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Published: 17 June 2026

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As Vietnam launches its toughest anti-drug campaign yet, it is choosing its model. And it isn’t the one its neighbour just abandoned.

Through June, Vietnam ran its 2026 Anti-Drug Action Month under a blunt national theme: a shared determination to build a drug-free commune. Provincial police forces launched simultaneous high-intensity operations to suppress drug crime and screen users. Hanoi also convened China, Laos and Myanmar to agree a three-month joint crackdown along their shared borders, running through to mid-September.

What is striking is how far the campaign reaches beyond policing. This is not a crackdown the public is asked merely to tolerate; it is one they are mobilised to join. The month built in public rallies, community running events, artistic programmes, exhibitions and digital campaigns, alongside anti-drug education in schools and the active involvement of community leaders, religious figures and local residents. Communes across the country have staged their own launch ceremonies, declaring local determination to become drug-free. Running underneath the enforcement is a recovery arm too, with state-backed credit programmes to help former drug users access vocational training, employment and reintegration. The framing throughout is that drug prevention is a task for the whole of society, not just the police, and on the ground the campaign appears to enjoy genuinely broad support. Hard outcome data is another matter, and Vietnam’s own figures are not independently audited, but the popular backing for the approach is not in doubt.

This is a country leaning further into prohibition, not away from it. And it is doing so at the precise moment much of the world is supposedly moving the other way. To understand the bet Vietnam is making, it helps to look at the two models now on offer in its own neighbourhood, and at what happened to the country that tried the other one.

A Region at a Fork in the Road

Vietnamese officials have been explicit. They do not accept the global trend toward legalising drug use, and they remain committed to a long-term vision of a drug-free region. Vietnam is one of the toughest jurisdictions in the world on the supply side, retaining capital punishment for serious trafficking offences. That is a dimension of its approach which draws sustained international criticism, and one worth naming honestly rather than glossing over.

Where does that leave Vietnam in the regional picture? Firmly in the same camp as Singapore and Japan, and well away from the road Thailand has just retraced.

Singapore draws a deliberate line between two ideas. One is “harm reduction”, which manages the damage once drugs are already embedded in a society. The other is what it calls “harm prevention”: keeping that damage from taking root in the first place. As one senior Singaporean minister put it, some countries reach a point where drugs are so pervasive that they have little choice but to let them circulate. Singapore’s stated aim is to never arrive there at all. Japan sits in much the same camp. It has some of the lowest drug-use rates in the developed world, underpinned by strict laws and a strong cultural disapproval that does work no statute can.

The Thai Cautionary Tale

The alternative model is not hypothetical. Thailand tried it, and then reversed it.

When Thailand removed cannabis from its narcotics list in 2022, becoming the first country in the region to do so, the industry exploded rapidly. By the time the brakes went on, the country had registered well over 18,000 cannabis shops, with the market valued at more than a billion US dollars. The problem, by near-universal agreement, was that decriminalisation arrived without a regulatory framework to govern it. The result was not a tidy, medicalised market but a fast, largely unregulated free-for-all.

Thai authorities and local reporting increasingly pointed to the downstream costs. They flagged rising cannabis-related poisonings, and growing concern about dependence among young people. In June 2025, the government reversed course. Cannabis flower was reclassified as a controlled herb, recreational use was recriminalised, and sales were restricted to patients holding a valid medical prescription. Thousands of the shops that opened during the boom soon had to close.

For prevention advocates, the lesson was not really about cannabis itself. It was about commercialisation. Once an industry is built on normalising a substance, the incentives all run one way, and the public-health bill arrives later, payable by the young.

Why the Stakes Are Not Abstract

(Source: Vietnamese state media)

Vietnam’s hard line can read as severe from a distance. Up close, the trade it is fighting is anything but abstract, as a recent killing on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City made clear.

In May, a senior figure in the so-called Coconut Cartel, a western Sydney syndicate, was shot dead outside a restaurant in a busy HCMC dining precinct. The dead man, 24-year-old Lorenzo Lemalu Tovia, was an Australian; a second Sydney man was wounded in the same attack. Street-level footage of the killing, captured on the cheap phones some locals wryly call “rice-powered cameras”, spread quickly across the internet. Two Samoan men, Joseph Vaa, 27, and Steve Tofa, 23, later confessed to the shooting on Vietnamese television and now face a potential death penalty.

