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My new best friend Denis O'Reilly has written an article called "P: Let's give it a miss" which is in the latest edition of Werewolf. Its an excellent article and echoes a lot of what I have been saying all along - but we disagree in one area.
Denis thinks the answer to eliminating P use is to rely, through education, on Users deciding to 'self-prohibit'. I say that we cannot wait that long. All the experts say that P is the hardest drug to quit, and while we sit around waiting, too much damage is being done to the User, their family and the community.
Do we sit around and wait for boy racers to decide they'll stop that activity? Or burglars to decide they'll stop robbing people? Ummmm - Nooooo....We crush cars and throw burglars in jail.
But in the case of P, the Government is allowing the lunatics to run the asylum.
There are ways and means of 'persuading' P users to quit - the National Committee for Addiction Treatment tells us that coerced treatment is as effective as voluntary treatment - SO WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR???
A partnership between families, communities and community Police is surely at least worth trying, in order to steer P users into MANDATORY Treatment.
We know that at least one man has been murdered on my watch, because he wasn't able to quit P even though he wanted to....
I have extracted the following excerpts from Denis O'Reilly's article.
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Back when Werewolf was just beginning to howl (Werewolf 5, November 2009) I wrote an article praising, in general, the Government’s initiatives to counter the importation into, and manufacture, distribution and use of methamphetamine in New Zealand. Now I appreciate that the talk of the moment is about the most readily available and destructive recreational drug available, alcohol – it is assessed that we incur around $1 billion dollars worth of economic and social harm because of illicit drugs but about $3 billion of the same because of alcohol. However, at the risk of seeming like a one trick pony, I’d like to reflect on the methamphetamine issue again and review progress to date.
At this point the reader might say, as many others do, ‘what bullshit, this is just spin’. The prevailing majority view is that gangs (aka ‘Maori youth’ for most NZers) are synonymous with meth manufacture and distribution and rely on these activities to gather vast sums of wealth. Like most such social beliefs this view holds some truth – many of my brothers (and sisters) are players in the meth market. In the main, from my observation, this is to maintain the management of their personal addictions rather than accruing wealth. I may mix with a lower caste but I don’t see rich gangsters.
If there is a link between street crime such as burglaries and methamphetamine usage – and I think that this causality has been clearly established through Dr Chris Wilkins’ research for the NZ Police – then the way the NZ Asian community might best defend itself against this crime is by joining in on the broad movement to combat meth. Maori leaders like Pita Sharples and Tariana Turia and tribal elders are constantly challenged to step up in taking a stance against family violence and child abuse and such, but there is no such expectation made of Melissa Lee or Pansy Wong and the Asian community leadership when it comes to meth imports by their kith and kin.
We have to recognize that the methamphetamine market is dynamic and that there are strong push and pull factors at play. Based on research Dr Chris Wilkins concluded some time back that the NZ meth market had leveled out and was in the ‘maturity’ stage of the product lifecycle. We had moved from an epidemic to an endemic state.
Marketing theory holds that we would then normally expect a slow decline in demand unless there was ‘product re-launch’, a drop in price, a new feature, or a change in the production and distribution chain. I suspect that this has happened. My best intelligence is that what was once a bottle neck at the cooking stage (where the raw material precursors are processed to produce crystal meth) has been ‘syndicated’ by way of cooking schools where the craft of conversion is shared and manufacturing options are multiplied. Supply is strong and I anticipate that fresh research will show a new upward trend in usage. Because the street price has remained stable regardless, I anticipate that there is a new economy in play where a bigger share of the wealth is being gathered at the point of manufacture and the next tier of distribution. So everyone on the supply chain is a winner except the poor mug end-user.
And who might that be? Chris Wilkins’ work suggests the mean age of the typical user is 27 years of age. From my observation meth does not seem to be widely used by younger teenagers but the profile starts to build amongst an older segment of youth on the bridge of adulthood – say 18 years of age or so through to the fifty year olds (and beyond). Users seem to be mainly male but a Iarge number of especially younger women use as well.
In terms of ethnicity there seems to be a disproportionately high representation of Maori, younger and poorer than their Pakeha fellow users. Mike Williams, the Chief Executive of the Stellar Trust describes the New Zealand meth-user profile as looking like a weightlifting dumbbell. He says that there is a big ball of younger, less well off Maori on one end and an equal size ball of relatively wealthy older Pakeha users on the other end with a connecting bar of users running across New Zealand society. The Stellar Trust commissioned UMR to undertake research about awareness levels about and attitudes towards meth use in New Zealand and intend to release their findings early next month. Both Police and Ministry of Health are also engaged in meth use related research projects with Massey University so as time goes on we will get more clarity and less hype about the situation.
Regardless, as long as New Zealanders want to use methamphetamine and are prepared to pay an encouraging enough price then there will be suppliers. This is the immutable truth of the law of supply and demand. In the first five months of this year our border control agencies interdicted methamphetamine precursor products equal to the amount seized in the entire previous year. As a trend that’s bad enough, but when one takes into account that ‘world best practice standards’ for Customs’ interdiction is only 20%, and then multiply the quantities seized by a factor of four, the quantum that gets through is a cause for great concern.
