Harm Reduction Coalition Aotearoa is a newly launched organisation, aiming to ensure drug policies are based on science and evidence, and uphold principles of harm reduction and human rights.
As researchers with expertise in drug and alcohol harms, we strongly support this goal.
Harm reduction will benefit the youth of Aotearoa, and policy reform will ensure our young people are not harmed by the current 1970s-era "war on drugs" policies.
Harm reduction aims to reduce the negative consequences of drug use, in a way that upholds people’s dignity and rights, rather than condemning or punishing them.
It accepts that drug use is a reality of our world, whether we like it or not.
In 2023, we published the New Zealand drug-harms ranking study, which included an assessment of harm specifically to youth — a world-first.
The most harmful drug (psychoactive substance) to youth was a legal one — alcohol.
This was substantially more harmful than a number of Class A drugs (those that have the strictest criminal penalties) — highlighting the fact that the legal status of drugs is not linked to their harmfulness.
We also found that for youth, harms such as loss of education opportunities and disconnection from family and friends were significant contributors to overall harmfulness.
These harms can be minimised by taking a policy approach to drugs focused on health and wellbeing, rather than prohibition and criminalisation.
Research undertaken by New Zealand’s longitudinal studies, including the Christchurch Health and Development Study, has shown that drug use, and in particular high or regular levels of drug use, during adolescence can lead to a wide range of adverse outcomes over a lifetime, including educational failure, unemployment and socioeconomic challenges, poorer mental and physical health, involvement in criminal offending, and other adversities.
These findings suggest that a critical feature of harm reduction is to find ways of helping young people avoid using drugs, or to delay the onset of drug use until later in life.
However, what our longitudinal research also shows is that adolescent drug use does not occur in a vacuum — it is often the logical and unfortunate consequence of exposure to a range of adversities earlier in life, such as poverty, family instability, abuse exposure, and early mental illness and behavioural disorders.
We argue that, in the absence of being able to eliminate exposure to early adversity, we need to understand that drug use among young people will continue to be a problem.
Furthermore, our longitudinal studies have highlighted the fact that though most people use at least one drug, not everyone is harmed by their drug use.
Indeed, it has been frequently observed that high levels of use and experimentation are phenomena that commonly occur in late adolescence and early adulthood, and that these diminish over time into middle adulthood.
Longitudinal studies have also shown that the criminalisation of users of illicit drugs has no effect on either preventing or reducing drug use — even after being arrested or convicted of a drug offence — and that criminalising users increases the amount and kinds of harm they are exposed to.
We as a society must understand we will never be able to arrest and convict our way out of these problems.
We are not negating the need for prevention programmes, or accurate drug education, or treatment.
Youth need easy access to harm-reduction programmes such as drug checking and safe spaces, alongside prevention, education and treatment.
And all of the strategies will be more effective if there is drug-policy reform, because moving away from prohibition will reduce stigma and remove barriers to seek help.
We should be aiming to create an environment where young people feel safe and supported to seek help.
In drug policy there is a well-known diagram called the "U-curve".
When it comes to reducing harm for youth, we argue that New Zealand has missed the mark in both directions.
On the one hand we have prohibition applied to drugs such as cannabis or MDMA.
The UK campaign group Anyone’s Child provides a stark reminder that we all want to protect young people — but banning and criminalising drugs is not the way to do it.
Indeed, some of the strongest calls for harm reduction and drug-policy reform come from bereaved parents.
Canada’s cannabis legalisation policy explicitly aimed to protect youth from an unregulated black market, and importantly cannabis legalisation was not associated with an increase in youth use, as was feared.
On the other hand, the most harmful drug to New Zealand’s youth — alcohol — is widely accessible, heavily marketed, and cheap.
Harm Reduction Coalition Aotearoa is advocating for a new piece of legislation that regulates all psychoactive drugs, including those that are legal or prohibited.
We support this goal, as it would ensure that drugs are regulated on the basis of their harmfulness, rather than an ideological judgement about which drugs are "acceptable" and which are "bad".
For too long, our drug policy in New Zealand has been driven by an outdated approach that causes harm, is ineffective and inefficient, and is not grounded in science and evidence.
Our youth deserve better.
That is why we support Harm Reduction Coalition Aotearoa, and why we think you should too. — Newsroom
■Dr Rose Crossin is a senior lecturer in the department of population health and Professor Joe Boden is a professor in psychological medicine, both at the University of Otago (Christchurch). They lead the National Addiction Centre at the University of Otago, and are members of the newly launched organisation, Harm Reduction Coalition Aotearoa.
