An Environmental Scan of Alcohol and other Drug Issues Facing Law Enforcement in Australia 2010

This is the second alcohol and other drug environmental scan undertaken for the law enforcement sector in Australia. The first (Nicholas and Shoobridge, 2005) was conducted under the auspices of the Commissioners’ Drugs Committee of the Conference of Commissioners of Police of Australasia and the South West Pacific Region. The current scan was funded by the National Drug Law Enforcement Research Fund (NDLERF). Environmental scanning, as with any form of predicting the future, is not a purely scientific endeavour. It involves drawing together data from a large range of sources, ranging from refereed journals to the opinions of experts in a given field, in order to try and better understand current and future trends. This becomes even more difficult when the subject of study involves complex phenomena such as alcohol and other drug problems. Indeed, it is a difficult task to construct a comprehensive view of alcohol and other drug problems in Australia at present, let alone attempting to predict those that will arise in the future. Consequently, this environmental scan represents the author’s attempt to make sense of a vast amount of data and, as such, the views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and not those of the NDLERF Board of Management or the Australian law enforcement sector more broadly.