The cartel itself had just been all but dismantled in Australia, where NSW Police blamed it for a long run of shootings, kidnappings and attempted murders driven by a turf feud with a rival network. The violence, in other words, did not stop at a border. It followed the trade all the way to Vietnam’s doorstep. This is the reality a drug-free-region policy is built to keep out, and the reason Vietnam is unmoved by arguments that the war on drugs is simply unwinnable.

The Enforcement Reflex, in Sydney and Hanoi

Australia’s response shows how alike the instincts are at both ends of this trade. Days after the cartel arrests, the NSW Parliament passed the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Organised and Gang-related Crime Reforms) Bill 2026. It is a serious piece of law. A new aggravated offence now covers the “kill cars” that organised crime uses and then torches to destroy evidence. The window for authorities to seize assets of people subject to Drug Trafficker Declarations has been extended from one year to five. Bail conditions change so that courts can weigh an accused person’s organised crime links, with specific measures targeting the recruitment of children to do the dangerous work.

These are sensible reforms, and they deserve support. So does much of Vietnam’s enforcement effort. But every one of these tools, in Hanoi as in Sydney, responds to harm that has already happened.

By the time a cartel is dismantled, the damage is done. The young person recruited into a kill car has already been recruited. The community that lived under the shootings has already lived under them. Vietnam can run the toughest supply-side regime in the region. New South Wales can pass the firmest laws in a decade. Both will still be arriving after the fall.

The NSW reforms name the recruitment of children as a specific target, and that is the detail that should focus everyone’s attention. Networks like this do not run on hardened veterans alone. They run on a steady supply of young people with little to lose. Money, status and a sense of belonging they could not find anywhere else draw them in. The two young Samoan men who confessed to the Ho Chi Minh City killing fit the pattern exactly: reportedly ordinary workers caught up in something far larger than themselves. The flashy side of this world is now lived out in public, on social media, for an audience of teenagers who are watching closely. There are good reasons not to reproduce or glamourise any of it. But it would be naive to pretend it is not a recruitment tool. It is.

Prevention Is the Half That Lasts

This is where Singapore’s distinction earns its keep, and where drug prevention proves its worth. There is a real difference between a society that prevents harm and one that has resigned itself to reducing it. That difference takes shape upstream, long before a court or a customs scanner ever gets involved.

Across decades of this field, the evidence keeps pointing to the same protective factors. A young person who has belonging, identity, meaning and a trusted adult in their corner is far harder to recruit than one who has none of those things. The cartel understands this better than most prevention campaigns do. It offers a counterfeit version of all four. Belonging through the crew. Identity through the reputation. Meaning through the mission. Mentorship through the older operator who takes an interest. To a teenager with none of those things in place, that offer is not stupid. It is logical. Prevention works when the real version reaches them first, through family, school, sport, faith and community, before a recruiter does.

We use a phrase a lot at the Dalgarno Institute: the difference between scaffolding and foundations. Tough laws and big seizures are scaffolding. They can hold a structure up for a while, and they matter. Foundations are slower, harder and far less photogenic. The family, the community, the sense of purpose that means a young person never finds the cartel’s offer attractive in the first place. Scaffolding without foundations only ever holds for so long. Dismantle one network and, where the underlying conditions are unchanged, another fills the vacuum, usually faster than the last one took to build.

The Work That Never Makes the News

Vietnam has chosen its model, and on the evidence of Thailand’s reversal it has chosen well. Keeping a drug culture from taking root is cheaper, kinder and more effective than dismantling one after it has formed. But the hardest part of that choice is not the enforcement that makes the headlines. It is the prevention that does not.

