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Published: 24 September 2026

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Recommendations For National Drug Strategy 2027–2036: A Prevention & Recovery Framework (Building Safer, Healthier and more Resilient Communities)
Australia stands at a crossroads. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s World DrugReport 2025 confirms what families and communities already know: our current approach to the substances and drugs issue is failing those global demographics. Australia now leads the world in cocaine consumption (per capita) and has ‘by far the highest’ global prevalence of ecstasy use. Our cannabis use is three times the global average among school students. Over 40% of Australians in drug treatment are there for methamphetamine, the highest proportion globally. Most concerning, 55% of those in treatment are under 35 years of age.
These statistics represent real people: sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, community members with unfulfilled potential. Behind each number is a family in crisis, a childhood disrupted, a future compromised.
Yet we know what works. Between 1998 and 2007, Australia’s ‘Tough on Drugs’ policy achieved a 39% reduction in illicit drug use and a 67% reduction in opiate deaths. Sweden reduced student drug use by 80%. Iceland achieved 60–90% reductions. Prevention policies actually implemented and followed up on produce a $12.88 saving in future damage management costs for every dollar invested.
The evidence is clear: prevention works, recovery is possible and productive, children can be protected, and families must be educated and equipped to that end.
This policy brief is a priority option for the National Drug Strategy 2027–2036, which returns to evidence-based prevention as the foundation of drug policy. It prioritises protecting children, supporting comprehensive recovery, and building drug-use-declining communities. It honours Australia’s international obligations under Article 33 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most ratified UN treaty in history.
We can no longer afford policies that normalise drug use while claiming to reduce its harms. The time for a seriously resourced and thoroughly implemented prevention and recovery framework has come.

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Published: 16 September 2026

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New research has confirmed what many carers and clinicians have long suspected. Youth in foster care who live with a mental health diagnosis are far more likely to misuse alcohol, cannabis or nicotine than their peers. They also respond less well to the brief support sessions designed to help them cut down.

The study appears in the journal Addiction. It was led by Courtney B. Dunn of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Researchers followed adolescents attending a foster care clinic in the Midwest United States. They tracked 1,656 young people aged between ten and twenty who completed a standard substance use screening tool. A smaller group of 287 went on to receive a brief intervention and were followed for six months.

Youth in Foster Care Show a Troubling Link Between Trauma and Substance Use
The findings paint a stark picture. Just twelve per cent of young people in foster care screened positive for problematic substance use overall. Yet those carrying a mental health diagnosis were between fifty eight and one hundred and sixty one per cent more likely to fall into that category.

Depression carried the strongest association of all. Adolescents with a depressive disorder had one hundred and fifty five per cent higher odds of problematic use than those without one. Trauma related disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and disruptive behaviour disorders each raised the odds by more than half again.

The research team believes trauma pushes some young people in foster care toward what they call an internalising pathway. Substances become a way of coping with distress rather than a form of rebellion. This pattern may be especially common among youth in foster care, given how often they face early adversity and disrupted family relationships.

Brief Interventions Fall Short for Some
Researchers also examined what happened after these young people received a brief intervention. This is a short motivational conversation, usually delivered by a psychologist or social worker. Most participants cut their days of substance use sharply within sixty days. Use then crept back up slightly by the six month mark.

That pattern did not hold for everyone, though. Young people in foster care with anxiety, depression or trauma related disorders showed much smaller reductions in cannabis and nicotine use. Those with anxiety showed almost no improvement at all. Nicotine use proved especially stubborn among adolescents carrying four or more mental health diagnoses. Youth with five diagnoses actually reported an increase in use after the intervention rather than a decline.

Alcohol use told a different story entirely. Neither the number nor the type of mental health diagnosis appeared to influence drinking patterns among these adolescents. Researchers link this to the generally low and occasional nature of alcohol use recorded in this age group, averaging under one day of use per month.

Why Early Support Matters for Young People in Foster Care
The research team argues that a single short conversation cannot address the deeper emotional wounds driving substance use in many cases. They point to the value of pairing brief interventions with more sustained approaches, such as cognitive behavioural therapy. Support for the carers responsible for these young people day to day also matters greatly.

