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Published: 02 April 2026

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A Dalgarno Institute Position on Early Intervention, Diversion, and the Culture We Want to Build

Queensland is in the middle of a significant drug policy decision, and the public deserves a serious conversation rather than a partisan one.

The state government has proposed winding back its three-strike drug diversion program, the arrangement that gave people caught with small quantities of illicit substances several chances before facing criminal charges. Under the existing framework, first-time offenders received a warning. Second and third-time offenders were referred to a health practitioner-run program. Under the proposed changes, only first-time offenders would be diverted. After that: fines, or criminal charges.

Peak medical and nursing bodies have responded sharply. The Australian Medical Association Queensland has called the decision “dangerous and contrary to evidence.” The Queensland Nurses and Midwives Union has accused the government of acting on “unsound information and prejudice.” Civil liberties advocates have warned the changes risk turning repeat offenders into de facto drug dealers, given the likely penalties they would face.

The Police Minister, by contrast, argued that allowing people to be caught with heroin or fentanyl multiple times without meaningful consequence sends entirely the wrong message.

Both positions have merit. Neither is sufficient. And the people caught in the middle (individuals struggling with drug dependence, and the families and communities around them) deserve better than a debate that treats drug policy as a political football.

At the Dalgarno Institute, the question we keep returning to is this: is Australia’s approach to early intervention actually serious about helping people exit drug use, or are we simply managing the optics of a problem we have not yet committed to solving?

The False Choice That Keeps Failing Us

For years, Australia’s drug policy debate has been framed around a binary: criminalise people who use drugs, or decriminalise them. Lock them up or let them off. Punish or permit.

This is a false choice, and it has caused serious, lasting damage.

Crude criminalisation (charging, convicting, and moving on) does not help anyone exit drug use. It damages livelihoods, fractures families, and too often embeds people more deeply in the very environments that contributed to their drug use in the first place. Nobody serious is arguing for that approach.

But decriminalisation is not the answer either, and the pro-drug lobby’s insistence that it is deserves direct and honest challenge. Removing the legal framework around drug use does not reduce harm. It normalises use, increases uptake, and strips away one of the most powerful tools available for motivating someone not yet ready to seek help voluntarily. We have cared enough about tobacco users to maintain robust societal and structural pressure toward cessation over decades. People dependent on illicit drugs deserve at least that same level of genuine, sustained care, not permission dressed up as compassion.

The evidence is not ambiguous on this. Decades of experience in problem-solving courts, drug courts, and structured diversion programs confirms it: coercive intervention, applied with care and consistency, produces outcomes that neither criminalisation nor decriminalisation can match. The law, used not as a battering ram but as a firm hand on the shoulder, can guide people through the door of recovery. Many will not open that door on their own. The most caring thing we can do is refuse to pretend otherwise.

That is the space this country needs to occupy. The evidence is there. The will to use it properly is what has been missing.

What “Diversion” Has Become, and Why It Needs to Change

Here is what needs to be said plainly, and what the medical community’s otherwise reasonable defence of existing diversion programs has been too quiet about: in too many settings, diversion has become a procedural formality.

A person is intercepted, referred, ticked off a list, and sent on their way. A pamphlet changes hands. A box is marked. The system records a successful diversion, and the person returns to exactly the same environment, with exactly the same pressures and exactly the same unresolved reasons for using drugs in the first place.

That is not intervention. It is paperwork with better intentions.

The problem becomes even more acute in court settings, where recidivistic drug-using offenders appear before a magistrate for the third, fourth, or fifth time. Increasingly, mental health diagnoses, whether genuine or conveniently timed, function as a mechanism for avoiding any meaningful engagement with the consequences of continued drug use. We understand why courts tread carefully here, and we are not dismissing the genuine complexity. But when a mental health claim becomes a reliable exit from accountability, the system stops serving the person and starts serving the process. Structure, consistency, and appropriate expectation are not obstacles to recovery; they are conditions for it. Removing them is not compassionate. It is negligent.

Robust early intervention looks quite different from what most Australians currently encounter. Structured, supervised engagement over time replaces the single appointment. Genuine connection to therapeutic communities, peer support, and where necessary, secure welfare rehabilitation sits at the centre of any serious program. Consequences for disengagement must be proportionate, consistent, and oriented toward re-engagement with recovery rather than simple punishment. Honest, thorough assessment of what is actually driving a person’s drug use matters far more than a one-size-fits-all program that treats every case identically.

