Queensland's Illicit Drug Enforcement and Diversion Framework: A Clinical Assessment
The Queensland Government is dismantling its expanded drug diversion program — a decision that peak medical, nursing, and legal bodies have condemned as prioritising political messaging over healthcare evidence.
The program being wound back is not some experimental fringe intervention. From May 2024, Queensland's expanded Drug Diversion Program offered a tiered health response: a warning for a first offence, followed by Drug Diversion Assessment Programs for second and third offences — keeping people out of the court system and into health support. The data on the program's operation over the first 18 months showed it was working as intended. The government's response to that data was to scrap the model before its scheduled 2026 evaluation.
What the new framework actually does — and why it's scientifically backwards.
The Crisafulli Government is not abolishing diversion entirely. Under the new Illicit Drug Enforcement and Diversion Framework, eligible first-time cannabis offenders will still receive a single diversion opportunity. For other minor drug offences, police may issue on-the-spot fines, with offenders able to choose a diversion program instead of paying. Repeat offenders face criminal charges.
This is precisely where the clinical problem lies — and it's the argument the government cannot answer. AMA Queensland president Dr Nick Yim explained that the point of diversion programs is to reach people who have had multiple contacts with the police and legal system, because the vast majority of people with a first offence do not come back into contact with police or require treatment. The new model concentrates its one health-based intervention on the cohort least likely to need it, then criminalises the cohort most likely to benefit. That is not a policy error — it is a structural inversion of what the evidence supports.
A coalition of AMA Queensland, the Alcohol and Drug Foundation, QuIVAA, the Queensland Law Society, QNADA, and the Queensland Nurses and Midwives' Union wrote jointly to Premier Crisafulli urging the government to keep the expanded program in place while it was evaluated, noting that the expansion was supported by doctors, lawyers, drug workers, and the Queensland Police Service itself.
That coalition was ignored. Those organisations had proposed the sensible middle ground of reviewing the program at its scheduled May 2026 evaluation, assessing its effectiveness in delivering health interventions, cost savings, and community safety outcomes. Australian Medical Association The government moved to scrap it before that evidence could be gathered.
The moral framing deserves direct challenge.
Minister Purdie stated the government makes "no apology" for restoring "real consequences for repeat drug offenders," framing the previous program as having "sent the dangerous message that breaking the law carried no meaningful consequences."
As a pharmacist and prescribing clinician, I do not dispute that drug use carries consequences. I dispute the government's apparent belief that it gets to choose which consequences apply. The clinical literature — and indeed the Queensland Police Service's own pre-2026 support for the expanded model — indicates that health-based consequences (assessment, brief intervention, treatment referral) produce better outcomes than criminal ones for minor possession offences. Addiction specialists have noted the new framework shifts drug use from a health issue to a criminal problem — a shift that evidence consistently shows increases harm rather than reducing it.
The government is entitled to a political position. It is not entitled to dress that position as a public health one. Queensland's homeless population and people with mental health challenges and poverty are expected to bear the greatest burden of the repeal. These are not abstract policy categories. They are patients.
The APS position
The APS Decriminalisation Statement is clear: strike-based systems — particularly those that treat a second or subsequent minor possession offence as a criminal matter — continue to cause harm without providing individual or social benefit. Queensland is not restoring community safety. It is restoring a model that the health sector spent two decades trying to move past.
We urge the parliamentary committee to demand the evidence the government refused to wait for, and to ask a simple clinical question: what outcome, exactly, does a criminal charge produce for a person with a substance use disorder that a health intervention does not?
The full APS position on decriminalisation is available https://www.psychedelicsociety.org.au/aps-decriminalisation-statement
