Drug trade: P - first your friend, then it's the devil

John was a self-employed tradesman, a quiet bloke earning a living. Fiona had a comfortable middle-class upbringing and is the mother of two daughters. Dave was a wide boy, a bit of a bling king who wanted to be cool.

Now all three have lives in ruin, their downfall accelerated into chaos by addiction to P.

John became so enmeshed in the P world he graduated from being a user to being a maker - a P cook.

He is pretty sure he's going to jail. Again. Probably for eight and a half years. Having just finished 15 months in Paremoremo for possessing precursor drugs, he has pleaded guilty to manufacturing a class A drug and expects to be jailed upon sentencing in May.

In the meantime he's on bail at an Odyssey House rehab centre in central Auckland. A dad of five with one more on the way, Auckland born-and-raised John is his late 30s but looks older.

His speech is punctuated by long pauses. He's also wary: cooking brought him into contact with gang members. We've changed his name, and the others', but he's watching his tongue. In prison, he'll have difficulty avoiding gang members with grudges.

John and his partner were speed users who smoked P every now and then - "I felt confident on it" - after it appeared on New Zealand streets in the late 1990s. They both had jobs; he was a self-employed tradesman. Within a year he was doing the drug weekly: it made a quiet guy feel more confident.

Unlike many users, he still ate "three square meals a day".

But he was annoyed that the 20 to 50 packets of precursors he would buy and hand over to cooks never yielded the amounts promised. He decided to learn to cook himself and make some money too. The money came at a cost.

Police decontaminate P labs in full protective gear. John talks of how the "toxic as" combination of hydrochloric and sulphuric acid used in cooking can rust steel in a matter of months: "I never used to wear a mask." Or gloves. His feet would balloon as he stood for hours on end, cooking. He has a burn on his arm from a brush with a pipe full of chemicals. Able to make what he craved, John fell further into addiction.

The impact on his family was "massive ... people were invading and my partner was really pissed off ... and I couldn't say no [to them].

"I'm using that much, and getting death in one ear from my partner, which is understandable because she's had enough, and I'm saying to myself: I'll do one more reasonable [batch] and get out ... and one more reasonable one never happened."

He was caught and sent to jail, convicted of possessing precursors. Now he's facing jail again. His partner phones him, "crying on the phone, telling me how lonely she is, how my son misses out, and makes me promise that I'm not going to do that again".

Cooking? "It's a bit of a bad business. The whole industry is run by not very nice people, really."

Fiona first encountered P while working as an 18-year-old Auckland prostitute. A solo mum on the Domestic Purposes Benefit, she was already taking regular cocktails of other drugs - marijuana, speed, mushrooms, trips.

After a fellow worker offered her a puff P went to the top of Fiona's list. "I had always said that you shouldn't diss anything 'til you try it," she recalls. "Straight away it made my heart race, and I started to feel great about myself."

Ten or 15 drags later, she went home feeling euphoric, and raced around doing housework until 4am. A week later, on her 19th birthday, she bought her first "point" - a tenth of a gram in a tiny snaplock bag about the size of a stamp - for $100. "

That was the beginning of a long slide to the point where she "lost everything" - her two pre-school children, who were taken by the authorities; her possessions; any desire to care about others; and her self-esteem.

The drug P - a high-purity methamphetamine which looks, in its smokeable form, like crystals - doesn't discriminate. "Everyone uses it," says Fiona, now 22, "from gay people to chemists, business people and lawyers - people you would not expect to be doing it."

To see Fiona in the street - long sandy hair, fair complexion, solidly-built - you'd think she was the girl-next-door: pleasant, articulate.

Not long after that first P, Fiona was working to fund her addiction. The pattern of her life became: Do a job. Ring the dealer. Buy - the more she bought, the cheaper it got. Then she'd smoke. Do a job. Ring the dealer. Buy. Start the cycle again.

It was a self-centred, suspicious, impulsive world but Fiona never worried about being caught. P made her invincible.

Last August she and her partner had a row and he told his family what was happening. They contacted authorities who took Fiona's daughter. She fled to a motel with her infant son, but was tracked down.

Fiona, who is pregnant again, expects that she will need a year at Odyssey before she contemplates life on the outside. One day at a time.

She's dumped the motto "Don't diss it 'til you've tried it. Today, Fiona says, her only mantra is "Never again".

Dave, 24, was an early adopter. From the age of 15 he was buying Valium from dealers, then progressed to a highly addictive opiate, morphine sulphate, as well as synthetic heroin.

He was a wide boy. A bit of a bling king. "I wanted to have a good things. I wanted to be in the staunch crowd, with all the cool guys."

Dave's heritage is Pacific Island and European. His parents separated when he was 8 and he moved around between various family members.

"I call my early life normal, pretty much. We were quite a poor family - no money. We had the basics but nothing more."

Some of the "hoods" he grew up with were "pretty drug-infested" but not his immediate family. They are, he says, battlers who worked hard, stayed in touch with their cultural heritage and made something of their lives.

He's not sure why he was different. Maybe it was "because I hung around with older people and one thing led to another".

While imprisoned for a jewellery heist in 1999, he had his first taste of P.

Within a month of leaving prison in 2000, "I really hit it". Crime was the only way to feed the habit. "You could call it obsession. Always on the hunt for more money, more P."

One "job" which netted Dave $35,000 was gone within a week. It took the suicide of a close childhood friend - a fellow P-using inmate - to shock Dave into change.

It was just before Christmas 2003. Dave was inside on his fourth lag, this time three and a half-years for aggravated robbery.

"We'd been laughing at him - everything he had said that day was out there - and we thought he'd just lost it.

Horrified and helpless, Dave witnessed the hanging through reflections on the walls.

"It took ages for the officers to come," he says, eyes falling to his hands. "By then it was too late."

It was a year before the Corrections Department would let Dave go to Odyssey. A chunky home detention radio transmitter is clamped around one ankle. It stays until at least May.

There is time to count the losses: his mate, the four-year-old son he never sees, the love of his family. Relations with his parents and siblings "are not good. I don't think they trust me."

P, he says, is "at first your friend, then it's the devil".