Drug firm bankrolls P education

A trust that teaches schoolchildren about the dangers of P will pay for the programme using money from a major manufacturer of pseudoephedrine-based cold and flu tablets.

Stellar Trust chairman Alistair Burry said the trust had thought long and hard before deciding to work with multinational pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline.

"Some people might think it was a bit strange but we considered it very carefully and ... talked to GSK at length. They are very keen to work with us and we see no reason why the relationship won't work."

GlaxoSmithKline owns the Coldrex brand of cold and flu tablets, some formulations of which contain pseudoephedrine, the raw ingredient for methamphetamine.

Its Chinese arm makes Contac NT, a cold medicine Mr Burry said was illegally hijacked and brought to New Zealand for the meth trade.

It is not manufactured or sold here.

Mr Burry said the money from GSK, the trust's first major corporate sponsor, would allow educators to visit up to 50 intermediate and high schools in the first year of its school drug education programme.

The programme had gone down well with students and the trust believed it was an effective way to reach people, he said.

He supported the Government's efforts to restrict access to pseudoephedrine products and said GSK was playing a part in that.

"They are as concerned as anybody is about the pseudoephedrine coming into New Zealand.

"They are manufacturing it quite legitimately and selling it quite legitimately but somewhere down the supply chain or the distribution chain somebody's hijacking it and it's being imported into New Zealand illegally."

Late last year Chinese authorities said they had seized 44 tonnes of ephedrine, enough to make 10 tonnes of methamphetamine, and that the main source of the pseudoephedrine was Contact NT, which was made in a single factory owned by GlaxoSmithKline.