Drug trafficking in the Pacific has moved from a background concern to one of the region's most pressing challenges. The Pacific was long seen primarily as a transit route for drugs moving between Latin America, Asia, Australia and New Zealand — but more is now staying in the region and reaching communities more than ever before.
Pacific governments have elevated drug trafficking to a top-tier priority. Australia has invested in interdiction, maritime surveillance and policing partnerships in response, with some important successes.
But experts increasingly point out that the challenge goes beyond enforcement. Trafficking networks can fuel corruption, undermine governance and exploit social and economic vulnerabilities. It therefore requires holistic responses through the combination of a range of tools.
As criminal groups become more sophisticated and the scale of the problem grows, so does the debate about whether current approaches are sufficient.
This week for The Intel, we asked three experts: Drug trafficking in the Pacific is surging — What more could Australia do?
The starting point matters. People join drug trafficking networks because someone made them an offer, legitimate alternatives were limited, and in many cases protection systems have not served them well. That reframing has significant implications for what Australia should do.
Pacific Island countries, once largely transit points for drugs destined for Australia and New Zealand, are seeing a surge in local demand. Unemployment, high cost of living, and lack of opportunity have become push factors for people joining criminal networks. Young people with aspirations and no legitimate pathways to meet them are recruitable. Organised crime offers quick returns, a peer network, and a sense of purpose that formal economies in much of the Pacific cannot currently match. Seventeen tonnes of illicit drugs were seized across the Pacific in just the first few months of 2026, more than three times the total seized across all of 2025. The scale is accelerating faster than enforcement can keep pace.
Human mobility sits at the centre of this picture. The same routes, intermediaries, and documents that move trafficking victims and, increasingly, drug couriers. Foreign criminal groups are capitalising on geographic isolation, infiltrating legitimate businesses, and using new technologies to advance illicit operations while evading law enforcement. Organised crime uses the infrastructure of mobility because that infrastructure exists and is under-regulated.
Australia's investments in labour mobility, vocational training, and private sector development are therefore directly relevant, more so than enforcement alone. Expanding legitimate economic pathways to create real alternatives reduces the comparative attractiveness of the criminal offer. Managed migration pathways that connect people to formal income and build long-term economic resilience are part of the answer.
Security responses without that foundation are managing symptoms. The development investments Australia already makes are part of the solution, but only if they are designed to function that way. Ensuring that Australia-funded digital identity and financial inclusion programs are designed with trafficking vulnerability screening built in, rather than added retrospectively, would convert investments already being made into a deliberate prevention strategy. This is not necessarily new funding, but intentional design.
Sandra Kraushaar leads The Asia Foundation's Pacific Islands program from Suva, bringing 25 years of experience across gender, governance, and political economy work — including as DFAT's Women, Peace, and Security policy lead and manager of the $320 million Pacific Women program. The Asia Foundation implemented the Pacific RISE Counter Trafficking In Persons program across Fiji, Marshall Islands, Palau, Papua New Guinea and Tonga. At the Lab, we admire Sandra's insistence that governance reform only sticks when the people it's meant to serve are the ones at the centre of it.
Drug trafficking in the Pacific is surging, but the answer is not simply more agencies, more meetings, or more hardware. The Pacific already has a crowded security architecture. What is needed now is a more connected, trusted and culturally informed intelligence ecosystem that helps Pacific states see, understand and disrupt the networks operating across their region.
Australia can play an important role, but it should start by helping connect the systems that already exist. This means investing in practical intelligence-sharing: secure communications, shared case-management tools, joint analytical cells, common reporting standards and embedded Pacific analysts. Intelligence must flow both ways. Pacific partners should not be treated merely as sources of information for Australian investigations.
Australia should also help close the enforcement gap created by new technology. Criminal syndicates are using encrypted communications, drones, cryptocurrency, maritime technologies and decentralised logistics. Pacific police, customs and prosecutors need access to digital forensics, crypto-tracing, drone detection, data analysis and lawful tools to investigate encrypted and cyber-enabled crime.
But technology alone will not be enough. In the Pacific, traditional chiefs, churches, villages, fishers, youth leaders and women’s groups are often the first to notice when something has changed. Fiji’s culturally grounded Kaduvu Community Policing-Vanua-Multi-Agencies Crime Prevention and Maritime Security model which draws on land and maritime community actors and government agencies captures this; the Pacific Watch initiative is another example. Australia should treat these traditional and community structures as security partners, supporting local reporting, prevention and resilience programs.
José Sousa-Santos is an Associate Professor of Practice and head of the Pacific Regional Security Hub at the University of Canterbury as well as a Senior Fellow at ASPI, specialising in transnational crime, non-state actors, and irregular warfare across the Pacific and Southeast Asia. A former UN analyst in Timor-Leste and advisor to the Timorese government, he also founded Uma Juventude, an NGO focused on conflict prevention. At the Lab, we admire Jose's ability to connect the local and transnational.
At the recent Pacific Peace and Security Dialogue held in Suva, the Pacific drug crisis was consistently raised as one of the highest priority threats to the region. Just a few years ago, it might not have even been mentioned.
Drugs are washing up on Pacific shores and being consumed there at an unprecedented rate, with direct consequences for public health, social cohesion, governance and security.
Australia already recognises this. Through the AFP, the Pacific Transnational Crime Network, AUSTRAC, maritime surveillance, policing partnerships and broader justice cooperation, Australia is helping Pacific partners detect, investigate and disrupt transnational organised crime. This work matters and should continue.
But the drug crisis cannot be treated as a problem for police alone. Trafficking networks exploit gaps across society: weak border systems, stretched courts, limited treatment services, economic pressure, corruption risks, and low public awareness. The harm also lands well beyond the point of seizure. It affects families, churches, schools, workplaces and trust in public institutions.
That means Australia’s next step should be less about inventing an entirely new response, and more about tying existing support together. Counter-trafficking should be connected to governance programs, justice reform, health services, youth engagement, community education and trusted local leadership. This should include supporting locally led programs that spread awareness about the risks of consuming drugs and engaging in criminal networks and provide information on how to seek support. Supporting resilient, secure and informed communities should reduce their involvement in drug-related activities.
Australia has many of the right tools. The challenge now is to bring them together into a clearer whole-of-society approach that helps Pacific countries disrupt criminal networks, reduce harm and build resilience before the crisis becomes harder to reverse.
Blake is a national security and intelligence expert, with a passion for building capacity and resilience in the Pacific. He is a strategic thinker with a background in analytical techniques, product development, and workshop design. Blake was a senior analyst and lead of the Pacific Program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and is currently also the Intelligence and Data Methods lead at ANS Analytics. At the Lab, we love Blake's ability to break problems down into core questions and his work to amplify the voices of other experts across the region.
