While the government expands move-on orders and frames youth as a growing public safety problem, youth court data tells a very different story about drug offences. (Source: Stats NZ, youth-court-orders)

In 2021, courts processed 156 illicit drug offence cases involving young people. By 2024, that number had dropped to 48, a 69% collapse in just three years. It's the joint-lowest level in the entire 32-year dataset, matched only by 2022.

Here's how we got here. In 1992, youth drug offences sat at 72. They stayed relatively stable through the 1990s, hovering between 48 and 96 cases annually. Then came the 2000s. The numbers drifted lower, bottoming out at 24 in 2005. For a few years, it looked like youth drug offending was becoming marginal.

But 2010 marked a turning point. Cases jumped to 72, then kept climbing. By 2015, we hit 108. The trajectory steepened: 132 in 2019, then 156 in 2021, the second-highest point in three decades. COVID disruptions likely played a role. Court backlogs ballooned. Policing changed. But whatever drove that spike, it reversed just as sharply.

The fall from 156 to 48 between 2021 and 2022 was the steepest two-year drop in the dataset. Cases briefly ticked up to 72 in 2023, then fell back to 48 in 2024. We're now at 1990s levels, despite a larger youth population and far more public anxiety about youth crime.

That anxiety matters, because it shapes policy. The political conversation around youth offending has grown louder and tougher even as some categories of youth crime have collapsed. Move-on orders get expanded nationwide. Boot camps get trialled. The framing is consistent: young people are out of control, and the system needs harder edges.

The drug offence data doesn't support that narrative. It shows a category of youth offending that spiked during the pandemic years, then fell off a cliff. Whether that reflects changes in policing priorities, diversion programmes, or something else in youth behaviour, the outcome is the same: far fewer young people facing court for drug offences than at any point in the last decade.

Politicians don't tend to campaign on problems that are solving themselves. The data suggests this one is.