Framing drug policy reform: Third-sector advocacy and the 2024 New South Wales Drug Summit

Drug policy remains a politically and socially contested domain, with third-sector voices often marginalised despite their central role in advocacy and service delivery. The 2024 New South Wales (NSW) Drug Summit provided a rare, government-convened deliberative forum for third-sector organisations to contribute to state drug policy debate. This study examined how third-sector organisations framed drug policy issues and proposed solutions in advocacy documents produced in the lead-up to the summit and assessed the extent to which these frames were reflected in the summit’s official outcome document, the Report on the 2024 NSW Drug Summit (the report). We conducted a qualitative document analysis of 33 publicly available third-sector advocacy documents, alongside the report. A deductive framing analysis was applied using Entman’s four-frame model (problem definition, causal attribution, moral evaluation, and treatment recommendations), supplemented by Benford and Snow’s collective action frames (diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational), to enable systematic comparison across documents. Advocacy documents predominantly framed drug-related harm as rooted in structural injustice, highlighting criminalisation, discriminatory policing, systemic underinvestment, and stigma. They attributed responsibility to specific laws and institutions and called for decriminalisation, expanded harm reduction, improved treatment access, and stronger peer-led services. Although the report acknowledged strong support for decriminalisation, it did not include it as a recommendation. Instead, the report framed harm primarily as the result of service fragmentation and access barriers and prioritised less contentious service-level reforms. The majority of third-sector organisations advanced cohesive, rights-based, and harm-reduction-oriented frames, including strong support for legal reform. In contrast, the report framed drug policy reform primarily through service-level and harm-reduction recommendations, while more politically contentious proposals—particularly decriminalisation and prison-based harm reduction—were less visible or absent. Our findings illustrate how frame-tracking can help clarify patterns of alignment and divergence between stakeholder advocacy and agenda-setting outputs in invited participatory forums.