On a Friday night outside a Civic nightclub, an ACT Policing officer pats down a 22-year-old and finds a small clip-seal bag holding under a gram of MDMA. Two years ago, that discovery would have ended in an arrest, a formal caution or a minor criminal charge — and possibly a conviction that could turn up in job and visa checks for a decade. Under the ACT's 2023 reform, he instead gets a $100 on-the-spot notice or, more often, a booking into a one-hour health assessment with Canberra Health Services: harm-reduction advice, an offer of treatment if he wants it, and no charge laid, no record created. That one change in what happens next, repeated across thousands of encounters ACT Policing has each year, is the entire experiment the Australian Capital Territory has been running since 28 October 2023 — whether treating a small personal drug seizure as a health contact rather than a court date makes Canberra safer, sicker, or simply different.
A territory that built the model twice
The ACT did not arrive at broad decriminalisation in one step. The first move was cannabis. From 31 January 2020, the Drugs of Dependence (Personal Cannabis Use) Amendment Act 2019 made the ACT the only Australian jurisdiction where an adult can lawfully possess up to 50 grams of dried cannabis (150 grams "wet") and grow up to two plants per person, capped at four per household, for personal use at home (ACT Legislation Register). Selling, supplying or smoking in public stayed illegal, and the Commonwealth's own cannabis offences were never repealed — a legal grey zone the territory chose to run anyway, betting the Commonwealth would not prosecute conduct its own neighbouring jurisdiction had legalised.
The bigger step followed a private member's bill from backbench Labor MLA Michael Pettersson, first tabled in February 2021 and passed by the Legislative Assembly on 20 October 2022 as the Drugs of Dependence (Personal Use) Amendment Act 2022, commencing 28 October 2023 (ACT Legislation Register). It made the ACT the first Australian jurisdiction to decriminalise personal possession of a defined list of other illicit drugs — cocaine, heroin, MDMA, amphetamine-type stimulants including ice, LSD and psilocybin — below set threshold quantities: 1.5 grams for the stimulants, 1 gram for heroin, and a five-dose-unit limit for LSD, among others (ACT Government, Drug Law Reform fact sheet). At or under those thresholds, police can no longer lay a criminal possession charge; they issue a $100 fine or refer the person to a health assessment, and completing it ends the matter with no conviction recorded. Above the personal threshold but below a trafficable quantity, possession stays a criminal offence carrying fines of up to $8,000 and prison terms of up to six months — cut from a previous maximum of two years, not abolished. Supply, trafficking and drug driving remain fully criminal throughout. All of it is enforced by the same officers: ACT Policing, which — unlike every state police force — is not a territory agency but the Australian Federal Police, delivered to Canberra under a long-standing policing agreement with the Commonwealth.
The strongest case
A criminal record has never cured an addiction, and the ACT had already tested the model once
The government's argument rests on a distinction most Australians already accept for alcohol: that using a drug is a health behaviour, and dependence is a health condition, even where the drug itself is illegal. A conviction for possessing a personal quantity does nothing to treat either — it adds a criminal record on top, which can cost a young person the job, the rental application or the visa that might otherwise have kept their life on track. The ACT was not improvising when it extended this logic beyond cannabis: it had already run a comparable scheme, the Simple Cannabis Offence Notice, since 1993 — Australia's first drug expiation scheme — without the surge in use or lawlessness opponents had predicted at the time. The 2023 reform applies the same health-first logic that underpins the National Drug Strategy, the framework every Australian government, state and federal, has signed since 1985, which names harm reduction as a pillar equal to law enforcement and demand reduction.
The early signs the government points to are consistent with that theory working as designed. Interim data reported in ACT media in October 2025, two years into the reform, showed roughly seven in ten to three-quarters of people found with a personal quantity (approx.) chose the health referral over the fine — meaning most contacts that used to end in a charge now end in a documented conversation about treatment, which cannot happen inside a courtroom. And the underlying fear behind every decriminalisation push — that removing the threat of prosecution invites more use — has not shown up in the territory's own population data: the ACT's rate of recent illicit drug use, 14.1 per cent in 2022–23, sat below the national rate of 17.9 per cent even after cannabis was legalised (AIHW, National Drug Strategy Household Survey, 2022–23). On the government's own telling, Canberra ran the experiment other states are still debating, and the sky did not fall.
The evidence
Two years past commencement, the honest answer is that the full picture is still being assembled — a genuine gap in the record, not an evasion. The ACT government commissioned an external evaluation, run by the Drug Policy Modelling Program at UNSW's Social Policy Research Centre with the Australian National University and the Canberra Alliance for Harm Minimisation and Advocacy, a drug-user harm-reduction body, covering 2024 to 2026. Its final report is due to be tabled in the Legislative Assembly, but as at mid-2026 only interim figures reported in ACT media were publicly available — not the full report itself.
