Overdose in Australia: The need to rebalance funding
August 2024
In 2022, 2,356 people across Australia died from drug overdose, with 79.7% of these deaths being unintentional.
Australia’s National Drug Strategy 2017–2026 is designed to take a balanced approach across three pillars: Demand reduction, supply reduction, and harm reduction. But Australia’s expenditure on drug policy tells a different story.
Spending on law enforcement dominates Australia’s drug budget, accounting for 64.3% of spending. And although police intend to target people manufacturing and selling illegal drugs, most contacts with police are for use or possession. In 2022–23 that was over 35,000 people.
Treatment accounts for 27.4% of expenditure and prevention receives only 6.7%. The least amount of funding goes to effective harm reduction activities (1.6%) like take home naloxone, supervised injecting facilities, and needle and syringe programs, even though our National Drug Strategy is based on minimising harms.
Harm reduction initiatives not only directly prevent overdose deaths and reduce other harms, they also provide vital opportunities for people who use drugs to access healthcare, harm reduction education and treatment that they may not have otherwise received.
There are only two medically supervised injecting facilities in Australia, both of which have demonstrated a significant positive impact in the local community by safely managing overdoses and providing health and social support services. Australia has also made great progress in expanding take home naloxone and needle and syringe programs in recent years, but more still needs to be done.
Law enforcement approaches do little to reduce harms or impact the market but do contribute to criminalising and stigmatising some of the most marginalised people in the community.
More funding is needed to expand harm reduction measures like medically supervised injecting facilities, dedicated needle and syringe programs, needle and syringe vending machines and naloxone vending machines.
We still have a long way to go in addressing overdose. With the National Drug Strategy approaching renewal in 2026, now is the time to think about how to better balance the three pillars of the strategy in line with its true intent to minimise harms.
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