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Although the US has a lot of influence on international culture and laws the above is simply not really true.

Drug laws in Europe vary wildly between countries, with places like Portgual decriminalising even hard drugs and places like the Netherlands having an open culture when it comes to buying and consuming cannabis and other 'less hard' drugs. Then of course there's the big difference in laws when it comes to drinking; a 16-year old drinking on the street is perfectly legal in quite a few European countries whereas in the US it would get you arrested on multiple charges.

Banking laws are very different as well: I think the recent introduction of MiFID II shows quite clearly that Europe has very different views on regulation. Hell, the new rules on investment research are pretty much opposite to the US ones.

GDPR is forcing numerous US companies into complying with European views on privacy.

OP is quite right in saying that it's a very US-centric view to think drug policy around the world is mainly caused by race relations in the US.

Another point of view is recently-introduced SESTA. It was a law intended to stop sex trafficing in the US. Seems like a nice bill, right?

Well, as a direct consequence of it, sites like Backpage got shut down and reddit banned loads and loads of communities that were used by sex workers in countries across Europe where sex work is as legal as it can get. Sex workers were simply cut off of their usual ways of communicating between each other and attracting customers because of a law in the US.

And the reason that the Netherlands always gets mentioned when talking about soft drugs is because it decriminalized marihuana decades ago. In reality, the way they did that was very impractical and open to loopholes that were commonly abused by the coffee shops. Dutch laws on drugs, at their current state, are way worse then the laws in places where marihuana was decriminalized recently. The reason for that is the pressure from the neighbors, because the ability to buy and grow larger quantities + open borders = more work for Belgium and Germany.

Let's compare Canada and the Netherlands. Canada: you can grow 4 plants and have up to 30 grams with you for recreational use. The Netherlands: you can grow 2 plants and have up to 5 grams with you at all times. In the Netherlands, these restrictions also apply to the supply side, so coffee shops operate mostly in a shady gray area. In Canada, they're introducing licensed supply chain.

> vary wildly between countries

Not really, name a European country where I won't be jailed for having even an ounce of cocaine? Portugal is as close as it gets to sensible drug policy, and they've only decriminalized (as opposed to legalized) small personal-use amounts.

The only drugs that should be regulated are antibiotics :)

An ounce is quite a lot but there are several places in Europe where a small quantity of unidentified white powder on you will not cause consequences unless you're a suspected dealer or something. And you won't get searched in the first place unless you're being taken into custody (for some other offense) or suspected for being a danger to others or yourself.

E.g. Berlin is very tolerant. So is Portugal.

Helsinki would be complete opposite. You will be searched for any minor reason and anything found on you will cause consequences regardless of why you're being stopped and searched.

Berlin was arresting people with any amount of weed in certain public parks just a couple years ago, because an awful coalition government thought Zero Tolerance would surely work this time.

Its laws are more or less identical to New York State's - decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana, everything else is extremely illegal - just with shorter prison sentences and perhaps slightly looser enforcement.

> Not really, name a European country where I won't be jailed for having even an ounce of cocaine?

Spain. A couple of years ago I was in Madrid and went out to a bar with some friends. One of them tells me to come outside with him, then he proceeds to prepare some cocaine lines on the roof of a random car parked on the street right outside the bar. When he's about to snort them, some normal looking guys approach us (not in uniforms) and then all of a sudden they flash their badges (they were cops). I thought I was going to jail right there and then.

The cops asked for our ids and then started grilling us about where the cocaine came from, they said that if we gave up our dealer they would let us go. My friend was feeding them random info which they wouldnt buy. Then one of our friends who was inside the bar came outside looking for us. Somehow he realized what was going on at a glance, he walks up to the cops and asks what's going on. The cops tell him they caught us in possession of cocaine. Before they could keep talking, he cuts them off and demands that they write us a ticket and let us go. The cops are a little bit baffled and are about to say something when our friend tells them he's a lawyer, that he knows how these things work and sternly demands again they give us a ticket and let us go.

After that the cops didn't say a word. They just gave a ticket to my friend who had the cocaine (I didn't even get one), confiscated the cocaine and then let us go.

One of the biggest scares of my life.

For an ounce though? I picked that amount because it's not a lot, but it is generally considered to be more than a "personal use" amount.

You're best bet in the US getting caught with that much or more is to just get robbed by the cops, which actually happens all the time.

Have no idea how much my friend was carrying in terms of weight, didn't have a scale with me. Also, it would have probably been in grams not in whatever weird units you guys use in the US.

Jokes aside, it's confusing the way you used the expression "an ounce", given that "an ounce of" something is usually used to express just "a bit of" something.

Banking is a great example. FATCA forces banks all over the world to send financial information on American account holders to the USA.

If a bank has even a vague hint that you might be a US person, they have to send all your personal financial information to the USA, so that the USA can collect tax from you wherever you are in the world.

Not only is this terrible from a privacy perspective. It has cost foreign banks hundreds of millions of dollars to implement. It has cost Australian banks almost half a billion dollars over the past decade.

Yet any time the rest of the world tries to make the USA play by their rules, the US government claims some moral outrage about sovereignty.

Then why would places unaligned with the US follow similar policies? Places like Cuba, Iran, etc?

> US basically dictates global policies in the block of countries not part of the soviet sphere of influence during the cold war.

You are basing yourself on vague feelings of superiority, rather than actual knowledge. Influential, yes. Dictating policy, not at all.

I'm in Portugal, we follow the US lead very often on foreign policy, but only when we agree.

We've taken our own way in drug policy, extradition (we've refused to extradite criminals to the US because of the death penalty), immigration, and in a host of other areas.

Like Germany and prostitution?

And the world did end- not