The Coconut Cartel is gone, and Vietnam’s borders are a little tighter this month. Both are worth something. But whether anything takes the cartel’s place, in Sydney, in Ho Chi Minh City or anywhere else, depends far less on the next law or the next crackdown than on the quiet, unglamorous work of drug prevention. Ultimately, the conversations in lounge rooms, classrooms and community halls that never make the news, but decide everything that does

(Source: WRD News)

 

 

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Published: 10 June 2026

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Queensland’s child safety system is not just failing children; it is warehousing them, exposing them to abuse, and then acting shocked when the damage shows up as violence, exploitation, and chaos. But if this crisis is to be understood properly, it must be framed not only as a care-system failure, but as a prevention and demand-reduction failure. The report makes clear that substance use is not incidental to the breakdown: it is repeatedly tied to neglect, instability, exploitation, and trauma. A serious response must therefore shift from managing fallout to reducing the drivers of uptake, delaying first use, strengthening protective factors, and intervening early before harm compounds.

A system built to fail

The headlines are grim enough: 78 children under five are still in residential care, and the government says none should remain there. But the deeper scandal is that residential care has become a dumping ground for the hardest cases, even though it is plainly unsafe and ineffective for many of them. The inquiry found that 67 percent of reported sexual abuse incidents involved children in residential care, which is not an accident — it is a system design failure.

Substance use as a prevention failure, not just a symptom

The report’s biggest blind spot is treating substance use as a downstream problem when it is clearly part of the core machinery of harm. A prevention and demand-reduction lens makes the issue harder to ignore: children and young people in care are being pushed toward environments where drugs, alcohol, and other substances fuel exploitation, violence, and survival behaviour, while the pathway from care to youth justice is reinforced by repeated exposure to those risks. When a system cannot protect a child from predators, placement breakdowns, unstable housing, or substance-saturated settings, it is not simply failing to manage harm after the fact — it is failing to reduce demand before patterns of use and dependency take hold.

What should change: from crisis response to prevention and demand reduction

Queensland cannot just identify the problem; it needs to stop reproducing it. That means no more young children in residential care, far earlier family support, rapid diversion into kinship and therapeutic foster care, stronger treatment pathways for young people and carers, and properly staffed wraparound services that deal with trauma, neglect, and substance use before they harden into lifelong harm. It also means rebuilding the system around protective factors: stable relationships, safe housing, school engagement, trusted adults, and clear community norms that do not normalise substance use. Success should be measured not by how efficiently the system moves children after breakdown, but by reduced abuse, reduced placement churn, delayed or denied substance uptake, and reduced youth justice contact.

Why this matters: the policy lens must shift

If government keeps describing this as only a “care” problem, it will keep producing care-like excuses. The deeper truth is that this is simultaneously a prevention failure, a demand-reduction failure, a substance-use failure, and a governance failure. The needed redesign is therefore not just about crisis containment; it is about building a child safety system that prevents exposure, delays uptake, strengthens resilience, and treats early signs of harm before they become entrenched. Without that strategic shift, the system will continue to react to damage it might otherwise have prevented.

What Next? Prevention Must Be the Priority — Demand Reduction as Core Strategy

Early intervention works best when it is routine, fast, layered, and prevention-focused rather than treated as a crisis-only response. The goal is not merely to respond to harmful use once it appears, but to deny or delay uptake, reduce the drivers behind it, and make support easy to access before patterns of use harden into dependence. This is where demand reduction becomes practical: strengthening resilience, interrupting risk pathways, and building systems that favour healthy development over substance exposure.

What to put in place

• A single and undiluted focus, message and voice on prevention into the public square – as with tobacco. Education, health, media and government all on the same page and the removal of cognitive dissonance in the drug policy space.
• Screen early and often in schools, primary care, youth services, and child safety settings to spot warning signs before they escalate.
• Pair substance-use screening with mental health screening, because co-occurring issues need integrated care, not separate silos.
• Use brief interventions first: a short, structured conversation can reduce risky use and connect people to the right level of care.
• Build a “no wrong door” system so any contact point can steer a person into treatment, counselling, or family support.
• Strengthen protective factors such as stable family relationships, school engagement, trusted adult mentors, and structured activities.
• Make treatment accessible, non-judgmental, culturally safe, and available across locations and service types.

