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Recent media reports highlight the growing use of the South Pacific as a transit corridor within the transnational cocaine trade, particularly in relation to the Australian market.
Most recently, developments in Fiji have again drawn attention to the impact of illicit drugs on local communities that are ill-prepared and ill-equipped to respond.
Fiji’s role as a transit hub for methamphetamine and cocaine is placing enormous strain on communities, local services and law enforcement. Drugs are not just passing through, they are fuelling corruption and creating a HIV crisis.
If the region is to avoid the catastrophic public‑health outcomes seen in Southeast Asia, the response must centre on harm reduction rather than only law enforcement and punitive approaches. As Prof Nick Crofts warns, “I have spent thirty years watching a very specific and very painful sequence of events unfold across Southeast Asia. I have watched it happen in Thailand, in Myanmar, in Vietnam, in China – in every country in the region. I have watched governments respond with the best intentions and the worst possible tools. And I have watched communities pay an enormous price that was entirely preventable.
Now, for the first time, I am watching the same sequence begin in the Pacific. And I feel a responsibility to say clearly, and as plainly as I can, what comes next – because Pacific Island nations still have a chance to write a different ending.
The sequence always starts the same way. A drug trafficking route opens. Organised criminal networks – in today’s Pacific, that means cartels from the Americas, outlaw motorcycle gangs out of Australia and New Zealand, and Asian syndicates – find a new corridor. Fiji is already a documented transit hub. Methamphetamine at extraordinary purity and huge quantities is moving through Fiji on yachts from Tonga and elsewhere, narcosubs and flights, bound for consumer markets in the south. The route is not coming. It is already here.
What follows is predictable. As drugs move along a route, some spills into local markets all along the route. Accessibility to the drug increases, prices drop, purity rises, and a new generation of users of the drug evolves – often rapidly. Over time many of these users’ transition from smoking or snorting the drug to injecting – because injecting delivers more effect per dollar. And once injecting takes hold in a community with an absence of harm reduction programs, HIV follows. Not because of anything complicated. Because of a shared needle. These epidemics, based on needle sharing among people who inject drugs, are the most rapid HIV epidemics among any population group – a country can go from having a few people infected with HIV to having thousands in a matter of months.”
Harm reduction is not about condoning drug use, it is about reducing immediate risks to individuals and communities also making long‑term harms less likely. Practical measures such as needle and syringe programmes (NSPs), low‑threshold access to testing and treatment for blood‑borne viruses, and targeted peer-based outreach that keeps people who use drugs connected to health services. These interventions save lives, reduce disease transmission, and maintain community trust—assets that policing alone cannot do.
Redirecting scarce resources toward dismantling cartels makes strategic sense but as Crofts adds, “When police arrest a person for possessing a needle, that person stops carrying needles. They do not stop injecting. They start sharing.” That dynamic increases HIV risk and undermines public‑health efforts.
Police can be powerful enablers of harm reduction by adopting non‑interference policies around NSPs, training officers to recognise health‑seeking behaviour, and not focus on incarcerating people who use drugs for minor drug offences. Evidence from jurisdictions that protected NSPs shows dramatically lower HIV prevalence among people who inject drugs; policy choices, not culture, explain the difference.
As trafficking routes cross borders, so must the response. The Pacific already has forums for cooperation – the challenge is political will. Coordinated agreements that protect health services, and fund community‑led harm‑reduction programmes will be far more cost‑effective than reactive mass arrests or emergency powers that drive drug use underground.
The Pacific should not repeat the mistakes of other regions, but act on clear lessons by introducing and scaling up harm‑reduction services. The Pacific communities deserve no less.