….Canada! According to a 2005 survey (the most recent country-wide data we could find) 44.5% of Canadians 15 and over have smoked pot at least once in their lives. Now, remeber that this includes the pre baby boomer crowd, who are less likely to have smoked pot than their children’s generation. Although we couldn’t find any reliable data for lifetime use, Papua New Guinea, Micronesia and Ghana, have estimated annual usage rates of 29.5% (1995), 29.1% (1995) and 21.5% (1998) respectively. Given Canada’s annual usage rate of 16.8% (2004), it is likely that they have higher lifetime usage rates.

The United States comes in a close second with a lifetime usage rate of 42.4% for those aged 18 and over, followed by New Zealand at 41.9% (for those aged 16+). In China, even just considering those 18 and older in the Beijing and Shanghai metropolitan areas, only an estimated 0.3% of the population has tried marijuana.

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