Mandated medical examinations already offer a natural point of contact for these conversations. Every child is required to have one when entering care and after each change of placement. The authors suggest clinicians could use these visits to do more than simply screen for substance use. They could also weigh up whether a young person’s broader mental health needs call for a more intensive referral before problems take hold.

For those working to prevent substance misuse before it starts, the findings reinforce a familiar message. Addressing the root causes of distress early in life matters more than treating substance use in isolation. This remains central to protecting young people in foster care from a lifetime of harm. Comorbid mental health concerns are so widespread among youth in foster care that the study’s authors call for continued research into how prevention and treatment can be woven together more effectively.

(Source: WRD News)

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Published: 06 August 2026

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A new book argues that tobacco companies wrote the original addictive drug industry playbook. It claims the marijuana industry has quietly copied that playbook, strategy for strategy. The book is Marketing Pleasure: How Addictive Drug Industries Tell Big Lies to Make Big Profits, by Sue Rusche. Her argument is simple. Every commercial industry built on an addictive substance follows the same script. The public, she writes, keeps mistaking that script for genuine debate.

A Prevention Leader, Not an Outside Critic
Rusche spent forty six years running National Families in Action. The organisation helped lead the parent movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Her prologue is personal. She describes losing her father to a heart attack, and later her mother and brother to smoking related illness. At the same time, she worked to reduce youth marijuana use with a cigarette in her hand. By her own account, the contradiction eventually became impossible to ignore. That personal history sits behind the book’s central claim. Nicotine, alcohol, marijuana and opioids are not separate problems. They are variations on one commercial pattern.

Denying Harm to Protect Profit
The book calls this pattern biological capture. It is the process by which an industry must exploit human biology to keep people buying its product. Rusche states it plainly. Once a government legalises a drug for medical use, the industry making it moves to deny harm and increase use. The goal is protecting shareholders. Public health scientists move in the opposite direction. They work to identify harm and reduce use. She backs this with a stark comparison. Tobacco kills around 480,000 Americans a year. Alcohol kills around 178,000. Opioids have killed more than a million since the Food and Drug Administration approved OxyContin in 1995. Understanding the profit motive common to all four, she argues, is the key. It shifts responsibility from the people harmed to the industries doing the harming.

Same Tactics, New Drug
Rusche draws direct parallels between the drug industry marketing tactics tobacco once used and what marijuana companies do today. She points to the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, which forced the Joe Camel campaign off a Times Square billboard. The book then describes a marijuana company floating a giant lit joint over Broadway, timed to the 4/20 cannabis holiday. An industry spokesperson defended the stunt to trade press as necessary to normalise the plant. Rusche treats that line as an admission rather than a defence.
A similar echo shows up in vaping. The founders who later built Juul first sold a marijuana vaporiser called Pax. They moved half a million units at nearly 250 dollars each before Juul ever launched. Rusche cites research showing marijuana vaping rose sevenfold among American and Canadian teenagers between 2013 and 2020. That rise happened in the same markets the company targeted.

Who Actually Led Legalisation
One of the book’s sharper claims concerns who actually drove marijuana legalisation. Rusche states it was not scientists or doctors. Instead, she names a Santa Monica public relations firm, financed by three billionaires. A group that later became the leading legalisation advocacy organisation hired that firm. It shaped the ballot initiatives that first legalised marijuana for medical use in California. The same model then spread to other states, part of the drug industry marketing tactics Rusche describes in the book. Some of those campaigns, she notes, claimed marijuana could treat cancer. She contrasts that claim with newer research pointing the other way. That research treats marijuana as a possible contributing factor in some cancers, rather than a cure.
Rusche also flags a practical consequence of loosely worded legalisation laws. New York permits households to grow up to five pounds of marijuana. By her own arithmetic, an ounce produces roughly sixty joints. Five pounds works out to around 4,800 joints from a single household crop, far beyond anything resembling personal use.

