AOD Policy

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

Drug checking services have quietly become one of the most accepted tools in how society now handles illegal drug use. A sample goes in. A result comes out. Somewhere in that exchange, a seller learns whether they cut the batch correctly, and a buyer learns whether tonight’s supply is roughly what it claims to be.

A habit that millions of people consider harmless could be quietly raising the odds of a heart attack. A major new review, published in The American Journal of Medicine, has pulled together years of research on cannabis use and heart attack risk, and the picture it paints is far from reassuring, especially for younger adults