Yesterday, Zack Polanski told Sky News that ‘the war on drugs has clearly failed over and over again. In fact we have the highest drug deaths in Europe and for the past 14 years every single year drug deaths have increased.’ He made these two claims in response to criticism that his party has received for its policy on illegal drugs, which is, according to the Greens’ website, to ‘end prohibition and replace it with a system of legal regulation’.

On the first point, other countries in Europe have higher death rates. In 2023, England and Wales saw 93 deaths per million people overall, compared with 135 per million 15- to 64-year-olds in Estonia, 130 per million in Latvia and 94 per million in Norway. Although caution must be applied when comparing international statistics (as drug deaths are recorded and presented differently by different jurisdictions) it is accurate to say that England and Wales has one of the highest rates in Europe, or in western Europe – which is the formulation that most official sources use when contextualising the problem.

On Polanski’s second claim, that drug deaths have increased every single year over the past 14 years, the data does support........

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