None of this requires new laws. It requires the willingness to use existing ones properly, and the courage to insist that people are capable of more than we have been expecting of them.

The Judicial Educator: Law in the Service of Recovery

Here is something Robert Downey Jnr said in 2004, after coming through one of the most public battles with addiction of his generation: “It’s not that difficult to overcome these seemingly ghastly problems. What’s hard is to decide to do it.”

That single observation sits at the heart of everything the Dalgarno Institute believes about early intervention. The decision to exit drug use is the hardest part, and for many people caught in the grip of dependency, the drug-affected brain cannot reliably make that decision without external help. Psychotropic substances corrupt the very cognitive processes needed to choose differently. This is not a moral failing. It is a neurological one. And it is precisely why assisted decision-making matters so much.

The Judicial Educator model exists to provide that assistance. The idea is to use the authority of the law not to punish, but to facilitate recovery. Not to brand a person, but to redirect them toward the exit from drug use that they may not yet be able to find on their own.

Anti-drug laws were always meant to serve this purpose. They were designed as a vehicle to protect communities, families, and children from the harms that flow from normalised drug use. For too long, those laws have sat underused while families paid the price. The Judicial Educator reclaims them for their original intent: not as a hammer, but as a hand on the shoulder.

Problem-solving courts and drug courts around the world have been operating on this basis for decades, and their results are well documented. They hold participants accountable for progress through recovery programs. They maintain the coercive potential of criminal sanctions for those who genuinely disengage, but reserve that potential as a last resort, not a first response. And critically, for those who complete the diversion pathway genuinely and in full, no criminal record need be recorded at all.

This is what purposeful intervention looks like in practice: not permission, but precision. Not the removal of legal consequence, but the intelligent deployment of legal authority in the service of human recovery.

Once psychotropic substances become entrenched in a person’s behavioural patterns, whether through short-term intoxication or long-term dependency, the risk to that person and to those around them requires more than a doctor’s appointment. It requires sustained, structured engagement with recovery, alongside genuine therapeutic and community support. The Judicial Educator, working in concert with health services and therapeutic communities, is the most effective framework we have for making that happen.

The existing criminal codes do not need weakening or erasing. They need tasking, again and properly, in the most proactive framework available to us. One voice, one message, one focus: helping people find their way out.

Prevention Belongs to Everyone, Including Police

Effective early intervention does not begin in a courtroom. It begins in the environments where drug use takes hold: on campuses, at events, in communities, and in the ordinary situations that no formal program ever reaches.

Campus police and community law enforcement officers occupy a position that is genuinely unique. They are present where drug use begins. They see what precedes harm. They observe patterns of behaviour that no clinician or educator ever sees, because those patterns play out on the street and in the moments between formal interventions. That proximity is not just an enforcement resource. It is a prevention resource, and one that Australian drug policy has consistently underused.

Research in prevention practice is clear: frontline officers create what practitioners call teachable moments, situations where a young person is far more open to a genuine conversation about risk than they would be in a classroom or a clinic. Students who binge drink are 3.5 times more likely to experience violence than those who do not. Nearly one in five students report feeling unsafe because of another student’s drinking. Officers see this up close, every week. That is not incidental. It is strategic intelligence.

Effective prevention requires that law enforcement be embedded in prevention planning from the outset, not called in after failure. It requires data-sharing between police and community health teams, consistent messaging across institutions, and officers who understand not just the law but the neuroscience of addiction and the principles of early intervention. When enforcement and prevention work in alignment, outcomes are measurably better, not because police become social workers, but because they become informed partners in a shared effort toward the same goal.

Prevention is not soft. It is one of the most strategic investments a community can make. And it belongs to all of us, including the officers who are already standing in the right place at the right time.

The Culture We Are Actually Trying to Build

All of this (the courts, the diversion programs, the campus officers, the therapeutic communities) is in service of something larger than policy. It is in service of culture change.

Drug use is not primarily a legal problem. It is a cultural one. And culture does not change through legislation alone. It changes when families, communities, schools, workplaces, sporting clubs, and individuals begin to speak with one voice, not a shaming voice, not a criminalising voice, but an honest and caring one that says: we know this causes harm, we know people can and do recover, and we are not going to look the other way to make anyone feel more comfortable.

