There is a question many people in Fiji have quietly asked while driving through town late at night: why are so many children and teenagers still outside, unsupervised, wandering through streets, bus stands, shopfronts, and dark corners where anything can happen?
It is easy to look away. It is also easy to blame the young person. But the harder question is the one Fiji needs to sit with: who is responsible for noticing when a child is drifting beyond the reach of home, school, church, sport, and community?
Fiji’s drug crisis is often discussed as a police issue. It is that, of course. Drugs destroy families, feed crime, and place pressure on already stretched law enforcement. But if we only speak about raids, arrests, and seizures, we miss the deeper emergency. Fiji’s drug crisis is becoming a youth-development crisis.
The warning signs are no longer hidden. The Fiji Government’s Counter Narcotics Strategy 2023-2028 identifies the rise of synthetic drugs, particularly methamphetamine, as a threat to public health and societal safety. It also recognises Fiji’s vulnerability as both a domestic market and a transshipment point for transnational organised crime networks.
That means this is not only about individual bad choices. It is about a country being placed under pressure by organised crime, poverty, weak support systems, family breakdown, stigma, and a lack of visible treatment pathways.
The numbers are sobering. According to a Fiji Times report citing a WHO rapid assessment, registered drug-related cases increased from 479 in 2015 to 2,035 in 2024, a four-fold rise. Methamphetamine cases reportedly surged more than 36-fold over the same period and accounted for 18 percent of registered drug cases in 2024.
The same report notes that offenders are predominantly young and male, with about two-thirds aged 18 to 35 and 95 percent male. That age group should be building careers, families, trades, farms, businesses, teams, and communities. Instead, too many are being pulled into a cycle that can start with curiosity, peer pressure, unemployment, trauma, or the search for quick money.
Police figures reported by FijiVillage recorded 8,076 marijuana cases and 861 methamphetamine cases from 2022 to October 2025. In another report, authorities said more than 19 tonnes of marijuana and 4.1 kilograms of methamphetamine were seized between March and September 2025, while the Minister for Policing warned that Fiji’s drug problem was overwhelmingly affecting young people, with many arrests involving people aged 18 to 35.
Behind each number is a story that rarely appears in court statistics: a family that noticed too late, a school that lost contact, a friend group that normalised risk, a community that had no safe place to send someone for help, a young person too ashamed to ask for treatment.
The crisis has also become a public health emergency. Fiji declared a national HIV outbreak in January 2025 after 1,093 new HIV cases were recorded between January and September 2024. The Fiji Government reported that injecting drug use was the primary mode of transmission for 223 of those cases.
The World Health Organization later reported that Fiji recorded 1,583 new HIV cases in 2024 and 1,226 cases in the first six months of 2025 alone. Among people starting HIV treatment in 2024, 48 percent were people who inject drugs. WHO also highlighted urgent gaps in access to sterile injecting equipment, HIV prevention, and stigma-free care.
This matters because addiction is not solved by shame. Shame may push a young person further into hiding. Fear may keep them away from clinics. Public judgment may stop families from asking for help until the situation becomes unbearable.
Fiji needs accountability, but accountability cannot only mean punishment. Parents need to know where their children are at night. Schools and communities need stronger early-warning systems. Churches, youth groups, sports clubs, village leaders, and civil society organisations need to be part of prevention. Police must continue targeting supply networks. But the country also needs treatment, counselling, rehabilitation, harm reduction, and aftercare that people can actually find and trust.
The Counter Narcotics Strategy already points in this direction by naming demand reduction, supply reduction, harm reduction, rehabilitation, school awareness, community programmes, and legal reform as part of the national response. The challenge now is visibility and delivery. A young person in trouble should not have to guess where help exists. A parent should not have to wait until a court case, an overdose, an HIV diagnosis, or a police raid before support becomes visible.
We also need to talk honestly about supervision. If children are out late at night without anyone checking on them, that is not only a private family issue. It becomes a community issue. The streets will raise children if homes, schools, and communities do not. And the streets can be very persuasive when they offer belonging, money, escape, or protection.
This does not mean every child outside at night is involved in drugs. It does mean that unsupervised young people are more exposed to risk. They are easier to recruit, easier to pressure, easier to exploit, and easier to forget.
The drug crisis in Fiji is not just about substances. It is about what happens when young people feel unseen. It is about what happens when help is harder to find than drugs. It is about what happens when stigma becomes stronger than compassion.
If Fiji wants to protect its future, the response must begin before the arrest, before the infection, before the addiction, before the child disappears into a crowd that no one is watching closely enough.
The child on the street at midnight is not someone else’s problem. That child is Fiji’s future asking where we were when it needed us.
Sources
- Fiji Government: Counter Narcotics Strategy 2023-2028
- The Fiji Times: Drug crime quadruples – WHO
- FijiVillage: Marijuana and meth cases recorded from 2022 to October 2025
- FijiVillage: Fiji records marijuana and meth seizures in six months
- Fiji Government: Health Ministry launches response plans amid rising HIV cases
- WHO Fiji: Rapid assessment on injecting drug use, HIV, and stigma-free care
- UNODC: Transnational Organized Crime in the Pacific, 2024
Disclaimer: This is an opinion-related article. It does not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation, institution, or individual, and should be read as a self-opinionated commentary informed by publicly available sources.
