Drug Foundation executive director Sarah Helm. Photo: Supplied/ NZ Drug Foundation
A major new report says decriminalising all drug use is the best way to combat rising addiction and harm.
The Drug Foundation is recommending a complete overhaul of the Misuse of Drugs Act, throwing out the drug classification system, and legalising some lower-risk drugs through a not-for-profit model.
Executive director Sarah Helm said the Misuse of Drugs Act had been a "colossal failure" since it was introduced 50 years ago in 1975.
"The evidence shows that our drug laws have exacerbated addiction, overdose, deaths and criminalisation."
The report said the country is facing "unprecedented levels" of drug use, with methamphetamine and cocaine use doubling over the past 12-18 months.
Wastewater data showed methamphetamine use in 2024 was the highest ever recorded, and 74 percent higher than the previous three years' average.
It also said more adults were needing treatment for addiction. In 2021-2023, about 470,000 were at moderate or high risks of harms from illicit substance use, an increase from 390,000 people in 2016/2017.
The foundation has raised concerns that fatal overdoses were increasing, between 2016 and 2024, 1295 people died of accidental drug overdoses.
And it said there were high incarceration rates for drug use, citing figures from 2024 which showed 64 percent of convictions for drug offences were for possession and use of drugs.
The report gathered evidence from a range of law reform models internationally, looking at 34 countries and 36 areas that have decriminalised cannabis use, and 22 countries that have decriminalised all drug use.
Helm said New Zealand should follow Portugal's lead, which decriminalised all drugs in 2001, but the change needed to be coupled with "significant investment" in health and addiction services.
She said overdose deaths had fallen dramatically since drug use was decriminalised in Portugal, HIV transmission rates had plummetted, and the burden on the criminal justice system had eased.
"Portugal now has one of the lowest rates of drug-related deaths in the EU," Helm said.
The report said decriminalising needed to be paired with substantial investment in addiction and treatment services, including harm reduction, prevention, early intervention services, and dedicated funding for Māori services.
It also said there needed to be specialist treatment for people whose addictions were driving their offending.
The report recommends more drug checking services, overdose prevention centres, safe drug consumption sites, and access to safer utensils.
It said a new regulatory framework should empower a health agency to license these interventions.
"At the moment the law prevents us from implementing many life-saving overdose and harm reduction measures that would reduce social and health costs upstream," Helm said.
The report suggested implementing legal protections for people who call emergency services in the event of a drug overdose, also known as Overdose Good Samaritan protections.
It said the drug classification system needed to be replaced with a legal framework which gives an appropriate health agency the power to legalise lower-risk drugs for adults on a case-by-case basis.
The foundation advocates, for example, that the legal supply of cannabis should be regulated through not-for-profit associations, not through commercial models.
Helm said not-for-profit models for legal cannabis implemented in Malta, Uruguay, and more recently Germany, have been shown to displace the illegal market, but commercialised legal models in America had introduced harms.
"The evidence was clear that commercial models don't work. They are successful at displacing the illicit market, but overall drive up health harms," Helm said.
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