How to break the cycle

The cycle usually keeps going because the system reacts late, fragments care, and leaves people to self-medicate through trauma, stress, or instability. The robust and sustained reintroduction of Primary Prevention, Demand Reduction and Early intervention should therefore focus on the whole person: housing, family support, mental health, school re-engagement, and follow-up after the first contact, not just the substance itself. For young people, continuity matters most, because gaps in care are where relapse, exploitation, and escalation tend to happen.

Practical model

A workable model looks like this:

1. Identify risk early through screening and referral.
2. Deliver a brief intervention immediately.
3. Match intensity to need, from counselling to specialist treatment.
4. Involve family or significant supports where appropriate.
5. Keep follow-up going until stability is established.

The policy shift

If governments want fewer cycles of substance-related harm, they need to fund prevention and early intervention as core social infrastructure, not optional extras. That means recalibrating misused harm-reduction systems, so they do not inadvertently normalise uptake and hinder recovery – but more – restoring primary prevention, demand reduction, treatment for recovery to their proper place in the policy mix.

In practical terms, it means more intense and fully funded prevention practice priorities, include in integrated youth services, more workforce training, better post-treatment follow-up, and less stigma so people seek help sooner. Pursuit of and access to drug use exiting focused recovery and, again, the highest priority of denying or at the very least, delaying uptake of these life, family and community wrecking substances.

(Source: WRD News Team)

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Published: 10 June 2026

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Building a Healthier Future Through Conscious Choices

Making choices that support personal health and long-term well-being is one of the most empowering journeys a young person can embark upon today. In a world full of academic pressures, social media expectations, and peer influences, deciding to look after your mind and body is a profound act of self-reliance. Choosing to live a life free from intoxication provides massive advantages for your personal growth. By exploring the fundamental substance abstinence benefits, we can understand how steering clear of intoxicants alters your life path for the better.

Many people think that experimenting with drinking or using drugs in a ‘recreational’ context is just a standard part of growing up. However, deciding to completely avoid these substances creates a solid foundation for your future career, relationships, and physical vitality.

The Crucial Substance Abstinence Benefits for Brain Development

The human brain continues to grow and refine its neural pathways until a person reaches their mid-twenties. The prefrontal cortex is the specific region responsible for planning, emotional balance, impulse control, and rational decision-making. When alcohol or illicit drugs enter a developing brain, they disrupt this intricate wiring process.

Choosing sobriety allows the brain to develop to its full intellectual and emotional capacity. Young people who maintain a lifestyle free from chemical interference consistently demonstrate sharper memory retention, better concentration, and superior problem-solving skills. Staying away from peer pressure and chemical habits means you avoid the cognitive fog that frequently holds people back from achieving their top marks at school or university.

How Sobriety Safeguards Mental Health and Stability

There is a massive connection between substance consumption and emotional difficulties. Many individuals mistakenly believe that a drink or a drug can help ease social anxiety or stress. In reality, chemical substances alter your brain chemistry and actually worsen underlying mental health struggles over time.

Choosing to avoid drugs and alcohol entirely helps keep your emotional baseline stable. It prevents the sharp mood swings, sleep disruptions, and heightened anxiety that toxic substances cause. By developing healthy, natural coping mechanisms like exercising, writing, or playing music, young people build true psychological resilience. You learn to handle life’s inevitable challenges with a clear mind rather than relying on a temporary chemical escape.

Enhancing Physical Health and Freedom from Chemical Habituation

The physical rewards of avoiding toxic substances are immediate and long-lasting. Alcohol and recreational drugs place a heavy burden on your vital organs, especially the liver, heart, and kidneys. According to official UK health data published by the Office for National Statistics, there were 10,473 deaths from alcohol-specific causes registered across the United Kingdom in 2023 alone, representing the highest number on record. This stark statistic highlights the severe toll that toxic substances take on the human body.

Choosing a chemical-free lifestyle ensures your energy levels remain high and consistent. Your sleep patterns improve, your immune system stays strong, and your body recovers much faster from physical exertion. Furthermore, preventing the initial use of addictive substances is the most effective way to eliminate the danger of chemical habituation altogether. When you never open the door to substance misuse, you never have to face the difficult, painful path of trying to break an addiction later in life.

