When cocaine is washing up on your beaches, supply isn’t the only problem

When it’s said Sydney is awash with cocaine, it’s understood that the hyperbole is being used to emphasise the extent of the problem. That was until hundreds of kilograms of the stuff started washing up on our beaches over Christmas. Surely, it’s time to reconsider our approach to drug regulation.

Drug addiction, overdose deaths and shootings in public places dominate debate about illicit drugs policy. As terrible as they are, those outcomes are only the most obvious ill-effects of the current regime for regulating recreational hallucinogens. And because they affect only a relatively small number of people, it is easy for society at large to fail to take decisive action.

A white Christmas: Barnacle-crusted packages containing cocaine washed up on NSW beaches in late December. Credit: NSW Police

But the illicit drug trade affects us all, impacting our health system and economy and fuelling corruption in government and the private sector. Through our work, we’ve seen how drug money can distort the property market. Foreign state actors facilitating drug importation are also causing serious national security ramifications.

Decriminalising the possession of drugs for personal use would avoid the large numbers of otherwise law-abiding (mostly) young people being drawn into the criminal justice system for engaging in behaviour that a significant section of the community considers to be relatively harmless.

But that won’t stop the harms outlined above. Government agencies aren’t going to manufacture the drugs needed to satisfy the personal use market, nor will they enter into trade agreements with the vicious criminal cartels that control international drug markets.

And so the shootings, kidnappings, money laundering and economic distortion will continue.

Even with the great technology-enabled success of police in stopping drug importation – 26.8 tonnes of illicit drugs were seized in 2022-23 before they could be sold on our streets and tonnes more were intercepted offshore – wastewater analysis shows that Australians still consumed over 16.5 tonnes of methamphetamine, cocaine, MDMA and heroin in the year to August 2023. That amounted to a 17 per cent increase in consumption of these drugs from the previous year.

It’s fair to ask, then, even though our policing agencies are succeeding in their fight against drug traffickers, can problems of such magnitude be left to law enforcement to combat alone?

Drug users can’t shirk responsibility. If a social media influencer posts Snapchat pics of themselves using cocaine with their glamorous friends, they are participating in a supply chain dripping in blood. So many opinion makers and ordinary, otherwise law-abiding members of the public are willing to ignore the harm done by the pernicious crime gangs that their drug consumption supports. Pop stars, professional football players, even members of the British royal family, by their actions and comments, endorse illicit drug use in a way that normalises it.

But there is no fair-trade cocaine.

Corrupt individuals in the customs and logistics sector, accountants and solicitors willing to ignore their professional obligations, money remitters and banks, luxury goods retailers and increasingly sophisticated technology used by offshore-controlled organised criminal networks mean that law enforcement will struggle to stay on top of the problem as it expands.

We need to conceptualise the drug market as we do all others: supply increasing to meet demand. Law enforcement agencies will continue to do their best to suppress supply – but they can’t be expected to combat demand.

Real and lasting demand reduction will require a significant change to social attitudes towards drugs. Recent history shows it is possible.

I’m embarrassed to say that in my youth many of my cohort used to drive drunk and boast about it. Twenty years later, my daughters and their friends would be aghast if any of their number did that. Drink-driving quickly became very uncool, even though it involves the most pervasive drug.

Where are the public education campaigns about the indirect harms of drugs? We need more society stakeholders to step up: the large corporates that now recognise they have a role in influencing social policy; professional sport that is intrinsically invested in public health and can have impact in public health messaging; construction and extractive industries that rely so heavily on a young, healthy workforce and can influence the conduct of their employees away from work; the media, which can choose to portray organised criminals as glamorous thrillseekers or corrupt lowlifes who have no redeeming features; and academia, which can create new knowledge and evaluate the impact of policies here and abroad.

Governments must also do more. They should drive the collaborations and manage the multiple projects that will emerge. The energy and innovation that these diverse sectors apply to their core businesses will undoubtedly generate novel solutions to a problem that otherwise risks overrunning us.

In the meantime, lifesavers and fishermen will continue to pick up drugs floating in our littoral zone and law enforcement will continue to lock up the operators within reach who make mistakes.

Michael Barnes is the NSW Crime Commissioner.