P for panic stations

A drug once regularly doled out for weight loss is now a terror of the modern age but crackdowns so far have failed. Is it time for a different approach?

- BENEDICT COLLINS

As a journalist, I've always been interested in covering stories on drugs, from the black-market supply of substances that our politicians outlaw to the law enforcement that targets people who use drugs regardless. In 2016, I began investigating the meth-testing industry, which had ballooned in New Zealand in response to fears that methamphetamine - "P" - manufacturing labs had contaminated people's homes. Terrified homeowners were forking out tens of thousands of dollars on meth testing and expensive cleans-ups. Those who carried out the testing issued dire warnings about the sheer scale and health ramifications of contamination, boosting their businesses in the process.

The government, meanwhile, began evicting hundreds of people from their state homes if meth was detected, even though there was often not a shred of proof that those people had ever used the drug, let alone manufactured it. It didn't take long to realise that people were being evicted for just a few millionths of a gram of P on a wall, and in most cases, there had never been a meth lab in those homes.

And so began several years of reporting on an industry which eventually came crashing down and showed that we had been caught up in a hysterical moral panic. It was this work that sparked the idea for a wider look at this country's history with the drug P. My book Mad on Meth was born.

Over the past 20-odd years, successive governments have pulled every lever they had to try to keep methamphetamine at bay. To combat the growing crime and addiction associated with P, we have significantly increased the penalties for possessing and trading, we've busted several thousand domestic meth labs and we've locked up umpteen meth cooks, importers, sellers and users.