AOD Policy

Police are recording more sexual assaults and family violence against Australian children than they did a decade ago. The sharpest rises have come since 2021. That is the headline finding of a national study published in JAMA Network Open on 13 October 2026. Violence against children in Australia looks very different depending on which government

Workplace deaths in Australia hit 222 in 2025, the largest yearly toll since 2012. Each one was a person who went to work and did not come home. Meanwhile, the nation’s wastewater is telling a second story, with ice and cocaine consumption at record highs. Two bad trends, one country. So it is fair to

A new national study of MDMA deaths has put hard numbers on an awkward point for drug checking. Much of the risk sits outside the pill, in the body that takes it and in everything else taken alongside it. Researchers at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at UNSW Sydney examined 217 deaths recorded

ACT paramedics attended nearly 4000 callouts linked to alcohol and drugs in a single year, the latest ambulance surveillance data shows. Australia’s Annual Overdose Report 2026, published by the Penington Institute, also counted 28 unintentional drug induced deaths in the ACT in 2024 Those numbers come from a city that has recently rewritten how police

The Australian methamphetamine problem has reached levels that no national monitoring system has recorded before. The National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC) at UNSW Sydney released its September 2026 bulletin (Chrzanowska et al., 2026). Nearly every headline indicator points upward. Wastewater consumption, hospitalisations and overdose deaths sit at record highs. Crystal methamphetamine, meanwhile, sells

A major parliamentary inquiry into the health impacts of alcohol and other drugs in Australia has come down firmly on one side of a long running debate. Its recommendations put prevention over harm reduction as the guiding priority, and the report leaves little doubt about it. The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health, Aged

The Australian Federal Police’s (AFP) record makes one point difficult to dismiss: illicit drug markets are not victimless lifestyle choices. They are a major revenue stream for transnational organised crime, impose serious social, as well as public health and welfare costs, and require sustained policing alongside credible prevention, early intervention, treatment and recovery. This article

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

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