The most instructive parallel remains tobacco. A generation ago, smoking was normal. Today it is not. That shift did not happen because of a single law or a single campaign. It happened because the whole of society, gradually and consistently, stopped accommodating tobacco use as a lifestyle choice and started addressing it honestly as a harm. Legal frameworks, health education, social norms, and economic signals moved in the same direction over decades. Nobody called that cruel. We called it care.

We can do the same with illicit drugs. It requires us to stop arguing about whether to punish or excuse, and to start building something better: early intervention programs that are robust, not tokenistic; legal frameworks that are purposeful, not brutal; communities that are honest, not permissive; and a shared commitment to holding people to the possibility of a better future, and meaning it.

The people most at risk are not statistics. They are sons and daughters, students and workers, neighbours and friends. A tick in a box is not enough. What they deserve is engaged, accountable, and genuinely caring support from every part of the community, from the courts and the clinics to the campus officers and the families who refuse to give up.

That is the culture worth building. And it starts with being honest about what we are willing to do to get there.

Research Team – Dalgarno Institute

The Dalgarno Institute is Australia’s leading drug prevention and education advocacy organisation. For resources, training, and policy submissions, visit dalgarnoinstitute.org.au

(Source: WRD News)

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Published: 01 April 2026

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A landmark study published in JAMA Network Open reveals a deeply troubling link between parental death and child mortality. Children who lose a parent to drug overdose, homicide, or suicide face a sharply elevated risk of dying before they reach adulthood. The findings raise urgent questions about bereavement support across the United States.

Professor Sean Esteban McCabe at the University of Michigan School of Nursing led the research. His team mapped the relationship between parental death and child mortality at a statewide level using 14 years of linked birth and death records from Michigan, spanning 1992 to 2023. The study tracked more than 32,000 children who lost a biological parent to one of three preventable causes.

The findings are stark. Children bereaved by a parent’s homicide recorded the highest childhood mortality rate, at roughly 106 deaths per 10,000. That compares with just 5.22 per 10,000 among the general Michigan child population. Children who lost a parent to suicide faced a rate of more than 66 per 10,000. Those bereaved by parental drug overdose recorded nearly 37 deaths per 10,000. Together, these figures account for approximately 150 excess childhood deaths over the study period.

The scale of disparity is difficult to overstate. Children bereaved by homicide face a mortality rate 2,000% higher than the average Michigan child. Those who lost a parent to suicide face a rate 1,200% higher. Parental drug overdose carries a 700% higher mortality risk. Parental death and child mortality, the study confirms, connect far more deeply than anyone previously measured.

Parental Death and Child Mortality: A Crisis Hidden in Plain Sight

US parental mortality has reached historic highs. The ongoing drug overdose crisis drives much of this rise. Michigan already records higher parental mortality rates than the national average. Tens of thousands of children across the state now carry the consequences of addiction, violence, and suicide in their own bodies.

McCabe also directs the University of Michigan’s Centre for the Study of Drugs, Alcohol, Smoking and Health. He brings a personal dimension to the work.

“I have had several close friends and loved ones die due to overdose, suicide, and homicide, leaving behind many children,” he said. He volunteers as a children’s bereavement group facilitator at a non-profit in South-East Michigan. He has watched how isolated grieving children become.

“Bereaved children often experience friends at school who have no clue what to say when they talk about their parent who died,” he noted. “Friends often change the subject, so grieving children don’t want to discuss their deceased parent.”

Why Bereaved Children Mortality Risk Stays So High

The study stops short of establishing direct causation. Researchers acknowledge the complexity involved. Losing a biological parent reduces what the team calls a child’s “level of protection against harm.” Family disruption, declining mental health, financial pressure, and social isolation all likely push bereaved children mortality risk higher.

Parental homicide produced the highest child mortality rates of the three causes. Researchers now want to examine why, looking at factors such as family restructuring and the psychological impact of violent loss.

The study has limitations. It covers only biological parents and may undercount paternal deaths. The true scale of the problem is likely larger. The 2023 data were also provisional at the time of publication.

The Case for Urgent Action

Preventing parental deaths from overdoses, suicides, and homicides would directly lower mortality among children. The link between parental death and child mortality is not merely a statistic. It is a policy challenge that demands a response.

McCabe has been clear about what must change.

“There are early preventive interventions and childhood bereavement services that have been shown to improve children’s health following the death of a parent that need to be made more widely available,” he said, “so no Michigan child grieves alone.”

He wants a statewide bereavement collaborative, the removal of what he calls “bereavement service deserts,” and swift action on shortages in mental health, addiction medicine, and psychiatric care.

