Unharm submission: draft NSW Alcohol and Other Drugs Strategy 2026-2036

The NSW Government has released a draft Alcohol and Other Drugs Strategy to guide policy for the next ten years. Unharm welcomes the draft and its commitment to treat drug use as a health and social issue. Our submission makes seven recommendations to strengthen it.

Part 1: The aim and approach of the Strategy

1. Make safe, healthy and resilient communities the aim. The draft names harm minimisation as its aim. But in the National Drug Strategy, harm minimisation is the approach, and the aim is to build safe, healthy and resilient communities. The draft’s own vision commits to safer, healthier communities, but its aim leaves them out. Restoring the full aim would give every activity under the Strategy a clear test: does it make communities across NSW safer and healthier?

2. Apply the core concepts to every pillar. We endorse the draft’s core concepts, including equity, dignity and addressing stigma, and urge the Government to keep them. The draft says these concepts run throughout the Strategy, yet its section on reducing supply, which includes policing, mentions none of them. The Strategy should apply them to every agency, and monitor equity in drug law enforcement.

3. Evaluate law enforcement. Law enforcement takes 64 per cent of government spending on illicit drugs in Australia. Harm reduction gets 1.6 per cent. Yet no one has ever published an evaluation of Australian supply reduction as a whole. Research links intensive drug policing to rushed injecting, shared equipment and people avoiding health services. The Strategy should assess whether drug law enforcement makes communities safer and healthier.

4. Remove two unsupported statements. The draft’s executive summary commits to “a strong law-enforcement focus on drug misuse”. Nothing in the body of the draft supports this commitment, and it contradicts the Strategy’s focus on serious supply. The draft also claims that disrupting supply networks makes communities safer, without citing evidence. The evidence points the other way. Authorities seized more of several major drugs in 2023-24 than Australians consumed, yet consumption still rose to a record. Research for the UK Home Office links drug law enforcement more often to increased violence than to less. The Strategy should delete the first statement, and replace the second with a commitment to evaluate the actual effects of supply disruption.

Part 2: Programs

5. Community-based drug checking. We welcome the Government’s decision to make festival drug checking permanent. But festival services run at no more than 15 events a year, while most drug use and most overdose deaths happen far from festivals. In 2024, 72 per cent of fatal overdoses in Australia occurred at home. Community-based services would reach people all year round, many of whom have never spoken to a health service about their drug use. They would also give NSW Health continuous data on a changing drug market. The ACT and Victoria already fund community drug checking. The Strategy should commit to year-round, community-based drug checking.

6. Supervised injecting as a multi-site program. The Medically Supervised Injecting Centre in Kings Cross has managed more than 12,300 overdoses since 2001 without a single death. But one site in inner Sydney cannot serve the tens of thousands of people who inject drugs across NSW. The Strategy should commit to supervised injecting as a multi-site program, as the 2024 NSW Drug Summit recommended.

7. Reform the Early Drug Diversion Initiative. Diversion keeps people out of court, and protects them from the lasting harms of a criminal record. But in its first 14 months, police diverted only 22 per cent of eligible people. For eligible Aboriginal people, the figure was just 9 per cent. We support the draft’s commitment to reform the scheme. The Strategy should make diversion the default for personal use quantities and widen eligibility, as the Drug Summit recommended. It should also set up a clear framework to monitor and evaluate the scheme.