Proof That Demand Reduction Works
The book is not only a warning. Rusche uses her own organisation’s history as evidence that prevention works when people take it seriously. National survey data she cites tells a striking story. Adolescent lifetime marijuana use fell from 31 percent in 1979 to 11 percent in 1992, nearly a two thirds drop. Daily use among high school seniors fell from around 11 percent to under 2 percent over the same period. That shift, she argues, followed directly from parents organising and refusing industry framing. They demanded that policy protect children, not commercial interests. She believes the same template is available today. The addictive drug industry playbook, she suggests, only wins when nobody names it.

Where to Find It
Marketing Pleasure is available now. Rusche has structured its proceeds to support the cause the book argues for. Once the book covers production costs, seventy five percent of proceeds will go to the University of California, San Francisco. That university is digitising National Families in Action’s archive of drug industry research. The remaining share goes to Smart Approaches to Marijuana and the Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions. It also supports Georgians for Responsible Marijuana Policy. For anyone working in prevention, treatment or public health policy, that is worth noting. It is a rare case of a book’s business model matching its argument.

Source: Marketing Pleasure: How Addictive Drug Industries Tell Big Lies to Make Big Profits (WRD News)

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Published: 06 August 2026

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Every alert issued by Australia’s drug early warning networks starts with the same uncomfortable fact. Someone has already taken a substance nobody could be certain about. New research published in the International Journal of Drug Policy examines how these networks operate. It looks at the state based systems that predate them, and at the national Prompt Response Network that now links practitioners across the country. The study offers a useful window into how these networks work. It also underscores something no warning system, however fast, can change. The surest protection against an unpredictable drug supply is never encountering it at all.
The study was led by researchers at the National Centre for Clinical Research on Emerging Drugs. It drew on twenty interviews with forensic toxicologists, government health officials, police, laboratory scientists and representatives of community organisations. Together they described a system built on relationships as much as on technology. Those relationships take years to form, and only moments to damage.
Why Detection Cannot Replace Prevention
Even the researchers behind the study acknowledged the limits of a reactive system. Practitioners told them their work sits downstream of drugs already circulating. Warnings are issued only after a substance has caused concern somewhere in the community. That timing gap matters. However well a network coordinates, it cannot undo an exposure that has already happened.This is why detection, however sophisticated, belongs alongside prevention rather than in place of it. An unregulated drug supply changes constantly. Strength, purity and composition are impossible for anyone to verify in advance, including the person taking the substance. No monitoring network can promise otherwise. The only response with no margin for error is not using an unpredictable substance in the first place. Building that understanding within communities before exposure occurs is arguably the harder work. It may also be the more valuable one.
What Drug Early Warning Networks Actually Do
Drug early warning networks exist to spot dangerous or unexpected substances circulating in the community. In Australia, this work happens mostly at state and territory level. It has been supported since 2018 by a national body called the Prompt Response Network. That network now brings together roughly three hundred people across ninety organisations, spanning every jurisdiction.
Members share information gathered from hospital emergency departments, forensic laboratories, seized drug samples and other monitoring sources. When something concerning turns up, agencies work to confirm what they are seeing and communicate the risk. It is necessary work. It is not, on its own, an answer to why people encounter unregulated drugs in the first place.
Twenty Practitioners, One Consistent Message
Researchers approached thirty six practitioners and ultimately interviewed twenty. Each spoke for sixty to ninety minutes about their experience of both their local network and the national Prompt Response Network. The sample deliberately spanned disciplines, from lab based scientists to frontline community workers. This meant the findings reflect a genuinely mixed picture, rather than a single professional viewpoint.
It is worth noting what that mixed picture did not include. None of the twenty roles represented sat specifically within prevention education. That is not a criticism of the study, which set out to examine network collaboration rather than prevention. It does illustrate where Australia currently concentrates its drug related expertise. Most of it sits in detecting and responding to a market that already exists, rather than in reducing how many people enter it.
A clear pattern emerged among those interviewed. Collaboration within these drug alert networks tends to build in stages. It moves from trust, to shared awareness, to a faster and more coordinated response when something goes wrong. Each stage feeds the next. Practitioners described the whole process as cyclical, though every turn of that cycle still starts after a substance is already circulating.
