Queensland's criminal drug manufacturers are being run out of business as cheaper, higher quality narcotics flood through the state's borders, police say.
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On Friday, they hailed a decline in meth lab busts in the state that was once infamous for having the highest rate of the dangerous scourge in the country but pointed to a concerning explanation.
Local manufacturers simply couldn't compete with the cheap, pure drugs from overseas.
"We've seen a major downturn of that in Queensland. We used to be the leader in Australia in the detection and charging of people in that kind of activity and there's reasons for that," Police Commissioner Ian Stewart said.
"We've seen a major downturn. We believe on the evidence available to us that it's because there's so much in drugs being flooded into this country that it is not profitable enough to make your own.
"You simply buy it through the criminal networks and that's where our work on organised crime is so important."
Actual charges for producing and trafficking drugs stagnated from 2014/15 to 2015/16 but charges for possession and and selling jumped nine and six per cent respectively.
The warning from Queensland police came on the heels of similar information from the Crime and Corruption Commission earlier this year.
"The demand for illicit drugs and the huge profits to be made from supplying them in Queensland, particularly in regional areas, has made Queensland an attractive market for interstate and internationally based crime groups to expand their criminal activities," the CCC found in its illicit drug markets report from earlier this year.
It found organised crime groups, particularly from interstate, were increasingly targeting regional areas such as Toowoomba, Mackay, Rockhampton, Gladstone, Townsville and Cairns.
Queensland was the clandestine drug lab capital of the country in 2013-14, hosting almost half of the nation's criminal drug laboratories, with about a third of them the year after, Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission.
The CCC identified a sharp swing away from domestic production toward "importations of high-purity final product" from overseas in its latest report.
"Methylamphetamine continues to be rated as the illicit drug market that poses the highest level of risk (Very High) — due to the high level of organised crime involvement and the significant harms the drug causes to individual users and the community," it said.
"The main change in this market since 2012 has been a shift in the form of methylamphetamine, with increased supply and demand for high purity crystal ("ice") rather than powder, and an increase in imported final product compared with locally produced methylamphetamine."
