The AFP Commissioner wants a “renewed conversation” about illicit drugs and organised crime. What she has offered instead is copaganda dressed up as analysis.
The Australian Federal Police Commissioner says the country needs a renewed conversation about organised crime and illicit drugs, but there is nothing renewed about the conversation she proposes.
It is the same war-on-drugs script governments and police have recited for decades: people use drugs; organised crime supplies them; violence follows; police need more power, more technology, more international reach and more public support. The state disappears from the story except as protector. Police appear only as the disciplined force standing between ordinary people and chaos.
It is shameful copaganda. It is also a word salad of national security, artificial intelligence, AUKUS, “vulnerable communities”, offshore offenders, synthetic drugs, youth crime and illicit tobacco, all thrown together to create the impression of an enormous, mutating threat that only an enormous, expanding police force can contain.
What it never does is confront the basic contradiction sitting at the centre of the Commissioner’s argument: prohibition is what makes the drug market so extraordinarily profitable, and those profits are what make an unregulated market violent.
Blaming people for a market created by prohibition
The Commissioner tells us Australians consume too many drugs and pay “absurd” prices for them. She says organised crime groups make obscene profits and are willing to kill for dominance of the market.
All of that is presented as evidence for continuing the war on drugs. It is actually a description of what the war on drugs produces.
Drugs do not arrive with an inherent black-market price. Their inflated value is produced by criminalisation: the risk attached to cultivation, manufacture, importation and sale; the scarcity governments attempt to create through interdiction; and the absence of any lawful, regulated means of supply. Prohibition hands an entire market to clandestine operators and then police point to the resulting profits as proof that prohibition must be intensified.
Even a 2024 parliamentary law-enforcement inquiry acknowledged that Australia remains attractive to transnational crime groups because of the drug market’s “exceptional profitability”. It heard that syndicates can absorb the loss of entire shipments because a single successful importation may return tens of millions of dollars. This is not evidence that policing is slowly winning. It is evidence of a market so lucrative and resilient that seizures become a business cost.
The Commissioner’s answer is nevertheless more of the same: stop drugs in source countries, expand international policing and never “raise the white flag”. The language matters. Drugs are not treated as a matter of health, pleasure, dependency, trauma, poverty or survival. They are a battlefield. Once a war has been declared, virtually any police power can be represented as necessary and any person caught in its path as acceptable damage.
The sleight of hand called “demand”
The ugliest move in the piece is the transfer of responsibility from institutions with enormous coercive power onto individual people who use drugs.
According to the Commissioner, shootings are “at their core” a demand issue. In this account, the person who buys cocaine or uses methamphetamine is made morally adjacent to the person who pulls a trigger. The individual consumer becomes responsible for an international supply chain, while the state that designed, funds and violently enforces prohibition escapes scrutiny.
This is political sleight of hand. If consumer demand alone caused organised violence, alcohol, pharmaceuticals and other regulated commodities would necessarily produce the same underground territorial wars. They do not. The decisive distinction is not simply the existence of demand. It is whether the state regulates a market or bans it and abandons its control to people who cannot use lawful contracts, courts or workplace protections to resolve disputes.
The Commissioner insists that “everyday people” might be caught in the crosshairs: your mum, your dad, your neighbour or the person making your morning latte. The formulation quietly divides the public into innocent everyday people and drug users, as if people who use drugs are not also parents, neighbours, workers and members of our communities. Their deaths, imprisonment and exposure to police violence are treated as something other than community harm.
That division is the ideological work of the war on drugs. It creates a public worth protecting and another public that can be searched, surveilled, raided, imprisoned and blamed.
If we are talking about organised violence, police cannot be exempt
The Commissioner wants Australians to think more seriously about organised groups that use violence, maintain internal loyalty, control territory, gather intelligence, carry weapons and protect their power.
Fine. Then police cannot be placed outside the frame.
