Mushrooms among drugs intercepted by Customs

Customs New Zealand intercepted cocaine, cannabis and other drugs in Queenstown and Invercargill and stopped magic mushrooms, amphetamines and weapons bound for the south.

Seizures by type, quantity and class nationally and at Queenstown Airport, Dunedin Airport and port, Bluff port and Invercargill Airport between January 2009 and last December were provided to The Southland Times under the Official Information Act.

Last year in the south, Customs intercepted small amounts of cocaine and cannabis leaf at Queenstown Airport and in 2010 stopped 88g of psilocybin, magic mushrooms, at the resort.

At the Auckland Mail Centre, eagle-eyed officers intercepted drug shipments bound for the south, including magic mushrooms, the class B ‘‘date rape drug’’ GABA, cannabis seed, morphine, ephedrine and amphetamine.

Officers in Queenstown also seized nine tablets of pseudoephedrine-based products, the precursor for ‘‘P’’, 362 capsules of prescription medicines and controlled medicines.

At Bluff, Invercargill and Queenstown, officers also intercepted tobacco, passports, weapons and drug paraphernalia.

Drug Foundation of New Zealand executive director Ross Bell said the intercepts reflected drugtaking trends and the tendency among users to favour speed-type drugs.

Last year, three times the amount of amphetamine intercepted in 2009 was stopped by Customs, 27.4kg of the pure class A drug.

While intercepts of methamphetamine increased, that was probably a result of work by customs and police, he said.

‘‘Use is not going up, it’s reasonably flat, we’re seeing a plateau or decrease in use,’’ Mr Bell said.

‘‘Customs and police in the last five years have put more into it and have had more success.

‘‘They’re catching more at the border and police are catching more domestically.’’

Customs were busting some huge attempts to smuggle amphetamine and ‘‘P’’ precursors into New Zealand, and intelligence-sharing with countries such as China, where precursor chemicals were sourced, had improved, he said.

That prompted manufacturers of illegal drugs to smuggle the pure drug into the country instead of bulky precursors.

The Government introduced temporary drug class notices last year, used to ban synthetic cannabis-like products such as Kronic. ‘‘The market is fluid. ‘‘It’s not just New Zealand grappling with this, it’s a global thing. The clever people think up these new synthetics, and countries where laws were written in the 1970s discover the laws can’t cope,’’ Mr Bell said.

Customs also stopped 18kg of DMT, a powerful hallucinogen that occurs naturally in the Amazonian ayahuasca brew used by indigenous people for spiritual ceremonies, and 74kg of the class C khat, a plant with amphetaminelike effects used legally in parts of Africa.