A new report in the online magazine PLos Medicine reveals that through surveys of Americans, 16.2 percent of Americans had tried cocaine at least once, and 42.4 percent had used marijuana, making us number one in the world for illegal drug use. This is in comparison to New Zealand, who came in a close second, where just 4.3 percent of study participants had used cocaine, and 41.9 percent marijuana.

In the Netherlands, where drug policy is more liberal than the United States, 1.9 percent of survey participants said they had used cocaine and 19.8 percent marijuana.

Twelve US 12 states including California permit medical use of marijuana, but possession and use remains prohibited under federal law.

And despite the US government’s massive anti-drug efforts, the United States remains the world’s top drug market, one amply supplied by South American cartels.

The US Drug Enforcement Agency has observed ever larger quantities of illegal drugs pouring into the country.

“We are seizing greater quantities of illegal drugs than ever before,” said a DEA statement last week.

In 2007, agents seized 41 metric tons of cocaine in just two raids, and denied drug traffickers record-breaking revenue of 3.5 billion dollars for the year, it said.

We may get our asses handed to us in every single sport at the Olympics this year, but goddamn it if we won’t give a shit ’cause we’ll all be too yay’d out and stoned. USA! USA!

The first full-length from New Zealanders and HBO stars Flight of the Conchords debuted this week at #3 on the Soundscan charts, the highest debut for a comedy album ever, surpassing Dane Cook’s 2005 release Retaliation. Congrats to our friends over at Sub Pop for stacking some more cheddar. As usual, I slept on Flight of the Conchords for awhile (I can’t afford HBO, man) but finally took the time to check out some of the clips of YouTube and now I realize why people go ape shit over these Kiwi bastards: they’ll seriously make you laugh your balls off.

The handsome creature pictured above is the tuatara. It is the last of a species that walked side by side with dinosaurs and has an ancestry that spans back over 200 trillion years. It doesn’t have the Internets, it hasn’t a clue about the upcoming US presidential election, it doesnt’ have a stance on global warming and it didn’t spend way too much money on a sorta functional iPhone, but it is the fastest evolving critter on the planet.

To make the estimate of evolutionary speed, researchers recovered DNA sequences from the bones of ancient tuatara. The team found that although tuatara have remained largely unchanged physically over very long periods of evolution, they are evolving — at a DNA level — faster than any other animal yet examined.The results will be detailed in the March issue of the journal Trends in Genetics.

“What we found is that the tuatara has the highest molecular evolutionary rate that anyone has measured,” said researcher David Lambert from the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution in New Zealand.

What does it all mean? Will we one day be subjugated by the tuatara in the same way humankind has subjugated much of the planet’s other species? Who knows. I mean, evolution’s just a theory, right?