The Turning Point report reveals something crucial about drug driving behaviour: people describe it not as aberrant, but as embedded in everyday routines (work, socialising, stress management). This apparent ordinariness, however, must be understood within a broader policy environment where harm reduction has been promoted in relative isolation from robust prevention and supply reduction. The unintended consequence is a perception that ongoing drug use is expected and manageable rather than something to be actively reduced. In this context, drug driving becomes a predictable outcome of a culture where drug use is framed as a given, and where policy energy focuses on managing risk instead of changing behaviour.
Harm Reduction in a Lopsided System
Harm reduction has an important place in public health. But when it dominates both narrative and resourcing at the expense of prevention and supply control, it can hollow out efforts to reduce initiation, frequency and intensity of drug use. Over the past decade, much public messaging has concentrated on safer use, overdose response and stigma reduction. Comparatively little has aimed to prevent uptake, delay use or actively support abstinence-oriented and reduction-focused goals (particularly in relation to driving).
The result, reflected in the experiences documented in the report, is telling: many individuals receive repeated signals about how to “be safer” while using, but almost no structured support or expectation to stop using before driving, or to address the underlying use itself.
The Missing Pillars: Supply Reduction, Prevention, Diversion
The Turning Point report highlights an enforcement-heavy roadside testing regime with minimal systematic prevention or therapeutic diversion. To correct this imbalance, drug policy around driving needs a deliberate triangulation of three pillars:
Supply Reduction Strong, targeted policing of trafficking and dealing, regulation of pharmaceutical prescribing, and disruption of local drug markets can reduce availability and convenience, making impulsive or routine drug use before driving less likely.
Prevention Evidence-based, developmentally appropriate prevention across schools, workplaces, families and communities is essential to delay initiation, reduce use and reshape expectations about combining drugs and driving. Prevention here means more than information: it encompasses skill-building, alternative activities, and structural supports that make non-use (or reduced use) realistic and attractive.
Diversion (Not Decriminalisation) When people are detected drug driving, responses should prioritise diversion into assessment, education and treatment rather than simply fines and disqualification, but without sending a message that drug use is consequence-free or socially accepted. Diversion is distinct from broad decriminalisation. It retains a clear legal boundary around drug use and driving, while using that boundary as an entry point to structured behaviour change.
By contrast, moves toward de facto normalisation or blanket decriminalisation, in the absence of strong supply control and prevention, risk further embedding drug use as a “new normal” (undermining public messaging around road safety and personal responsibility).
Consequences of Neglecting Prevention and Behaviour Change
The experiences captured in the report show how the neglect of prevention and behaviour change plays out on the ground:
- People report surprise at being detected, revealing that they have not internalised clear, consistent messages that any drug use before driving is unacceptable and risky.
- Many have long-standing patterns of drug use linked to mental health, work conditions or social networks, yet have never been offered sustained, structured help to reduce or exit those patterns.
- Contact points that could trigger change (police stops, courts, health services) rarely connect individuals to credible, evidence-based programs focused on abstinence from driving after drug use, and on broader behaviour change.
In effect, policy and practice communicate that the system will test and punish, and occasionally help people use more safely, but will not consistently invest in helping them use less (or not at all) in relation to driving.
Reframing Drug Driving as a Prevention Priority
To respond to the report’s findings, drug driving must be reframed as a central prevention priority rather than a niche enforcement issue or a side effect of broader harm reduction work. This reframing implies:
Public campaigns that explicitly challenge the idea that drug use is a normal, expected aspect of life, and that clearly condemn any drug use before driving as socially and morally unacceptable, not just technically illegal.
Integration of road-safety messaging into AOD and mental health services, with practitioners trained and resourced to work toward behaviour change (not only “safer” use) around driving.
Policy commitments that tie funding and performance measures to reductions in drug use prevalence, frequency and related driving, not solely to service throughput or distribution of harm reduction materials.
In this model, harm reduction retains a role but is embedded within a broader framework that:
- Limits supply
- Strengthens prevention
- Uses legal boundaries to drive diversion into change-focused support
- Resists narratives that present drug use (and by extension drug driving) as inevitable
Conclusion
The lived experiences in the Turning Point report sit within a decade of harm reduction-led messaging and weak prevention. The current patterns of drug driving are not accidental but are, in part, the predictable consequence of policy choices. Rebalancing toward supply reduction, robust prevention and meaningful diversion (while rejecting decriminalisation and cultural normalisation) offers a clearer path to genuine reductions in both drug use and drug driving-related harm.
(Source: WRD News)