The most contested number is deaths. ACT Policing and coronial data reported by the Canberra Times put drug-induced deaths at 26 in 2023 — a year in which the reform applied for only its last nine weeks — rising to 38 in 2024, the first complete year under decriminalisation, and running at 16 for the first three quarters of 2025. That is a genuine rise between the pre-reform baseline and the first full year of the new law, and it deserves to be stated plainly rather than explained away. It does not, on its own, establish that decriminalisation caused it. Emergency clinicians, including ANU's David Caldicott, have noted that ambulance attendances stayed broadly stable even as emergency department presentations climbed — consistent with people being more willing to seek help once the fear of prosecution was removed, not necessarily with more harm occurring. Toxicology in the same period increasingly flagged nitazenes, a class of synthetic opioids many times more potent than heroin, contaminating supplies of methamphetamine, cocaine and ecstasy sold in Canberra, according to CanTEST, the territory's drug-checking service — a supply-side shock affecting the whole east coast illicit market, not a consequence of how the ACT charges possession.
Decriminalisation changed how the ACT responds to a person found with drugs. It did not change what is increasingly found inside the drugs themselves.
The federal fault line
The ACT is the only Australian jurisdiction without its own police force. ACT Policing is the Australian Federal Police, supplied to the territory under a policing agreement, which means the officers enforcing a territory law that decriminalises possession are the same officers who, in other contexts, enforce Commonwealth drug offences that were never changed. During the bill's passage, the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions withdrew earlier advice about a proposed legal defence, citing "legal complexities that had not initially been appreciated" — an unusually candid admission that the boundary between territory and federal drug law was not fully worked out before the reform commenced. AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw warned publicly during debate on the bill that organised crime "will want to target this community because they can move their product quite easily," reflecting a broader policing view that decriminalising possession without any change to supply-side law creates a market signal police have to manage without new tools.
The dispute reached the federal Senate itself. On 19 October 2023, Shadow Attorney-General Michaelia Cash moved a private senator's bill to use the Commonwealth's constitutional power over territories to override the ACT's decriminalisation law. It was defeated 33 votes to 27, with federal Labor and the Greens combining to vote it down, but the episode confirmed that the ACT's reform survives at the Commonwealth's ongoing forbearance rather than as a settled constitutional fact — a territory, unlike a state, has no entrenched right to make its own criminal law that the Commonwealth Parliament cannot simply overrule.
The critique
Set against that federal exposure, the domestic evidence base has real gaps of its own. ACT Policing has not published a running public count of how many simple drug offence notices it has issued since October 2023, or a breakdown of how many detections fall above versus below the personal thresholds — the kind of basic operational transparency that would let anyone outside government check the diversion-rate figures now being cited in the debate. The government-commissioned evaluation, while methodologically serious, includes the Canberra Alliance for Harm Minimisation and Advocacy — a drug-user advocacy organisation, not a neutral party — as a named delivery partner, which is a reasonable choice for stakeholder engagement but blurs the line between evaluating the reform and having helped design its constituency. On the other side, the Australian Federal Police Association's public claims that cocaine use is up roughly 70 per cent, heroin 30 per cent and methamphetamine 40 per cent since 2023, and that drug-driving charges have risen more than 20 per cent, have circulated widely in ACT media without the union naming a specific dataset or methodology behind the percentages — figures that deserve exactly the same scepticism applied to the government's own diversion-rate claims, not a free pass because they cut against the policy.
The thresholds themselves are also a live design question. Setting the "personal use" limit for stimulants at 1.5 grams was meant to distinguish a user from a small dealer, but critics within policing argue it sits below what a moderately dependent user often carries between purchases — meaning some of the people the reform was designed to divert into health care may still be charged criminally simply because dependence, not casual use, drives them to carry more. Finally, drug driving law was left untouched by design: it remains a strict offence to drive with any of these drugs in one's system, and roadside testing technology for several of the newly decriminalised substances is limited, leaving police and drivers navigating a possession law and a driving law that were reformed on two different clocks.
The risk to the future
A policy that could be judged before its own evidence exists
The ACT's reform is due its first genuine test in 2026, when the UNSW-led evaluation is tabled in the Legislative Assembly. Until then, the public debate is being fought almost entirely with partial, contested and differently-sourced numbers — a rising death count the government has not fully explained, a diversion rate with no published raw count behind it, and an opposing set of use-and-harm statistics from a stakeholder group with an interest in repeal. A reform this significant, the first of its kind in the country, should be able to survive scrutiny on a genuinely independent, fully public evidence base; instead, both its defenders and its critics are currently arguing past each other on numbers neither side has fully opened up. If the 2026 evaluation is delayed, selectively released, or contested on methodology by whichever side it disappoints, the ACT risks a repeat performance of the federal Senate fight — a policy litigated on politics because the facts were never allowed to settle it.
The deeper risk sits beyond the ACT's borders. Because the reform survives only as long as the Commonwealth chooses not to override it, a future federal government with a different majority could revisit the 2023 Senate vote and win it — not because the ACT's evidence changed, but because the numbers in Canberra's political arithmetic did. For a territory that has spent six years building the most tested health-first drug framework in the country, across two separate reforms and a genuinely independent evaluation now under way, having the whole model turn on a single vote in a chamber the ACT does not sit in is the risk no amount of good local evidence can fully manage.