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?