A Dalgarno Institute Position on Early Intervention, Diversion, and the Culture We Want to Build
Queensland is in the middle of a significant drug policy decision, and the public deserves a serious conversation rather than a partisan one.
The state government has proposed winding back its three-strike drug diversion program, the arrangement that gave people caught with small quantities of illicit substances several chances before facing criminal charges. Under the existing framework, first-time offenders received a warning. Second and third-time offenders were referred to a health practitioner-run program. Under the proposed changes, only first-time offenders would be diverted. After that: fines, or criminal charges.
Peak medical and nursing bodies have responded sharply. The Australian Medical Association Queensland has called the decision “dangerous and contrary to evidence.” The Queensland Nurses and Midwives Union has accused the government of acting on “unsound information and prejudice.” Civil liberties advocates have warned the changes risk turning repeat offenders into de facto drug dealers, given the likely penalties they would face.
The Police Minister, by contrast, argued that allowing people to be caught with heroin or fentanyl multiple times without meaningful consequence sends entirely the wrong message.
Both positions have merit. Neither is sufficient. And the people caught in the middle (individuals struggling with drug dependence, and the families and communities around them) deserve better than a debate that treats drug policy as a political football.
At the Dalgarno Institute, the question we keep returning to is this: is Australia’s approach to early intervention actually serious about helping people exit drug use, or are we simply managing the optics of a problem we have not yet committed to solving?
The False Choice That Keeps Failing Us
For years, Australia’s drug policy debate has been framed around a binary: criminalise people who use drugs, or decriminalise them. Lock them up or let them off. Punish or permit.
This is a false choice, and it has caused serious, lasting damage.
Crude criminalisation (charging, convicting, and moving on) does not help anyone exit drug use. It damages livelihoods, fractures families, and too often embeds people more deeply in the very environments that contributed to their drug use in the first place. Nobody serious is arguing for that approach.
But decriminalisation is not the answer either, and the pro-drug lobby’s insistence that it is deserves direct and honest challenge. Removing the legal framework around drug use does not reduce harm. It normalises use, increases uptake, and strips away one of the most powerful tools available for motivating someone not yet ready to seek help voluntarily. We have cared enough about tobacco users to maintain robust societal and structural pressure toward cessation over decades. People dependent on illicit drugs deserve at least that same level of genuine, sustained care, not permission dressed up as compassion.
The evidence is not ambiguous on this. Decades of experience in problem-solving courts, drug courts, and structured diversion programs confirms it: coercive intervention, applied with care and consistency, produces outcomes that neither criminalisation nor decriminalisation can match. The law, used not as a battering ram but as a firm hand on the shoulder, can guide people through the door of recovery. Many will not open that door on their own. The most caring thing we can do is refuse to pretend otherwise.
That is the space this country needs to occupy. The evidence is there. The will to use it properly is what has been missing.
What “Diversion” Has Become, and Why It Needs to Change
Here is what needs to be said plainly, and what the medical community’s otherwise reasonable defence of existing diversion programs has been too quiet about: in too many settings, diversion has become a procedural formality.
A person is intercepted, referred, ticked off a list, and sent on their way. A pamphlet changes hands. A box is marked. The system records a successful diversion, and the person returns to exactly the same environment, with exactly the same pressures and exactly the same unresolved reasons for using drugs in the first place.
That is not intervention. It is paperwork with better intentions.
The problem becomes even more acute in court settings, where recidivistic drug-using offenders appear before a magistrate for the third, fourth, or fifth time. Increasingly, mental health diagnoses, whether genuine or conveniently timed, function as a mechanism for avoiding any meaningful engagement with the consequences of continued drug use. We understand why courts tread carefully here, and we are not dismissing the genuine complexity. But when a mental health claim becomes a reliable exit from accountability, the system stops serving the person and starts serving the process. Structure, consistency, and appropriate expectation are not obstacles to recovery; they are conditions for it. Removing them is not compassionate. It is negligent.
Robust early intervention looks quite different from what most Australians currently encounter. Structured, supervised engagement over time replaces the single appointment. Genuine connection to therapeutic communities, peer support, and where necessary, secure welfare rehabilitation sits at the centre of any serious program. Consequences for disengagement must be proportionate, consistent, and oriented toward re-engagement with recovery rather than simple punishment. Honest, thorough assessment of what is actually driving a person’s drug use matters far more than a one-size-fits-all program that treats every case identically.
None of this requires new laws. It requires the willingness to use existing ones properly, and the courage to insist that people are capable of more than we have been expecting of them.
The Judicial Educator: Law in the Service of Recovery
Here is something Robert Downey Jnr said in 2004, after coming through one of the most public battles with addiction of his generation: “It’s not that difficult to overcome these seemingly ghastly problems. What’s hard is to decide to do it.”
