Australia’s newest wastewater analysis report delivers a sobering reality check: our national drug strategy is not just under strain; it is in freefall.
The data, released today by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, shows that despite record seizures and decades of policy investment, illicit drug consumption has reached unprecedented levels across the country. The report’s findings demand a decisive shift away from the failing orthodoxy of demand and supply reduction, and towards harm minimisation and strategies that directly disrupt illicit markets.
Between August 2023 and August 2024, Australians consumed an estimated 22.2 tonnes of illicit drugs, valued at $11.5 billion. This record-breaking surge cut across every major drug type and every region. The scale of consumption makes it clear that neither demand nor supply reduction efforts are achieving their intended effects.
Despite record law enforcement seizures of 38.6 tonnes of illicit substances, the market remains awash with product. The sheer volume of availability suggests that these interdictions, while operationally significant, are strategically negligible. The reality is that global drug production, both synthetic and plant-based, has expanded to a point where supply reduction has become an uphill battle, if not impossible.
Organised crime groups operate in an environment where synthetic drug production can be scaled rapidly, at low cost and close to markets, removing many of the logistical chokepoints that traditional interdiction relies on. Plant-based drug supply chains have proven equally resilient, with diversified production sources and adaptive trafficking methods that defy border control.
Demand reduction has fared no better. Socioeconomic drivers of drug consumption, combined with the evolving potency and availability of substances, have kept user demand strong and inelastic. Addiction does not yield to public messaging campaigns or small-scale interventions, and new generations of consumers continue to enter the market.
The emergence of nitazenes, synthetic opioids as much as 40 times more potent than fentanyl, underscores how dangerous the new landscape has become. These drugs can be manufactured cheaply, shipped discreetly, and consumed in quantities so small that detection and interdiction become far more difficult. Their arrival in the Australian market is a harbinger of a more dangerous era, one in which the lethality of available substances is increasing even as volumes grow.
This should be a moment of reckoning. Continuing to invest heavily in a strategy that is demonstrably failing isn’t just a waste of resources; it’s a public policy liability. The current approach, built on the three pillars of supply reduction, demand reduction and harm minimisation, needs to be fundamentally rebalanced. Harm minimisation can no longer be the third pillar; it must be the foundation. That means scaling up safe supply initiatives, expanding supervised consumption services, and ensuring widespread availability of overdose reversal drugs such as naloxone. It means embedding real-time drug-checking services and early warning systems into community health responses so that dangerous new substances are identified and publicised before they cause widespread harm.
At the same time, we must abandon the fantasy that arresting more people or seizing more drugs will solve the problem. Australian governments should concentrate law enforcement resources on disrupting the infrastructure of illicit drug markets. That would involve targeting production facilities, chemical supply chains, distribution logistics and financial flows.
Wastewater data should be used not just as a reporting tool but as an intelligence asset, helping to pinpoint emerging markets, identify the spread of new substances, and prioritise interventions. These kinds of market disruption strategies recognise that drug markets are economic systems, and that destabilising their supply chains and profit structures will yield more long-term effects than stacking up seizure statistics.
None of this is to suggest that the path forward is simple. The contours of a successful new strategy are not fully clear, and moving towards a health-centred approach will require significant political courage and public education. But the first and most important step is to stop pretending that the current strategy is working. The data shows it is not.
Failure doesn’t have to mean defeat; it can be a catalyst for genuine reform. By openly acknowledging that our approach has failed, we can create the political and institutional space needed to invest in policies that will actually save lives, reduce harm and erode the operational freedom of organised crime groups. The alternative is to keep doubling down on an approach that delivers little more than the illusion of control while the markets, and the harms they generate, continue to grow.