Police forces are not “organised crime groups” as a matter of law, and the distinction matters. However, they are highly organised institutions that possess extraordinary coercive powers, operate through rigid hierarchy and solidarity, deploy violence, conduct surveillance and routinely investigate themselves. The public is entitled to examine how those powers are used, whose conduct is criminalised and whose violence is authorised.
Between 2019 and 2024, the AFP used discretionary powers to discontinue hundreds of misconduct allegations, including allegations categorised as serious misconduct and serious corruption. The Commonwealth Ombudsman raised concerns about deficient records and reasons in some serious matters. That history makes the Commissioner’s uncomplicated portrait of police as guardians especially difficult to swallow.
The AFP does not get to invite a national conversation about organised violence while setting the boundaries so that its own organisation, powers and conduct remain beyond discussion.
Nor can police institutions present themselves as neutral respondents to drug policy. The war on drugs grows their budgets, jurisdiction, surveillance capacity, intelligence networks, international partnerships and political authority. When the Commissioner folds drug use into domestic security, terrorism, airports, AI, youth offending and AUKUS, she is not clarifying the problem. She is building the case for an institution whose remit can expand in every direction at once.
Australia already funds the war the Commissioner says we must renew
There is another inconvenient fact missing from the appeal for “energy and focus”: Australia has already poured enormous resources into drug law enforcement.
Research estimating Australian government drug-policy expenditure in 2021–22 found that 64.3 per cent of proactive spending went to law enforcement. Treatment received 27.4 per cent, prevention 6.7 per cent and harm reduction just 1.6 per cent. Australia spent about $5.45 billion, yet nearly two-thirds of it went to the very approach the Commissioner now implies has never been tried forcefully enough.
That allocation exposes the dishonesty of calling education our “first line of defence”. Our budgets say otherwise. Police are the first line, the second line and most of the remaining lines. Harm reduction, the work most directly concerned with keeping people alive, receives crumbs.
The Royal Australasian College of Physicians has called for a health-first approach, including decriminalisation, treatment, prevention and harm reduction. These are not naïve proposals to pretend drugs cause no harm. They recognise that criminalisation creates additional harms: stigma, arrest, imprisonment, unsafe supply and reluctance to seek help.
The Commissioner offers the phrase “support people before harm escalates” but supplies no serious account of what support means. There is no commitment to safe supply, drug checking, supervised consumption, naloxone, accessible treatment, housing, income or community-controlled health care. “Support” appears only after pages devoted to interdiction, prosecution, intelligence sharing and global police operations. It is a soft phrase pasted over a hard carceral program.
A real conversation would threaten police power
A real national conversation about drugs would begin with different questions.
Why, after decades of seizures, arrests, raids and expanded police powers, are illicit markets still growing? Why does the state continue to create the conditions for a dangerous unregulated supply, then blame consumers for the conduct of those who profit from it? Why are people who use drugs treated as fuel for organised crime rather than people entitled to health care, dignity and self-determination? Who benefits institutionally and financially from maintaining permanent war?
It would ask why drug policy is so often made by police rather than led by people who use drugs, health workers, First Nations communities and families who have survived criminalisation. It would reckon with the racial and class violence of enforcement: whose homes are raided, whose children are removed, who is strip searched, who is imprisoned and who is permitted to consume drugs discreetly without becoming the object of state force.
And it would recognise that ending prohibition is not “raising the white flag”. It is refusing to keep sacrificing people to a policy that sustains the very illicit profits and violence invoked to defend it.
The Commissioner says she is ready for the conversation Australia needs, but the conversation she offers has a predetermined conclusion: organised crime is becoming more dangerous, the public must become more afraid, people who use drugs must accept blame and police must be further empowered.
That is not a conversation. It is an institutional funding pitch.
If we are serious about reducing violence, we must shrink the black market rather than endlessly militarise its edges. That means decriminalisation, regulation, harm reduction, properly funded treatment and material support. It means taking money and authority away from policing and placing resources in the hands of communities.
The war on drugs has not eliminated drugs. It has organised the conditions under which they become more profitable, more dangerous and more punishable. The AFP Commissioner wants us to recommit to that war without examining what it has built.
We should refuse.
