Violence sparked by Drug trafficking and high drug use cost countless lives across Latin America in 2011 depicting the incompetent regional anti-narcotics policies and reviving a legalisation debate.
"I did not ask for this war," read a poster near a casino firebombed by the Zetas drug gang in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey in August. Fifty-two people were killed.
Authorities blame the Zetas -- a gang set up by ex-elite army officers in the 1990s -- for torching the casino because its owners refused to pay protection money.
In Colombia, the world's top cocaine producer, authorities reported a major decline in coca cultivation and cocaine production, but also a fresh spike in killings attributed to narcotrafficking gangs that include ex-paramilitary groups.
And Colombia's Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) continued to finance its guerrilla operations through drug trafficking as did remnants of the leftist Shining Path rebels in Peru.
Peru also ranks among the world's biggest cocaine producers, with output estimated at 330 tons last year, a little less than Colombia's 350 tons.
In poor barrios across Latin America, bloody battles for control of cocaine derivatives such as "paco" in Argentina and "bazuco" in Colombia raged on.
"Drug trafficking has become one of the major global issues threatening the security of millions of people," said Louise Arbour, a former UN high commissioner for human rights and former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Calling the global war on drugs a costly failure, the report called for an end to "the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but do no harm to others."
There are an estimated 250 million drug users in the world, according to UN estimates. "We simply cannot treat them all as criminals," the report added.
"Dealing with drug trafficking through war instead of as a public health issue was a mistake which claimed thousands of lives in Mexico and other countries," said Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, founder of a "victims' movement".
On November 21, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos also called for a "frank and open debate" on the issue.
"There is no interest in taking this on, but there is agreement that the current approach is not working, privately, especially among members of (the US) Congress," said Michael Shifter, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank focusing on Western Hemisphere affairs.
"An election is coming up and people are not going to take risks on a politically sensitive issue," he added.
Cocaine use doubled in Mexico in the six years to 2008, the health minister said Friday, arguing that tougher border controls on smuggling has pushed more of the drug into the domestic market.
The increasingly powerful Zetas are likely responsible for 50 people's killing in strongholds of the rival Sinaloa cartel in western Mexico, while the years-long drug war continues, analysts say.