“A child’s zip code should not dictate whether they receive evidence-based bereavement services and treatment,” he said.

The research team urges other researchers to replicate the study across different states. Doing so would help identify at-risk children, expose racial and ethnic disparities, and show where bereavement support is most lacking.

What the Numbers Show

The study’s data make the scale of the problem concrete:

• Over the 14-year study period, 21,368 children lost a parent to drug overdose or drug-related causes. 79 of those children subsequently died.
• 6,651 children lost a parent to suicide. 44 of those children died.
• 4,243 children lost a parent to homicide. 45 of those children died before reaching adulthood.

Each group-specific mortality rate stands significantly above Michigan’s overall child rate of 5.22 per 10,000. The connection between parental death and child mortality is not coincidental.

The study appeared on 23 March 2026 in JAMA Network Open. The National Institutes of Health and the US Food and Drug Administration funded the research. (Source: WRD News)

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Published: 26 March 2026

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Glasgow fix room dealers are openly flogging heroin and cocaine to addicts at the gates of Britain’s first safer drug consumption facility. Pushers target vulnerable users outside The Thistle Hub, a £2.3 million a year centre in the Calton district. Campaigners say it is an open secret. Authorities, they warn, look the other way.

Drug dealing at The Thistle Hub goes further than the main gates. Some users collect NHS prescribed drugs at the clinic next door, step straight outside, buy street narcotics, and mix both into a lethal combination.

Glasgow Fix Room Dealers: A Centre Under Scrutiny

The Thistle opened 13 months ago as Britain’s first safer drugs consumption facility. Staff recorded 12,177 visits and oversaw 8,356 injections. Of those, 6,117 involved cocaine and 1,380 involved heroin. Addicts mixed both into “snowballs” on 848 occasions. Staff recorded 97 overdoses at the site.

Hub bosses argue the facility saves lives. It lets people with severe addictions use drugs under medical supervision. That keeps them out of doorways where no help can reach them. At launch, officials said users would bring drugs from elsewhere. Staff would not provide or sell anything on site.

Drug Dealing at The Thistle Hub: What the Images Show

Exclusive images tell a different story. Glasgow fix room dealers handed bags of powder to users queuing outside the gates. One man in a beanie hat exchanged drugs with an addict at the entrance. He then sold to another group minutes later. Others gathered near the building as handovers took place in plain sight.

The problem does not stop at the front gates. Transactions linked to drug dealing at The Thistle Hub also took place outside two homeless shelters less than five minutes away on foot.

Dealers at The Thistle: “A Blind Eye Being Turned”

Anmarie Ward of Faces and Voices of Recovery spoke bluntly about Glasgow fix room dealers and the damage they cause.

“Drug dealing takes place outside The Thistle every single day,” she said. “It has been happening since the first day it opened. It is shameful, but a blind eye is being turned to what is really going on down there.”

Ward pointed to a wider failure in Scotland’s addiction strategy. Drug deaths keep rising. Crime rates in the Calton are climbing. The area, she says, is becoming ghettoised.

“Those behind The Thistle say it is saving lives, but how can people ever get the help they need to stop when dealers are selling them drugs right outside the centre?”

She did not hold back. “Addicts need recovery programmes, not somewhere to take drugs. You would not give alcoholics their own private bar or gamblers their own dedicated bookies.”

Glasgow’s £50 Million Budget Failure

Glasgow holds a drug treatment budget of £50 million, one of the largest in the UK. Yet only £1.3 million funds residential rehabilitation places. That is less than 3% of the total pot directed at getting people genuinely clean.

To put it plainly, Scotland spends roughly £38 on drug maintenance for every £1 it puts into rehab. The system chases dependency management rather than recovery, and thousands remain stuck as a result.

With Glasgow fix room dealers operating steps from a taxpayer funded medical centre, that imbalance is hard to ignore. The question is no longer just about one facility in Calton. It is about whether Scotland’s entire approach to addiction is built to help people get better, or simply built to keep them going.

The Scottish Sun on Sunday contacted The Thistle Hub and the relevant health authorities for comment. (WRD News)

(“Across much of Europe,[and Australia] addiction policy has drifted into moral autopilot. Harm reduction, born from genuine humanitarian necessity, gradually expanded from a clinical response into a governing philosophy. The state’s task became preventing death while asking very little about life afterwards. Abstinence came to sound punitive, stigmatising even.  Abstinence goaled recovery began to sound naïve – Managed dependency was reframed as progress.