Reaping the Long-Term Substance Abstinence Benefits in Daily Life

Choosing to live without reliance on intoxicants impacts every single aspect of your daily existence, leading to deeper social connections and greater financial freedom.

• Authentic Relationships: Socialising without chemical stimulants forces you to develop genuine communication skills. The friendships you build are rooted in shared interests, mutual respect, and real conversations rather than shared intoxication.
• Financial Independence: Maintaining a lifestyle centered on health saves an incredible amount of money. The financial capital that would otherwise be spent on nights out, alcohol, or illicit substances can be redirected toward meaningful goals like buying a car, travelling, or funding a business venture.
• Unlocking True Potential: When you are not held back by the physical or mental exhaustion of hangovers and comedowns, you have the focus required to pursue your passions. Whether your goal is mastering a sport, learning a complex instrument, or launching a career, clarity of mind is your ultimate advantage.

Cultivating a Supportive and Healthy Social Environment

Embracing the primary substance abstinence benefits does not mean isolating yourself from social activities. It simply means choosing a lifestyle that puts your future first. Across the United Kingdom, a growing number of young people are choosing to stand up against peer pressure. Recent lifestyle data indicates that around 25% of young individuals aged 18 to 24 in the UK now choose to be completely teetotal. This positive shift shows that sobriety is increasingly recognised as a modern, forward-thinking choice.

You can actively protect your path by seeking out peer groups that value wellness, fitness, and authentic creativity. Surrounding yourself with individuals who respect your choices makes it much easier to stay committed to your personal goals.

Ultimately, avoiding drugs and alcohol is an active investment in your future happiness. By keeping your mind sharp and your body strong, you maintain full control over your decisions and unlock your true potential.

(Source: JAMAnetwork)

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Published: 05 June 2026

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In May 2026, the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC) marked thirty years of its Drug Trends program with a quiet announcement and a new bulletin series. NDARC framed the launch as a milestone: three decades of monitoring Australia’s drug markets, a commitment to drawing together multiple data sources, and a new series designed to make evidence more accessible to policymakers and health services. Yet for anyone watching Australian drug prevention policy, the milestone carries an uncomfortable weight.

The first bulletin the program produced, a detailed snapshot of cocaine in Australia, is among the more damning indictments of drug policy published in recent years. Not because NDARC intended it that way, but because the numbers tell a story the framing does not. Cocaine use among Australians aged 14 and over has grown from 1% in 2004 to 4.5% in 2022–23. Wastewater analysis recorded the highest cocaine consumption in Australian history in 2024–25. Deaths have risen fivefold since 2000. Hospitalisations have tripled since 2011. Cocaine is now the second most commonly used illicit drug in Australia. The market is, in the bulletin’s own words, “growing and more established.”

Thirty years of monitoring and every indicator moving in the wrong direction.

The question worth asking at this anniversary is not whether Drug Trends has done its job. It has, on its own terms. The real question is what job its designers intended it to do, and what that choice has meant for Australian drug prevention policy over three decades.

What Drug Trends Was Built to Measure

The anniversary announcement describes the four monitoring systems that make up the Drug Trends program in plain terms. The Illicit Drug Reporting System (IDRS) monitors “trends in illicit drug markets” through annual interviews with people who inject drugs. The Ecstasy and Related Drugs Reporting System (EDRS) tracks “emerging trends” in ecstasy and stimulant markets through interviews with people who regularly use those substances. The National Illicit Drug Indicators Project (NIDIP) disseminates “trends in the epidemiology of drug-related harms.” The Drugs and New Technologies project monitors online drug marketplaces and dark web availability.

Every one of these systems focuses on people already using drugs, markets already operating, and harms already occurring. None of them measure whether fewer Australians are choosing to use drugs in the first place. The word ‘prevention’ does not appear in any of their frameworks, let alone as something to track or evaluate. Nor does any system ask whether the policy environment is discouraging uptake among people who have not yet begun.

This is not a criticism of the researchers who built and operate these systems. Monitoring markets and harms is necessary work. However, the architecture of Drug Trends reflects a set of assumptions about what Australian drug prevention policy is fundamentally for, and preventing uptake is not among them. Over thirty years, that architecture has shaped what evidence researchers generate, what questions they ask, and what policy responses policymakers receive.