At the moment our border issues are around unprocessed ContacNT which is easily and legally sourced, usually in China, and brought here as the key precursor for conversion into crystal meth. But the market is so dynamic that could change overnight. So, kia tupato on that front. And we have already seen that raising the penalty tariff, as we have done by reclassification of meth to a Class A prohibited substance carrying penalties of up to life imprisonment, hasn’t scared away importers, cooks or distributors. Equally, we have beefed up our ability to detect, track and interdict inbound shipments of meth or its related precursors, but the very volume of imported goods is such that unless we were to look inside every stuffed toy (or whatever means) we’re constrained there too.
So if we can’t stem supply, somehow we have to drive down demand. We will achieve that when people care enough to ‘self-prohibit’, that is, they choose not to use the stuff. At this point the consequences of the law become another aspect of the rationale to quit or not to use in the first place. Other drivers to quit are issues around health, work, money, and relationships. I think it is this latter aspect – the profound negative impact on interpersonal relationships – provides the point of differentiation between meth and most other recreational substances, both licit and illicit.
I’m just a layman but from what I understand meth usage amongst other things damages the synapses that enable the natural transfer of our brain chemicals, and, in particular, the natural uptake of and access to dopamine. In fact there is a meth-related illness called ‘anhedonia’, the inability to experience natural pleasure. To my mind this is why we see people who at one point may have been candidates for mum or dad of the year turn into callous unfeeling childbeaters; see, up until their addiction reared its head, otherwise loving longterm partners turn into feuding fried arseholes; and, witness previously perfectly well adjusted young adults morph into lying, thieving, scumbag, parasites. Meth kills the love button. Meth use and whanau ora are mutually exclusive. There!
So, since John Key put his hand up last year and said “I’ll take charge of this” what’s been done? In the main, the energy has primarily been directed at reducing supply. But, as I’ve indicated, demand reduction through ‘self prohibition’ is probably the only sustainable solution. This is best facilitated by treating the matter as being primarily one of health rather than one of crime and raising awareness about necessary steps towards treatment and recovery. In my experience it looks like most people – lets go for the good old 80/20 split – can get off meth by going cold turkey and relying on the support of family and friends. For those who need clinical treatment the various DHB’s generally have good services available and they are front ended by 0800 787797 Drug Helpline.
I've already declared my bias toward providing education and treatment as a lead response. There’s plenty of international evidence gathered over the past 50 years that the ‘war on drugs’ strategy is a loser. But on the other hand you better have a stick in your hand in some situations. The meth market is dynamic. A supplier with plenty of product can soon stimulate demand by distributing freebies to those who are vacillating, and building a new customer base amongst the curious. Whilst awareness about the deleterious effects of methamphetamine is high in New Zealand, the drug’s seductive characteristics, and the fact that new users can still initially function, leads to a honeymoon period of denial and enables a fresh wave of uptake.
Obviously an important aspect of the meth market is at the interface with the Police. I readily concede that I don’t know what I don’t know, but I was surprised that the two recently busted Asian distribution rings operating out of Skytower were allowed to operate for a long period under surveillance whilst they facilitated distribution of substantial amounts of meth – 3kg (300,000 points and a lot of fucked up Kiwi lives!) in a two month period. They laundered around $20M cash through the in-house pokies whilst authorities sat by. I appreciate that the cops may have been waiting to get a fuller understanding of the market and so forth, and there’s always going to be tension between the needs of the spooks and the wants of the prosecution team, but hell! that $20M of destruction and misery will have created a negative multiplier in terms of family break up, ill health and crime five times that sum.
There’s a similar story I hear at community level where there is common knowledge of meth market activity but the cops seem unwilling or unable to act. This may be because the Police consider that they need firmer or better evidence for a prosecution, whereas the community might well be satisfied if the market was just disrupted and the sellers moved on. In fact a more intelligent application of the principles of social marketing (wherein the ‘costs’ of selling meth were raised and the benefits reduced, and the ‘costs’ of quitting the market were reduced and the benefits of quitting were raised) would help us get a better mix at the interface of the criminal justice (supply reduction) and health sector (demand reduction).
Now try as it might Government will never be able to deliver integrated ‘whole of governmentt’ services from the top. It is not in the nature of the public service beast. Silo behavior is standard operating procedure and brands, turf and budgets are jealously guarded grails. Although John Key has instructed his departmental chiefs to work collaboratively on implementing his meth plan there is no will amongst them for the sort of dialogue that is necessary to resolve the Gordian knot of and intertwined problematics of low Maori economic and social participation, low educational achievement, and high rates of incarceration and drug abuse that are part of the solution to the meth problem. If the Wellington leadership won’t hold the necessary dialogue then there’s not a hope in hell that regional public sector managers will either.
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Scary, isn't it.
And that's why we have to step up to the plate and DEMAND that Government take the necessary steps to stop people from using P, in oder to protect the rest of us.
Sorry Denis, but self-prohibition will never work; we need to take control of the situation.
Denis and I will continue dialogue on this issue until he comes over to my way of thinking !!!
I think he and I would make quite a formidable team.
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