While the courts are grappling with AI and deepfakes, a more straightforward trend has been unfolding in the youth justice system: young people are getting caught with drugs far less often than they were just three years ago.

In 2021, New Zealand courts issued 156 orders for illicit drug offences by young people. By 2024, that number had fallen to 48. That's a 69% drop in three years. (Source: Ministry of Justice, youth-court-orders)

To understand how we got here, you need to go back three decades. In 1992, youth drug offence orders sat at 36. Through the 1990s, they climbed steadily, peaking at 156 in 1997 during the height of New Zealand's moral panic about youth crime. Then came a sharp fall through the early 2000s, bottoming out at just 12 orders in 2007.

What happened next tells you everything about how drug enforcement ebbs and flows with policy and policing priorities. From 2007 to 2020, the numbers climbed again, reaching 96 by 2020. Then COVID hit.

The 2021 spike to 156 orders looks dramatic until you realize what was happening: courts were catching up on a backlog, police were back on the beat after lockdowns, and enforcement resumed with intensity. But that spike was short-lived.

By 2022, orders had crashed back to 48. They ticked up slightly to 72 in 2023, then returned to 48 in 2024. We're now at the same level as 2022, and well below the long-term average.

Here's what this timeline doesn't tell you: whether fewer young people are using drugs, or whether police and courts are simply choosing not to prosecute them as aggressively. The data can't distinguish between a genuine behaviour change and a policy shift toward diversion or warnings instead of formal orders.

What it does tell you is this: the narrative that youth offending is spiralling out of control doesn't match what's happening in the drug enforcement data. Youth drug offence orders are down by more than two-thirds from their 2021 peak, and sitting near historic lows when you look at the full 32-year dataset.

The courts may be worried about deepfakes and AI-generated evidence, but when it comes to youth and drugs, the trend line has been falling steeply for three years straight. That's the story the numbers tell, even if nobody's talking about it.