That single observation sits at the heart of everything the Dalgarno Institute believes about early intervention. The decision to exit drug use is the hardest part, and for many people caught in the grip of dependency, the drug-affected brain cannot reliably make that decision without external help. Psychotropic substances corrupt the very cognitive processes needed to choose differently. This is not a moral failing. It is a neurological one. And it is precisely why assisted decision-making matters so much.
The Judicial Educator model exists to provide that assistance. The idea is to use the authority of the law not to punish, but to facilitate recovery. Not to brand a person, but to redirect them toward the exit from drug use that they may not yet be able to find on their own.
Anti-drug laws were always meant to serve this purpose. They were designed as a vehicle to protect communities, families, and children from the harms that flow from normalised drug use. For too long, those laws have sat underused while families paid the price. The Judicial Educator reclaims them for their original intent: not as a hammer, but as a hand on the shoulder.
Problem-solving courts and drug courts around the world have been operating on this basis for decades, and their results are well documented. They hold participants accountable for progress through recovery programs. They maintain the coercive potential of criminal sanctions for those who genuinely disengage, but reserve that potential as a last resort, not a first response. And critically, for those who complete the diversion pathway genuinely and in full, no criminal record need be recorded at all.
This is what purposeful intervention looks like in practice: not permission, but precision. Not the removal of legal consequence, but the intelligent deployment of legal authority in the service of human recovery.
Once psychotropic substances become entrenched in a person’s behavioural patterns, whether through short-term intoxication or long-term dependency, the risk to that person and to those around them requires more than a doctor’s appointment. It requires sustained, structured engagement with recovery, alongside genuine therapeutic and community support. The Judicial Educator, working in concert with health services and therapeutic communities, is the most effective framework we have for making that happen.
The existing criminal codes do not need weakening or erasing. They need tasking, again and properly, in the most proactive framework available to us. One voice, one message, one focus: helping people find their way out.
Prevention Belongs to Everyone, Including Police
Effective early intervention does not begin in a courtroom. It begins in the environments where drug use takes hold: on campuses, at events, in communities, and in the ordinary situations that no formal program ever reaches.
Campus police and community law enforcement officers occupy a position that is genuinely unique. They are present where drug use begins. They see what precedes harm. They observe patterns of behaviour that no clinician or educator ever sees, because those patterns play out on the street and in the moments between formal interventions. That proximity is not just an enforcement resource. It is a prevention resource, and one that Australian drug policy has consistently underused.
Research in prevention practice is clear: frontline officers create what practitioners call teachable moments, situations where a young person is far more open to a genuine conversation about risk than they would be in a classroom or a clinic. Students who binge drink are 3.5 times more likely to experience violence than those who do not. Nearly one in five students report feeling unsafe because of another student’s drinking. Officers see this up close, every week. That is not incidental. It is strategic intelligence.
Effective prevention requires that law enforcement be embedded in prevention planning from the outset, not called in after failure. It requires data-sharing between police and community health teams, consistent messaging across institutions, and officers who understand not just the law but the neuroscience of addiction and the principles of early intervention. When enforcement and prevention work in alignment, outcomes are measurably better, not because police become social workers, but because they become informed partners in a shared effort toward the same goal.
Prevention is not soft. It is one of the most strategic investments a community can make. And it belongs to all of us, including the officers who are already standing in the right place at the right time.
The Culture We Are Actually Trying to Build
All of this (the courts, the diversion programs, the campus officers, the therapeutic communities) is in service of something larger than policy. It is in service of culture change.
Drug use is not primarily a legal problem. It is a cultural one. And culture does not change through legislation alone. It changes when families, communities, schools, workplaces, sporting clubs, and individuals begin to speak with one voice, not a shaming voice, not a criminalising voice, but an honest and caring one that says: we know this causes harm, we know people can and do recover, and we are not going to look the other way to make anyone feel more comfortable.
The most instructive parallel remains tobacco. A generation ago, smoking was normal. Today it is not. That shift did not happen because of a single law or a single campaign. It happened because the whole of society, gradually and consistently, stopped accommodating tobacco use as a lifestyle choice and started addressing it honestly as a harm. Legal frameworks, health education, social norms, and economic signals moved in the same direction over decades. Nobody called that cruel. We called it care.
We can do the same with illicit drugs. It requires us to stop arguing about whether to punish or excuse, and to start building something better: early intervention programs that are robust, not tokenistic; legal frameworks that are purposeful, not brutal; communities that are honest, not permissive; and a shared commitment to holding people to the possibility of a better future, and meaning it.
The people most at risk are not statistics. They are sons and daughters, students and workers, neighbours and friends. A tick in a box is not enough. What they deserve is engaged, accountable, and genuinely caring support from every part of the community, from the courts and the clinics to the campus officers and the families who refuse to give up.
That is the culture worth building. And it starts with being honest about what we are willing to do to get there.
Research Team – Dalgarno Institute
The Dalgarno Institute is Australia’s leading drug prevention and education advocacy organisation. For resources, training, and policy submissions, visit dalgarnoinstitute.org.au
(Source: WRD News)