The Drift Toward Harm Reduction

Australia’s shift toward harm reduction as the dominant policy framework did not happen at once, and it did not begin recently. When the Hawke government launched the National Campaign Against Drug Abuse in 1985, harm minimisation was introduced as the organising principle from the start. Every iteration of the National Drug Strategy since then, through 1993, 1998, 2004, 2010, and 2017, has carried the same overarching commitment to harm minimisation across three pillars: supply reduction, demand reduction, and harm reduction. Prevention of uptake was folded into demand reduction, never given its own pillar, and never given proportionate funding. A 2024 UNSW report found that of the $5.45 billion Australian governments spent on illicit drug countermeasures in 2021-22, just 7% went to prevention. Law enforcement consumed 64%. Treatment took 27%. Prevention, the only pillar directly aimed at stopping people from starting, received $363 million in a $5.45 billion budget.

By the time Drug Trends reached its thirtieth year, harm reduction had become the dominant logic of most public health responses to illicit drug use in Australia. Drug checking services now operate in the ACT and Victoria. Needle and syringe programmes proliferate nationally. Supervised consumption facilities have ended their so-called trials and opened for business in two states with disastrous community outcomes. Over those decades, the language shifted from discouraging use to managing damage more ‘safely’.

The cocaine bulletin reflects this orientation precisely. Its policy recommendations identify three priorities: continued monitoring of cocaine markets and harms; expansion of drug checking and public risk communication systems; and improved access to treatment and early intervention services.

Notably, the word “prevention” does not appear in the policy implications section. The bulletin makes no recommendation directed at reducing the number of Australians who begin using cocaine. It sets no target for reducing uptake. It offers no acknowledgement that the fourfold increase in cocaine use over two decades represents a failure that warrants a different kind of response.

This absence is not accidental. It is where a monitoring framework arrives after thirty years of progressively redefining success. Success no longer means fewer people using drugs. The framework was supposed to mean fewer people dying or ending up in hospital per unit of drug use, but with increasing use these relative numbers also increase, though the ‘spin’ may be that we are seeing ‘less’ such incidences. These are different goals, and pursuing one does not automatically serve the other.

Harm Reduction’s Real Limits

The cocaine bulletin documents that drug checking services in the ACT and Victoria found some samples sold as cocaine contained opioids, a contamination risk that kills people. Multiple drug alerts between 2024 and 2026 flagged opioids in cocaine samples across NSW, ACT, and Victoria. In that specific context, drug checking has a clear purpose. Even so, consumption of ‘uncontaminated’ substances does not slow.

Harm reduction as a primary policy framework, rather than one tool among many, carries consequences the bulletin’s own data make visible. Across thirty years of Drug Trends monitoring, cocaine use has grown every decade. The market has become more established, not less. Perceived availability among people who regularly use ecstasy and other stimulants reached over 40% in 2025, with many reporting cocaine was “very easy to obtain.” The domestic price, at $300 to $350 per gram, remains among the highest in the world, not because supply is constrained, but because demand is strong enough to sustain it.

Harm reduction does not reduce demand. In fact, it can paradoxically increase it, not least by normalising engagement with addictive substances. It manages the consequences of demand that already exists, but when demand grows, as it has in Australia across thirty years, the harm reduction burden grows with it. Hospitalisations multiply. Treatment episodes balloon, having quadrupled for cocaine over the past decade alone. Ambulance attendances climb with them.

That is not a system succeeding. It is a system absorbing the consequences of a problem its designers never intended it to prevent.

Where Did Prevention Go?

Prevention exists on paper, but little more than that. Reducing the number of people who initiate drug use has all but disappeared from Australian drug policy in practice. Governments have progressively marginalised and underfunded it, and much of public health discourse treats it with scepticism.

Some of that scepticism has legitimate roots. School-based drug education programmes of the 1980s and 1990s produced mixed results, mostly because of a lack of volume, consistency, and follow-through. Mass media campaigns have a complicated evidence base, depending heavily on who scripts the messaging. Consequently, those experiences generated real caution about prevention as a category.