Why Trust Comes First in Drug Early Warning Networks
Before any information gets shared, practitioners said they needed confidence that fellow network members would handle it responsibly. One forensic toxicologist described hoping the Prompt Response Network would help him trust contacts interstate the way he already trusted colleagues in his own state. He said the network had ultimately achieved that. It is a real achievement, and one worth taking seriously: a functioning response system depends on people who will pick up the phone for each other under pressure.
It is also worth asking who gets invited to build that trust in the first place. The practitioners describing this cycle of growing confidence were, almost without exception, people working in detection and response — toxicologists, public health officials, police, drug checking services. Prevention education workers were not among the twenty interviewed, and nothing in the study suggests they hold a defined place in the network’s trust-building either. A network can become extraordinarily good at trusting itself while still having no formal relationship with the people whose job is stopping exposure before it starts.
That confidence was not automatic even among those who were included. Interviewees pointed to real tensions behind the scenes: competition for scarce funding, clashing professional opinions and, occasionally, uncomfortable working relationships between individuals or organisations. One drug checking service representative described how a small field with limited funding “lands there being competition,” and how dismissive comments about people who use drugs could sour a working relationship for years afterward. Several noted that trust grew only where members felt their particular expertise was respected, whether clinical, forensic, lived experience or operational, rather than overridden by another discipline’s assumptions.
The same funding pressures that strain trust inside these networks reach further than the interviews cover. Government figures cited in the study show 64 per cent of drug policy spending goes to law enforcement, against 1.6 per cent for harm reduction. Detection and response programmes, the study notes, are themselves often funded on short fixed terms rather than ongoing arrangements. Prevention education, sitting outside both categories, barely features in that budget picture at all. A network can only build trust among the people who are resourced enough to be in the room.
Formal agreements mattered too. Clear terms of reference, data handling rules and expectations around confidentiality gave practitioners a rationale for sharing sensitive information in the first place. Without that clarity, several participants said, goodwill alone would not be enough. A national drug early warning network needs more than good intentions to last. But the agreements and terms of reference described in the study all point one direction: toward faster, more reliable detection and response. None of them describe a formal channel for turning what the network learns into prevention education that reaches people before a substance is ever in circulation.
From Shared Information to Coordinated Response
As trust grew, practitioners described exchanging increasingly detailed information, including emerging detection techniques and early signals of concerning substances. Researchers termed this situational awareness: a shared, up to date picture of what is moving through the illicit drug supply.
That awareness has a cost attached to it that is easy to lose in the account of how well the system responded. One police representative described a case in which two people overdosed on the same batch; one died, and one survived. Only after that loss did the coordination the study highlights actually begin — officers and hospital toxicologists working together, navigating separate legal constraints, to get information to the public quickly. She attributed that speed to years of relationship-building within her jurisdiction’s network. It is a genuine strength of the system, and it is also, unavoidably, a story that starts with a death. No amount of coordination afterward changes when the network’s involvement began. That timing gap is the case for prevention in miniature: everything the network did well here happened after the point where prevention would have mattered most.
Where Australia’s Drug Early Warning Networks Still Fall Short
Despite these strengths, the study identified a clear gap. Most information sharing within the national network remains informal and reactive, relying on personal relationships rather than binding agreements. Several practitioners, including one senior public health official, suggested a formal memorandum between agencies would help.
The researchers noted that Australia’s drug policy settings compound this challenge. Funding is split across supply, demand and other responses. Programmes underpinning early warning work are frequently funded on short fixed terms rather than ongoing arrangements. Much of the public conversation about strengthening these systems centres on faster detection and data sharing. Comparatively little attention goes to how findings from this work could feed into prevention education, long before a substance ever reaches a community.
The authors concluded that formalising data sharing arrangements would mark a natural next stage of maturity for these drug monitoring networks. That step should preserve the trust already built. It is a reasonable goal for a monitoring system. But the deeper lesson of an unpredictable and fast changing illicit drug market is not only that Australia needs faster warnings. It is that avoiding that market altogether remains the one response that no delay, and no data gap, can ever undermine.
(Source: WRD NEWS ScienceDirect)