How is comparing incarceration rate relevant to this discussion when countries have differing laws? People aren't wrongly imprisoned if they've broken agreed upon laws, especially in a democratic society where popularly elected officials pass the laws.

If society Z passed a law with a minimum three year prison sentence for jaywalking (pedestrian crossing a street without the right of away provided by a traffic signal), the incarceration rate may rise, but no one is wrongly imprisoned.

(replace with the war on drugs in the US, of course).

This may be particularly relevant as I chose the netherlands and it has a relaxed attitude toward substance abuse - so grabbing a better example country... The UK has a rate of 140/100,000 vs. the US's 655/100,000. That said, laws honestly don't differ extremely from country to country, most humans are in agreement about what is good and what is ill and in countries that have more extreme punishment (getting decades in prison for stealing bread) those punishments are viewed as unjust and enforcement of those penalties tends to be spotty since corruption will be more socially acceptable and people will have more moral allowance to ignore the unjust laws - a prison guard might just let someone otherwise blameless escape from jail for the penalty of stealing bread after a few days.

Honestly, while oftentimes human beings are terrible, humans are pretty decent otherwise... That all said, I think you'd find that laws really don't vary as much from country to country and that, outside of weird ones (like MJ illegality in the US) people will mostly adhere to laws out of convenience.

The US population is nearly 5x of the UK, has a much larger area and perimeter, and is more wealthy (7.8x total GDP, 1.3x per capita). This no doubt makes drug trafficking not only easier, but also much more profitable in the US vs UK.

It would also appear illicit drug use in US is more prevalent than in nearly every other country.

Edit: I'm not sure how relevant this is to what you posted, but figured I'd bring it up because I think it's an important thing to note in the general conversation.

The figures above where scaled to population, the actual US population (according to the wiki source) was 2,121,600 vs. UK with 83,014 - the GDP is honestly pretty even per capita though the US probably suffers from worse wealth inequality[1] although the CIA factbook says that both countries have ~15% population below the poverty line - so many that's not really a factor.

1. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...