KEY POINTS:
"Life or meth?" Mike Sabin asks. "You can't have both."
The straight-talking former policeman has an unenviable job trying to get through to teenagers on New Zealand's most insidious drug - methamphetamine, or P.
But he knows the right buttons to push as he addresses the pupils of Christchurch's Riccarton High School.
"If you remember nothing else ... this drug will make you heinous, butt ugly in no time," he says, graphic before-and-after pictures of methamphetamine users flashing up on a screen beside him.
The drug has left the users emaciated and with severe scarring as delusions of insects crawling under their skin makes them "pick and pull at their skin to get to the bugs".
The presentation by Mr Sabin's MethCon Group is being funded by a charitable trust to go to schools in Wellington and the upper South Island.
But he thinks it should be a Government priority that no New Zealand teenager leaves school without having learned what methamphetamine is and the havoc it can wreak.
Riccarton High students spoken to after watching the presentation said it left a strong impression on them.
"We had a marijuana talk and then a cocaine talk, and you sort of phase out, but this one kept you hooked," said Anton Harlow, 17.
Angela Williamson, 17, said: "It was really scary. We have never really seen pictures like that before."
Mr Sabin, who insists he is no "party pooper", saw the worst impacts of methamphetamine in his 12 years tackling it in the police.
Methamphetamine was not there when he was young and "everything rests in your hands", he tells students.
