Surprise, surprise as a survey released this week by the World Health Organization showed that the United States was the number one country in illegal drug use in the world.

According to FOXNews, researchers looked at drug, alcohol and tobacco use in 17 countries, all over North and South America, Europe, Asia, Middle East, Africa and Oceania. The ironic thing is that countries like Netherlands, which have less tough anti-drug laws, were not in the top and America, known for the stringent drug laws, managed to take the first place.

In the Netherlands only 1.9% of people reported cocaine use and 19.8% reported marijuana use, while in America 42.4% of the people interrogated said they used marijuana and 16% of them used cocaine at least once. On the second place is Colombia followed by Mexico, Spain and New Zealand where about 4 to 4.3% of the people interrogated said to have used cocaine.

“The United States, which has been driving much of the world's drug research and drug policy agenda, stands out with higher levels of use of alcohol, cocaine, and cannabis, despite punitive illegal drug policies,” wrote the authors of the study, reported FOXNews.

Regarding the use of tobacco in the U.S., 74% of the respondents said they were smokers while in Lebanon 67% of the people who participated at the survey admitted to tobacco use. Mexico and Ukraine were next with 60%.

Almost 92% of the U.S. respondents used alcohol, while 97% of Ukrainians and 95.3% of Germans admitted to using alcohol.

The U.S. leads in marijuana use with 42.4%, followed by New Zealand with 41.9%.

About 54,000 people participated in the survey.