Australians prefer harmful drug use to be tackled using education and treatment instead of law enforcement to a greater degree than they did three years ago, the latest results from the National Drug Strategy Household Survey show.

In 2009–10 the Drug Policy Modelling Program estimated that of the Australian government’s $1.7bn illicit drugs budget, 64% was spent on law enforcement, 22% on treatment, 9.7% on prevention, and 2.2% on harm reduction.

But the survey results released on Thursday show that voters would allocate the budget differently. People were asked how they would split a hypothetical $100 between education, treatment and law enforcement to reduce the harm of alcohol, tobacco and illicit drugs.

Depending on the drug type, they thought that a greater proportion of funds should be allocated to education or treatment in 2016 – making up at least 64% and up to 77% of total dollars.

Associate Prof David Caldicott from the Australian National University in Canberra researches the harms of illicit drugs and said government budgets were “grossly skewed toward to law enforcement with absolutely no evidence of a return on that investment in terms of it doing anything to reduce deaths”.

He pointed towards Australian Bureau of Statistics data released on Wednesday that found Australia had recorded the highest number of drug-induced deaths since the late 1990s, with a high proportion linked with prescriptions drugs commonly used to treat pain and anxiety.

“What you’ve got is a situation where the number of drug deaths in Australia is 10 times higher than it is in Portugal,” Caldicott said.

“And this is the case because Portugal have reallocated money from law enforcement to health and, lo and behold, people have stopped dying. This is widely known but it doesn’t seem to be leading to policy changing in Australia.”

The National Drug Strategy Household Survey was conducted from 18 June to 29 November 2016 by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. More than 23,700 Australians were asked about their use of and attitudes towards drugs and alcohol. The survey was last carried out in 2013. The latest report expands on findings released in July.

In it, about one in 20 Australians reported misusing pharmaceuticals. Of the recent painkiller users, 75% reported misusing an over-the-counter codeine product in the past 12 months. In December the Therapeutic Goods Administration made a decision to make all medicines containing codeine prescription-only medicines. But this change will not come into effect until February 2018, so at the time the drugs survey was conducted, codeine products such as Nurofen Plus were available on request from behind a counter at pharmacies.

However, Caldicott does not believe abuse of painkillers and related deaths will reduce until medical cannabis is made more widely available in Australia. At present medicinal cannabis can only be accessed in limited circumstances, usually by those suffering a terminal illness.

“We have evidence from countries like the US that in states where medicinal marijuana is more accessible there has been a crash in opiate-related deaths,” he said.

The survey found a 12% jump in support for the use of cannabis in clinical trials to treat medical conditions since 2013, with support now at 87%.

“We also found that 85% of people now support legislative change to permit its use for medical purposes in general, up from 69% in 2013,” Australian Institute of Health and Welfare spokesperson Matthew James said.

The report also found that while smoking rates have been on a long-term downward trend since 1991, the daily smoking rate had not significantly declined between 2013 and 2016. In 2016 smoking rates were at 12.2% compared to 12.8% three years earlier. About one in eight Australians had used at least one illegal substance in the past 12 months, the survey found.

The president of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation, Dr Alex Wodak, said it was important to remember than alcohol and smoking, both legal drugs, accounted for most of Australia’s drug-related harm.

“This survey focuses on consumption but not the harm caused by that,” he said.

“The stagnation in smoking decline could be due to Australia’s hostility towards e-cigarettes, despite tobacco harm-reduction being part of our national drug strategy.” Two-thirds of respondents to the supported restricting e-cigarette use in public places and limiting where the products could be advertised. People also responded that the rising cost of cigarettes was the biggest motivator for quitting.

Mental illnesses were also becoming more common among methamphetamine, amphetamine and ecstasy users, with 27% of those who reported using an illicit drug in the previous 12 months saying they had been diagnosed with a mental illness.

“In 2016 42% of meth/amphetamine users had a mental illness, up from 29% in 2013, while the rate of mental illness among ecstasy users also rose from 18% to 27%,” James said.

“People who were unemployed were about three times as likely to have recently used meth/amphetamines as employed people … employed people were more likely to use cocaine than those who were unemployed.”