This financial year, Customs and Federal Police have seized a record 13 tonnes of illegal drugs, concealed in shipments that included 300kg of cocaine in a yacht and 271kg in lawnmowers.
Traffickers also tried to smuggle heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and pseudoephedrine - used to produce meth - in bath salts, beer and raisins.
Home Affairs and Justice Minister Jason Clare said the record 5400 interceptions this year had been made using drug crime intelligence to target parcels and containers.
About 96 per cent of the shipments had been identified before they arrived in Australia.
"Intelligence is the key to seizing drugs and arresting the criminals who try to import them," Clare said.
The Australian Institute of Criminology also reported yesterday that the national drug use monitoring programme, conducted among alleged offenders throughout the country, had for the first time linked crime with specific drugs.
The study found 52 per cent of the more than 1600 offenders interviewed in the programme admitted drugs or alcohol were a factor in their crimes.
Heroin users were by far the most likely to attribute offending to drug use - 54 per cent of users said the drug played a role in their crime, and almost half said they committed crimes to pay for their habit.
The study also reported that 40 per cent of its subjects who attributed their offending to drugs or alcohol said they were intoxicated at the time.
Forty-two per cent of assaults and 34 per cent of all crimes reported in the study were alcohol-related.
This confirmed similar research by the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation, which estimated that between 42 and 44 per cent of assaults recorded by police in Western Australia and New South Wales were alcohol related.
The drug use monitoring programme was also used to compare drug abuse between Australia and the United States.
The Australian figures were based on findings in Bankstown, Parramatta and Kings Cross in Sydney, Brisbane and Southport in Queensland, Darwin, East Perth, and Adelaide.
American figures were taken from a similar US programme covering Chicago in Illinois, Minneapolis in Minnesota, Portland in Oregon, Sacramento, California, Indianapolis, Indiana, New York City, Washington DC, Atlanta, Georgia, and Denver, Colorado.
The comparison showed similar rates of cannabis use among people who had been arrested, but a higher rate overall of opiate use among Australian offenders - 11 per cent against 8 per cent.
Although the 18 per cent recorded in Chicago was the highest for both countries, Australia registered three of the top five sites in all 15 Australian and US locations.
Opiate use was highest in Sydney, followed by southeast Queensland, East Perth and Adelaide.
Australians were also more likely to have used methamphetamines, again with three of the top five sites.
But Americans were far greater users of cocaine - the drug was found in 25 per cent of offenders, compared with only 2 per cent in Australia.
The institute said the different patterns of drug use could be explained by sources of supply.
Most of the world's cocaine was produced in South America, so the US was among the drug's largest markets - 15 per cent of the world's annual cocaine busts, against the less than 1 per cent reported for Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands.
But the bulk of America's methamphetamine came from Mexico, while Australia produced most of its own.
