Back in 2020, the National Drug Research Institute at Curtin University finally got around to tallying up what cannabis costs in Australia were actually doing to the country. The last time anyone had done this properly was 2007 — thirteen years earlier. The number they landed on for 2015–16? $4.5 billion. In a single year.
It barely made a ripple. And since then? Nobody in authority has bothered to update it.
That’s not an oversight. That’s a choice.
What Did $4.5 Billion Actually Buy Us?
In the 2015–16 financial year, more than 2 million Australians used cannabis. Around 150,000 were clinically dependent on it. And 3,422 adults were serving prison sentences directly attributable to cannabis.
The bill broke down like this:
- $2.4 billion — Crime. Policing ($475M), imprisonment ($1.1 billion), courts, legal aid, crime victims. More than half the total, right there.
- $714 million — Healthcare. Mental health programmes, hospital admissions, psychosis presentations.
- $560 million — Workplace. Absenteeism and lost productivity.
- $470 million — Other social costs, including child protection.
- $194 million — Road trauma.
- $106 million — The intangible cost of 23 people who didn’t come home. Over 850 years of life, gone.
Total: $4.5 billion.
Anyone still want to argue that cannabis is a harmless personal choice with no impact on anyone else? The numbers say otherwise and these are the conservative numbers from nearly a decade ago.
The Counting Stopped. Funny That.
The NDRI had been working through a series of national cost reports — methamphetamine, tobacco, opioids, then cannabis. Solid, rigorous work.
Then it stopped.
In the years since 2016, Australia’s cannabis policy environment shifted dramatically. Decriminalisation pushes. Legalisation campaigns dressed up as social justice. And most significantly — the rapid expansion of dodgy ‘medicinal’ cannabis prescriptions.
It is hard not to notice that the national cost-accounting exercise was quietly wound down at precisely the moment it became politically inconvenient. When the evidence doesn’t fit the narrative, apparently the solution is to stop producing the evidence.
The communities, families, healthcare workers and kids left dealing with the real-world fallout deserve better than that.
‘Medicinal’ Cannabis: Pull the Other One
Here are the actual numbers, because they need to be seen to be believed.
In 2017 there were 231 medicinal cannabis prescriptions in Australia. By January 2024, over one million Australians were using medicinal cannabis products — confirmed by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency. More than 2.7 million prescriptions have been issued since legalisation, according to TGA data.
Let’s call that what it is: a regulatory loophole that has done more to normalise cannabis use across the broader population than any legalisation campaign could have achieved directly. And — worth noting — there is very little evidence it is even effective for anxiety or chronic pain, which are among the most common conditions it is now prescribed for.
And here’s the thing: the harms don’t care what it says on the packet. The link between cannabis and psychosis was already flagged as clinically significant in the 2015–16 NDRI data — cannabis-related psychosis presentations were the most costly cannabis-related hospital admissions in the country. Nothing since suggests that has improved.
The ‘medicinal’ label does not make the social costs disappear. It just makes them easier to ignore — and harder to count, because we’ve stopped counting.
That $4.5 Billion? Just the Opening Act
The $4.5 billion figure reflects 2015–16. Here’s what has changed since:
The user population has grown. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare recorded 2.5 million Australians using cannabis in the 12 months to 2022–23 — up from 2 million in the period the NDRI examined. Daily use among recent users has jumped from 14% in 2019 to 18% in 2022–23.
The prescription numbers have exploded — from 231 in 2017 to over one million patients by January 2024.
And the original $4.5 billion was already an undercount. The researchers themselves flagged that the cost of presenteeism — workers turning up impaired — hadn’t been adequately measured and needed further research. Nearly a decade later, that research still hasn’t been done.
Factor in a decade of cost inflation across health, justice, and social services — and that 2015–16 figure looks increasingly like a floor, not a ceiling.
Kids, Families, Communities: That Is Who Is Paying
Behind every dollar of that $4.5 billion is a person. A family. A young person whose developing brain was exposed to a drug that carries real, documented risks — risks that have been systematically downplayed as the normalisation machine has rolled forward.
The child protection cost alone — $470 million — doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It represents kids removed from homes, families fractured, caseworkers overwhelmed. The mental health burden lands on communities that were never resourced to carry it. The road trauma touches families who never saw it coming.
This is not abstract. It is happening in suburbs and country towns across Australia, quietly, expensively, and with no updated national reckoning to show for it.
So Where Does That Leave Us?
Cannabis costs in Australia were $4.5 billion in 2015–16. The user population has since grown to 2.5 million. Daily use is up. Medicinal prescriptions have gone from 231 to over a million. And the national cost-accounting has not been updated once.
That number has not gone down. It has gone up — and nobody in authority is measuring it.
The only honest response is to demand the evidence be updated, the true costs be counted, and policy be built around protecting communities rather than accommodating an industry that profits from permission.
The families, schools, and young people carrying the real costs of this drug already know the answer. It’s time the data caught up.
(Source: WRD News)