Caution, however, became abandonment. The monitoring infrastructure Drug Trends built over thirty years reinforced that abandonment, because it generated no evidence about prevention outcomes. You cannot make the case for investment in something you have no data on. The IDRS interviews people who inject drugs. The EDRS interviews people who regularly use ecstasy and stimulants. Neither system asks how those people came to begin using, what might have changed that trajectory, or what keeps non-users from starting.

The cocaine bulletin contains a figure that should be at the centre of any serious prevention conversation. Only 3% of people who used cocaine in 2022–23 did so weekly or more frequently. A full 97% used occasionally. The shift to more harmful, more entrenched patterns of use is not yet widespread at population level. There is a large cohort of occasional users who have not crossed into frequent use, and a broader population of non-users who have not started at all.

The bulletin itself acknowledges that “increased availability and, as a result, potential reductions in price may contribute to broader uptake and more frequent use over time.” It then recommends drug checking and treatment access. It spots the window and walks straight past it.

What the Numbers Say About Policy

The cocaine data in this bulletin covers a period during which Australia maintained one of the world’s most sophisticated drug monitoring systems, spent heavily on law enforcement, including record seizures of 5.6 tonnes in 2023–24 and a single operation that netted 2 tonnes in November 2024, and progressively expanded harm reduction services. Throughout that same period, cocaine use grew fourfold.

The bulletin is careful about causality, noting that researchers conducted no statistical testing to support statements about change over time. Fair enough. Still, what can be said is that the current framework has not produced a reduction in cocaine use, or in cocaine-related harm at population level. Cocaine already accounts for 11% of the burden of disease attributable to illicit drug use in Australia, within a broader context where illicit drug use contributes 2.9% of total disease burden. As use grows, that share will grow further.

A monitoring system that tracks harms but not prevention outcomes will produce evidence that supports harm reduction responses. That is not a conspiracy. It is simply how evidence framing works. The questions you ask determine the answers you get, and the answers you get determine the policies that follow. For Australian drug prevention policy to change direction, researchers and policymakers must first change the questions they ask.

What Needs to Change

Any serious prevention complement to the existing Drug Trends framework would need to do things the current systems do not. It would need to understand the social and cultural factors driving cocaine uptake among the specific populations the bulletin identifies: young, employed, city-dwelling Australians with tertiary education, and gay, lesbian, and bisexual Australians, who report use at 15.1%, more than three times the general population rate. Furthermore, it would need to develop and evaluate targeted prevention approaches for these groups, rather than treating prevention as a spent category.

Policymakers would need to set and measure explicit targets for reducing uptake, not just death rates per user. Researchers would need to build prevention outcome data into the monitoring system, so that after another thirty years there is actually evidence on which to base prevention investment.

None of this requires dismantling what Drug Trends has built. A framework that measures harms without measuring whether fewer people are choosing to use drugs is, though, an incomplete one. The cocaine bulletin, read carefully, makes that incompleteness impossible to ignore.

Conclusion

NDARC’s thirty-year anniversary marks a genuine achievement in Australian public health research. The Drug Trends program has built a sustained, rigorous evidence base that the sector depends on.

The anniversary also marks, however, thirty years in which cocaine use grew from a marginal issue to the second most commonly used illicit drug in Australia. It marks thirty years in which the monitoring framework watching that growth never asked whether anyone could have stopped it. Above all, it marks thirty years in which harm reduction expanded and prevention contracted, without anyone explicitly deciding that this was the right direction for Australian drug prevention policy to travel.

The bulletin series NDARC has launched is titled Trends in Drug Markets, Use and Health Impacts in Australia. It is an accurate title. Markets, use, and health impacts are what Drug Trends measures. After thirty years, it is reasonable to ask whether a system that does not measure prevention can ever produce the evidence needed to achieve it.

This article draws on the NDARC announcement ‘Marking 30 Years of Drug Trends: Introducing a New Bulletin Series’ (28 May 2026) and the associated bulletin ‘Trends in Drug Markets, Use and Health Impacts in Australia: Cocaine’ (May 2026). WRD News provides prevention-focused analysis of drug policy and public health in Australia.

Author DALGARNO INSTITUTE

(Source: WRD News)