Alcohol use may be down, but don’t worry – New Zealanders still love getting wasted

Drinking is down, drug use is up; alcohol prices are stable, drug prices are way down. Are these things connected?

The rumours are true: New Zealanders are drinking less than at any time since we began keeping track. Meanwhile, cocaine use has reached record levels (according to wastewater testing), methamphetamine is cheaper than at any point since Massey University began tracking prices in 2017, and illicit drugs generally cost far less in real terms than in 2017.

So, are New Zealanders putting down the beers in favour of cutting up lines? Unfortunately, the available data can't show that. What it does suggest though, says Dr Rose Crossin of the University of Otago's Department of Public Health in Christchurch, is simpler: many people want to alter their state of mind, and the real questions are which drug they choose, and why. (Crossin, who researches alcohol and drug harm, stressed that much of what she could talk about is an informed hypothesis, not hard data.)

Drinking is down, unevenly

The fall is real. In the Ministry of Health’s Health Survey, 74.9% of adults drank in the past year (2024/25), down from 81.6% in 2019/20, and hazardous drinking fell from 21.3 to 16.6%. And, as highlighted by NZ Alcohol Beverages Council, hazardous drinking among 18-24-year-olds fell from 35.8% to about 22.6%. But, Crossin says, “what that obscures is what’s happening within different subgroups”. Some young people are moving “towards complete abstention from alcohol or really, very, very minimal drinking”, pulling their group’s average down, “but within that, there are groups of young people who are still drinking a lot and drinking quite hazardously”. 

Meanwhile, drinking among over-50s, she says, is stable or rising. But why the young drink less is unclear. This cohort “tends to be more risk-averse”, she says, but there are “lots of different hypotheses out there and no solid answers”.

Cheaper drugs, not obviously more expensive booze

Alcohol is more expensive than it’s been in a long time, but only in nominal terms: excise is indexed to inflation and rose about 3.1% in July 2026. But indexation means it has largely tracked prices generally, and the Health Promotion Agency found alcohol more affordable in 2020 than in 2017. So on the available evidence, price looks to be a weak explanation for falling consumption.

The drug picture is clearer. Massey University’s New Zealand Drug Trends survey, which tracks what users report paying, shows steep inflation-adjusted price decreases.

Wastewater testing, which doesn’t depend on who answers an online survey, shows estimated cocaine consumption rising from about 3.3kg a week in early 2024 to a late-2025 peak of 9.4kg, easing to 6.8kg in mid-2026. Massey’s meth bulletin, citing wastewater testing, says meth consumption doubled in the last two quarters of 2024.

Crossin credits supply in part: “There’s a global cocaine glut, so cocaine has gotten cheap or relatively cheaper,” she says. “So people who previously wouldn't have been able to afford cocaine or couldn’t afford it very often can potentially use cocaine.” But price isn’t everything: meth is cheaper too, but that “doesn't necessarily mean it's more socially acceptable to do it.”

Not a simple swap

If New Zealanders were broadly trading beer and wine (and RTDs and shots and whatever else) for drugs, drug use should rise across the board. It hasn’t. Cannabis use among adults rose from 8.1% in 2011/12 to 15.6% in 2023/24, then slipped to 14.1%, a change not statistically significant, and Massey’s survey shows MDMA use falling since 2020 despite a cheaper gram. Reading from the Health Survey, Crossin said cannabis use among 15- to 24-year-olds is broadly stable, cocaine use is rising and hallucinogens are steady. The survey misses nitrous oxide, popular with the young, she says, and misuse of prescription medicines.

So is there a shift from alcohol to illicit drugs? “It is potentially a shift in which drug,” she says, but “we can’t just assume that the same people who are stopping drinking are the same people increasing their drug use.” Some abstainers “could be abstaining from absolutely everything”; others could be "reducing their alcohol use, increasing their drug use, or it could be that the group who have remained drinking are also adding in other drugs into that.” That, she says, “is just not possible to see with our big population-level data sets.”

Why, not how much

For Crossin, the real question is motive. “What are people getting from their drug or alcohol use? Why are they doing it? To me, that’s the fundamental question that underpins everything.” 

A widely used model of drinking motives breaks them into four, often overlapping, drivers: social (drinking to celebrate or socialise); enhancement (drinking to increase excitement or enthusiasm); coping (drinking to repress stress or anxiety or negative feelings); conformity (drinking because other people are). Each motive has a different relationship to intoxication. For some, it’s the entire point, for others, it’s irrelevant. 

That suggests, and Crossin agrees it’s plausible, that the more normalised abstaining from drinking becomes, the fewer people will drink out of conformity. It's a hypothesis, not a finding, that as certain illicit drugs become more available, some people may seek enhancement or coping through them instead of alcohol – different forms of intoxication can satisfy different needs. Crossin says she prefers to think of it as “an alteration of consciousness,” a “seemingly fundamental urge”. Then, she says, “it just becomes a question of, well, what drug and why?” 

She also cautions against celebrating the fall in youth drinking: “It might just be that alcohol has gone out of fashion, and that doesn't mean that alcohol can't come back into fashion.” 

What can and can’t be said

So while alcohol consumption is at a record low, and cocaine and meth are at or near record levels by wastewater measures, we can’t, unfortunately, draw a clean straight line between the two. The drug trend looks like a supply story (illicit drugs are significantly cheaper in real terms), the alcohol one more like shifting demand and fashion, but, ultimately, it’s impossible to know with the information available.

What we can know is that plenty of New Zealanders still want to get fucked up. We, like most of humanity (and other mammals), always have – “that is a seemingly fundamental urge. As far back as we’ve got human records, we’ve got records of people trying, for various reasons, to temporarily alter their consciousness," Crossin says. We probably always will. All that changes are the drugs we choose.