The numbers employers can’t ignore
The Drug Detection Agency’s latest quarterly workplace testing results, released on 16 July 2026, show two Class A drug trends that businesses can no longer treat as background noise. Amphetamines now account for 32.7% of positive workplace drug test results nationwide, and in Southland that figure rises to 44%.
Cocaine positive tests are up 68.5% year-on-year in the latest data. In Canterbury, cocaine detections have risen 375.8% year-on-year. Cannabis is still the most detected substance at 64% of positive tests, but the composition is shifting toward harder, more acutely impairing drugs.
TDDA chief executive Glenn Dobson told RNZ Morning Report the trend was “really entrenched now, with positive cocaine tests up for the last several quarters”. He told Mike Hosking on Newstalk ZB that “the significant increase in the South Island shows the supply is potentially fluid, suppliers moving around the country more than they have in the past”.
This is not a testing artefact
The workplace figures line up with independent evidence. NZ Police’s National Drugs in Wastewater Programme, covering roughly 80% of the population, found methamphetamine use averaging 36.6 kg per week in Q1 2026, 15% above the four-quarter average, at an estimated weekly social harm cost of $38.4 million. Cocaine ran at 7.0 kg per week, 12% above average. When two independent datasets tell the same story, the trend is real.
Not an Auckland problem anymore
The regional data is the signal employers outside the main centres need to hear. Southland’s amphetamines at 44%, Canterbury’s cocaine surge, and TDDA’s Q1 2026 Imperans report showing Taranaki amphetamine-type substances up 386.9% year-on-year and Northland up 192.3% all point the same way. Dobson’s explanation, that suppliers are moving around the country more fluidly, has direct implications for agriculture, forestry, construction and transport operators who assumed urban drug trends stopped at the city limits.
Cocaine’s rise also breaks the blue-collar stereotype. Dobson noted that drug testing is traditionally more common in blue-collar workplaces but is increasingly used in white-collar industries, a structural shift that changes who employers should be thinking about.
The opioid story nobody is reporting
Buried beneath the cocaine headlines is the substance Dobson has flagged as the deeper concern. TDDA’s Q1 2026 Imperans report showed opioid detections up 34.5% year-on-year, from 14.3% to 19.2% of positive tests. In Otago, 41.8% of workers who tested positive had opioids detected, a striking regional concentration. New Zealand has largely dodged the opioid epidemic seen overseas. Any sustained rise in workplace detection is worth watching closely.
Where the liability sits
This is where the story lands for business owners. Dobson told both RNZ and the ODT that drug use within work time is both a safety and a productivity issue, affecting decision-making, cognitive skills and reaction times.
Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, employers carry a primary duty of care to manage foreseeable hazards. With multiple consecutive quarters of published data now documenting elevated Class A drug use across the workforce, the defence that impairment was unforeseeable gets weaker every quarter. An employer with no drug and alcohol policy, or one that hasn’t been reviewed in years, is running behind a risk curve the data now defines precisely. In construction, transport and manufacturing, impairment can be the difference between a routine shift and a fatal incident.
The one piece of good news
It is not uniformly grim. The overall positive drug screen rate fell from 4.0% in Q4 2025 to 3.0% in Q1 2026, and RNZ reported a national decline in detection rates across all drugs tested. Testing itself appears to be having a deterrent effect. The practical takeaway is straightforward. Update your drug and alcohol policy to explicitly address opioids and amphetamines, train managers to recognise impairment, and run regular and random testing. The businesses that treat this as a live safety obligation rather than a social headline are the ones that will stay on the right side of both the law and the loss column.
Sources
- NZ follows global trend with cocaine use continuing to rise (Newstalk ZB / Mike Hosking Breakfast) (2026-07-16)
- Workplace testing shows cocaine ‘entrenched’ in NZ drug scene (RNZ) (2026-07-16)
- Opioids, cannabis still most detected drugs (Otago Daily Times) (2026-07-16)
- New Zealand Imperans Q1 2026 Report, State of Workplace Drug Use from TDDA (2026-04-21)
- National Drugs in Wastewater Programme – Quarter 1, 2026 (NZ Police) (2026-06)