Not the best achievement…

In news that isn’t super surprising, but is still confronting AF, cocaine use has gone through the roof in Australia in recent years, with one in 24 Aussies reporting they’d done the drug in 2019 (in a survey of 22,272 people).

Usually, past years has seen New South Wales dominate these sorts of lists, consistently scoring the highest out of all Aussie states for cocaine use (and drug use in general), which isn’t surprising considering the state consumed a whopping three tonnes of cocaine in 2019-20, compared to Victoria’s 1.2 tonnes and Queensland’s 900kg.

However, now Victoria has taken the lead, with the SMH reporting that “Cocaine users [in NSW] jumped from 3.4 per cent of those surveyed to 5 per cent between 2016 and 2019, while Victorian use more than doubled from 2.5 per cent of respondents to 5.2 per cent during the same period.” It’s also reported that the pandemic and accompanying lockdowns significantly increased rates of use as well.

So basically even though more coke is being consumed in NSW as a whole, Victoria has a higher percentage of individuals actually taking the drug, with 98% of users aged between 20 and 49 (men being more likely to report use than women)/