This week's court news has been about violence. A religious group leader and his wife jailed over a manslaughter and kidnapping at Gulf Harbour, as reported by RNZ. A coroner suppressing the identity of a dead Auckland man and the gang he was linked to. A 63-year-old facing historical sex charges. Serious, awful, front page stuff.

Meanwhile, in the remand statistics, the category climbing fastest isn't violence at all. It's drugs.

In 2025 the number of remand prisoners held on illicit drug offences hit 1,575, the highest in 27 years of records going back to 1998 (Source: Stats NZ, remand-prisoners). These are people in custody awaiting trial or sentencing. Not convicted. Held.

What makes that figure interesting isn't just its size. It's the shape of the line that got there. Drug remand peaked at 1,464 in 2020, then fell hard: down to 1,164 in 2021 and 1,035 in 2022. That's a drop of 29% in two years. For a moment it looked like the long climb had broken.

Then it reversed. 1,176 in 2023. 1,239 in 2024. And 1,575 in 2025, which is a rise of 52% from the 2022 low and 27% in the most recent year alone. The 2020 record, which stood for five years, was beaten by 111 people.

Zoom out and the trend is even harder to ignore. For the first 18 years of this dataset, drug remand never reached 1,000. It sat at 297 in 1998, drifted up through the 2000s, hovered in the 800s and 900s, then crossed 1,000 for the first time in 2016 and never went back. Today's number is more than five times the 1998 figure. New Zealand's population has grown since then, but nowhere near fivefold.

Here's the honest alternative reading, and it matters. A remand count is not an offending count. It measures how many people the system is holding before trial, which depends on charging decisions, bail settings and how long cases take to reach a courtroom. A jump like 2024 to 2025 can happen with no change in drug use at all if cases are taking longer or bail is being refused more often. The 2021 to 2022 dip lines up with the period when courts were badly disrupted, so part of that fall, and part of the rebound, is likely to be a backlog working through. Read this as a system-load number first and a drug-market number second.

Even with that caveat, the direction is clear. The count is now well above the pre-2020 level, not just back to it. And whatever combination of enforcement, court delay and bail policy is driving it, the outcome is the same: more people in a cell, before any finding of guilt, on drug charges than at any point since these records began.

My view: that's a strange place for the country to have arrived quietly. Drug policy debate in New Zealand has been framed for years around health versus criminalisation. The remand line is a fairly blunt answer to which one is winning in practice.

The most recent figures here are for 2025. Watch 2026. If the rebound was mostly backlog, it should flatten. If it doesn't, this is the new baseline.