Europe became extraordinarily skilled at keeping people alive in the short term while growing quietly fatalistic about what those lives might become.

This is the deeper failure. Not that Europe embraced compassion, but that it narrowed compassion’s horizon. Survival became the goal rather than the beginning.”

Annemarie Ward, CEO, FAVOR, UK}

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Published: 05 February 2026

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(This is just another outcome of Harm Reduction Only Ideology – The ever-increasing permission models that enable and EQUIP (like Needle Distribution Programs) ongoing drug use isn’t seeing drug use and its intensity reducing, only increasing. This is not only bad policy practice, it is contrary to all the aims of national and international drug policy intents – Welcome to drug use normalisation 101)

A recent national study has revealed serious health consequences tied to a practice many people underestimate. The National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at UNSW Sydney published the research in January 2026. It examined the co-injection of drugs among people who regularly inject substances across Australia. The findings show just how widespread this behaviour has become, and who faces the greatest risk.

What Is Co-Injection of Drugs?

Co-injection means mixing two or more drugs inside a single syringe before injecting them. This differs from using multiple substances on the same day. With co-injection, the body receives everything at once, in the same dose. That simultaneous intake puts the body under serious pressure. It must process several substances at the same time, with no ability to manage the combined effects.

The 2025 Illicit Drug Reporting System (IDRS) surveyed 865 people across all Australian capital cities. The study found that 18% of participants had combined two or more drugs in the same syringe within the month before their interview. Most of them did this more than once. For a significant number of people, co-injection is not a one-off event but a repeated pattern.

The Most Common Drug Combinations

Among those combining drugs in the same syringe, the top combination was methamphetamine crystal mixed with heroin. This makes sense given the data. Opioids and stimulants already rank as the two most commonly injected drug classes in Australia. Research from Melbourne between 2017 and 2019 confirmed a similar trend. Studies in Seattle also recorded a sharp rise in the co-use of methamphetamine and opioids over the same period.

The data also picked up diphenhydramine, an antihistamine with sedative effects sometimes found in over-the-counter sleep capsules. GHB, ketamine, and various pharmaceutical stimulants showed up as well. Of those who combined drugs in the same syringe, 84% mixed two substances. Around 13% used three drugs at once.

Who Is Most Likely to Co-Inject?

The study linked several factors to a higher likelihood of co-injection of drugs. Men reported this practice at notably higher rates. Daily injectors stood out too. They held roughly four times the odds of combining substances in a single syringe compared to those who injected less often.

Needle sharing played a significant role as well. People who shared syringes in the past month were more than twice as likely to have co-injected. Researchers also identified “bingeing” as a key risk factor. Bingeing means using drugs continuously for 48 hours or more without sleep. Those who had binged were around four times more likely to combine substances in one syringe. Together, these patterns show that co-injection tends to cluster among people with the most intense and high-risk drug use habits.

Why Co-Injection of Drugs Is So Dangerous

Mixing stimulants and opioids in the same syringe puts major strain on the cardiovascular and respiratory systems. When someone takes two substances at different times, the body can begin to clear one before the other arrives. Co-injection removes that buffer entirely. A stimulant pushes the heart rate up and sharpens alertness. At the same time, an opioid suppresses breathing and slows the central nervous system. That direct conflict between the two substances makes certain combinations deeply unpredictable and potentially fatal.

Earlier studies connected the co-injection of methamphetamine and opioids to poorer physical and mental health outcomes over time. They also flagged an elevated risk of overdose. The 2025 IDRS data tell a similar story. The behaviour clusters tightly around other high-risk patterns, especially daily use and binge episodes. Both of those patterns carry their own serious long-term health consequences.

Understanding the Bigger Picture

Co-injection of drugs is not a fringe activity. A meaningful number of regular injectors in Australia engage in it. It tends to happen among people whose drug use is already the most intense. The mix of stimulants and opioids in a single syringe represents one of the more dangerous forms of polydrug use seen in the country today. The health consequences, both immediate and long-term, need far greater public awareness.

Drug use patterns keep shifting across Australia. The risks tied to co-injection of drugs will stay relevant as long as that shift continues. Understanding exactly what people put into their bodies, and how, stays critical. The 2025 IDRS data give us a national snapshot. It is both timely and relevant, not only for researchers and clinicians, but for anyone who cares about public health.

(Source: WRD News)