Meth industry’s smoke and mirrors

Here’s a wee challenge for you. While you’re sipping that first morning coffee or flicking through the news, google ‘meth testing in New Zealand’.

What you’ll discover is that a substantial industry now exists for testing methamphetamine contamination in buildings and homes around the country.

For those unlucky enough to fall on the wrong side of the P ledger, there also exists a bunch of businesses to clean up the meth mess.

At great expense.

And anyone going through the process of buying a home might have come across new requirements for meth testing as part of the process.

It wasn’t too many years ago that former cop Mike Sabin entered the national consciousness as a self-styled drug educator, to tell a wide-eyed nation that P was not just the 16th letter in the alphabet.

Since that time, the downward spiral of so many meth users appears to have contrasted with the rise in profile of a formerly little-known police officer towards a short-term career in politics.

And the creation of a substantial industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Just one of its customers, Housing New Zealand, has spent close to $73 million over the past two years testing and cleaning houses supposedly contaminated by the drug.

As has been reported, that money could have built more than 100 homes for the many people around the country who need them. It’s clear that meth is a terrible drug that devastates lives, but it’s worth asking if the fear generated around it is justified or as nebulous as the vapour that betrays its use.

Some scientists believe that the new government standard for meth contamination, at 1.5 micrograms per 100cm, is ridiculously low, meaning simply smoking the drug will trigger the eviction of tenants, thousands of dollars spent in clean-up and the possible loss of a key asset.

Other scientists see a sensible reaction to safeguard the value of both property and lives.

That suggests that the government, the insurance industry and many others are responding to a new, perceived threat by taking a line supported more by fear and risk-aversion than rational thought and a valid response.

In the process they risk creating new unintended victims while letting the real perpetrators slip back into the fog.

Fear, rather than rationality, seems to be the main force fuelling the meth industry in this country.

And we are all paying a hefty price.

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