Cleaning up other people’s meth

Iwas just making conversation, really. The barman was taking his time, so I turned to the cheerfullooking geezer on my right and said gidday.

Names were exchanged, the weather commented on. And this being New Zealand, the next question was always going to involve sport, real estate or work. ‘‘So what,’’ I asked as I lifted my pint, ‘‘do you do for a crust?’’. He was a cleaner. Nothing unusual in that. The world’s a dirty place.

But he was a cleaner of meth houses. Now, this was interesting.

The latest in a long line of folk devils breathing down the necks of the nervous middle classes is surely methamphetamine. There is, we are told, a ‘‘meth epidemic’’.

Everybody is at it, hanging off the end of little glass pipes, morning, noon and night. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker: P-heads, one and all.

But was this true? Or was the media overstating the New Zealand meth menace as cynical click-bait?

‘‘Nah, mate,’’ said my drinking companion. ’’It’s pretty widespread, alright. There aren’t many meth cooks around, and they’re mainly working with the gangs. But a lot of people are smoking the stuff.’’

Nelson, he reckoned, was no worse than any other provincial town. Most of his South Island clean-up work was in Christchurch and the West Coast.

He told grim tales of condensation making toxins from meth smoke crystallise onto walls, with children and old people getting contact rashes and respiratory problems.

‘‘Kids rub their hands along the wall and it gets on their tucker. But range hoods and microwaves often have the highest contamination readings, because people sometimes make a sort of meth called shake’n’bake.’’

There was good money in cleaning this crap up, he said. Unlike journalism, I replied, hoping he might pay for my next beer.

In the early days, ‘‘a lot of cowboys’’ had charged insurance companies around 70 grand to do the job, he told me, but the technology was better now, and insurance companies less gullible. His crew sprayed several layers of foam on all interior surfaces to leach out the chemicals. Rinse and repeat. Their charge was between $5000 and $25,000.

I almost choked on my IPA. That’s still a heap of money, and until national testing standards were recently instigated, a lot of homes must have been expensively ‘‘remediated’’ when they didn’t need to be.

While meth manufacture can seriously damage a house, the National Poisons Centre reckons recreational meth smoking causes no more damage to household interiors than smoking cigarettes.

And there’s strong evidence to suggest a damp, mouldy, poorly insulated house poses a far greater danger to residents than a house where someone had smoked P.

But what would I know? I was just dropping in for a Friday arvo beer. My new companion had no shortage of work, with two houses to clean the following week alone.

‘‘It’s hard graft,’’ he said. ‘‘You might be up in a roof cavity for days, pulling out insulation in a face mask and HazMat overalls. It’s hot as a furnace up there!’’

As if to stave off the memory, he took a long pull on his nice cold pint.

‘‘But, you know… I can’t complain. It’s not the easiest job in the world, but somebody’s gotta do it.’’

His crew sprayed several layers of foam on all interior surfaces to leach out the chemicals. Rinse and repeat. Their charge was between $5000 and $25,000.