Drug trade: The hard sell - making drugs match market

If all the varieties of illicit drugs in the world were lined up for sale, they would easily outnumber the wines in your local supermarket. When it comes to choice, drug users have never had it so good.

New substances are rolling off secret production lines at an exponential rate.

American chemist Alexander Shulgin says Western scientists knew of only two psychedelic compounds 100 years ago: cannabis and mescaline. By the 1950s, the number was 20. Now there are well over 200, he told the New York Times this year.

Shulgin should know. Devotees call him Dr Ecstasy in honour of the drug MDMA he introduced to the world in the 1970s.

Throughout a remarkable career which has made him an idol to the dance culture and a villain to the law, the 79-year-old Californian figures that he has created about 200 psychedelic substances, assiduously cataloguing their chemical make-ups and effects.

Each of the drugs Shulgin has produced, he has tested on himself and his wife, Ann, a writer and researcher who was born in New Zealand.

His aim has been to discover tools to explore the human mind in psychotherapy. He has done nothing illegal because the substances he concocted did not exist until he produced them.

Inevitably, his compounds have been snapped up and exploited by drug dealers and manufacturers. His writings have become best-selling cookbooks in clandestine laboratories around the world.

Drugs are like any other commodity. They are subject to many of the same processes as the stock that lines the shelves at The Warehouse, Briscoes or on High St: product development, marketing strategies, pricing controls, the battle for market share. But for these products the anti-market forces are the law.

So when a new product is developed, those in the business look to exploit it. Why wouldn't they, when there is an insatiable market?

Shulgin's creations cross the New Zealand border regularly as others profit from his life's work. Examples make their way to the Institute of Environmental Science and Research (ESR) where a team specialises in analysing the array of drugs on the New Zealand market and identifying any new ones.

About 1500 cases a year arrive at the ESR's Auckland centre, two hospital block-like buildings. Substances seized by the police or Customs and sent for analysis can range from shipments several kilograms heavy to deals in small snaplock bags.

Each is treated in the same, careful manner: removed from the bag, described and weighed. Then the substance undergoes several tests designed to chemically identify it.

The most common tool is called GCMS, a two-step process which combines a separation technique and fragmentation of the molecule to produce a characteristic pattern for a specific drug.

The testing process is scientific and clinical but the results can be professionally exciting for those involved. One senior scientist described how for more than 25 years she had watched new products and combinations emerge.

Because of the nature of her work, and the nature of the people involved in the drug business, she was spoken to on condition of anonymity. Her role means she is well-placed to spot the early trends.

She has tracked the methamphetamine explosion and regularly handles new designer drugs. Often they are similar to known drugs, with small changes to the molecular structure.

MDMA or Ecstasy, for example, has a new sister substance called MBDB. A development of methamphetamine has seen the creation of a new substance called dimethylamphetamine.

In the past four months, ESR analysts have also detected a worrying combination of the popular party pills with illicit drugs. Party pill ingredients have been mixed with methamphetamine or MBDB. In one case, scientists found one batch of green pills contained nine substances ranging from MDMA to the party pill ingredient BZP to ketamine to caffeine.

The senior scientist we spoke to has observed how the drugs are constantly evolving, even if only in the packaging. The icons and designs on pills and tabs change with the times - strawberry patterns one day, Simpsons characters the next.

"It's a fashion industry, absolutely," she says. And like the fashion industry, it has attracted the attention of economists everywhere.

Economist Dr Chris Wilkins has made the drug market his main area of study since 1997. He completed his doctorate in economics at Waikato University in 1999, studying "violence in cannabis transactions", and now works at Massey University's Centre for Social and Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation.

Last year, he produced a major report on the socio-economic impacts of amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS: substances such as speed, methamphetamine and Ecstasy). For the first time, the scale and shape of the trade was exposed.

The report revealed that the high profit margins available to suppliers and dealers of methamphetamine and Ecstasy was a factor driving the spread of the drugs.

Motorcycle gangs and international smugglers were early market leaders, pursuing the big money on offer.

Dollars soon drew in others from the "general criminal fraternity" and from the wider community.

The report revealed how the marketing and sale of methamphetamine changed. Initially, when it hit the dance party and club scene, its availability was tightly controlled.

But as its coolness faded and dealers looked for fresh markets, it became more widely distributed. Call it the drug equivalent of the trickle-down effect.

Whereas once meth was highly priced - going for up to $1000g and sold in a tight circle - now it was on sale in tinny houses for $20 to $50 packages called "clicks".

Teenagers, people on low incomes and cannabis smokers had been identified as untapped markets and were being targeted. Users had become sellers too, earning an average of $24,000 a year from their sideline dealing.

The report revealed worrying potential market trends. ATS users tended to experiment with other drugs - high-potency hydroponic cannabis, LSD and magic mushroom, among others. These high levels of what researchers call "poly drug use" was an early warning sign of the potential for increased demand for other drugs such as cocaine and opioids. It could also fuel an intravenous drug problem.

Wilkins, a quietly spoken, bespectacled academic, has watched the methamphetamine epidemic in particular with close interest. His observations about what has spurred and sustained the demand are interesting; his view on how the cycle will be broken is controversial.

"If you ask young people now how cool P is, they'd probably say it's a little passe compared to 2000-2001," says Wilkins. But amphetamine sits with the social-economic times.

Today's lifestyles demand that people work hard and play hard. Amphetamines make this easier.

"It ties in in terms of the need to be productive at work and also socialise long hours."

Hence, when P hit the market, it appealed to those in the dance scene, professionals and parents alike. It spread to wide sections of the community, made criminals of people who had clean records, and made criminals spiral into even more extreme behaviour.

Traces of drugs were found in one in three trucks at a checkpoint at the Auckland port late last year, confirming police suspicions about high methamphetamine use among drivers believing it kept them alert.

It was popular in prisons, too - testing in jails discovered 62 cases of methamphetamine use among inmates last year.

Wilkins believes we are still experiencing the epidemic, although there is no longer the rapid growth in popularity that there was in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Another factor driving the cycle is New Zealand's naivete when it comes to hard-drug problems.

"There's not much of a social experience of cocaine and crack, which are very close to amphetamine, so there's not a societal understanding of addiction and psychosis in New Zealand," says Wilkins.

How will it end? Wilkins believes the biggest factor in diminishing drug epidemics comes from the demand side "when people decide pretty much this is an old drug and not cool".

"If you look at cocaine and crack in the US, they put a lot of money into supply reduction and enforcement and it really just had a dampening effect.

"Whereas in the late 80s, even though there was no change in enforcement, suddenly demand just dropped off."

Not that he is advocating any slackening off in drug enforcement. It's just that people should not have unrealistic expectations. "Drug enforcement is a key part of dealing with the problem but it's not going to be the cure-all."

 

 

How a potent drug got to NZ

Drugs responsible for a modern-day epidemic in New Zealand had their origins as a treatment for hyperactive children.

Amphetamine, said to have been synthesised by a German chemist, was available as a prescription-only pill in 1937 for Parkinson's disease, depression and narcolepsy, as well as wild children.

During World War II, Japanese war factory workers were fed methamphetamine pills to help them work harder. It triggered an epidemic of drug addiction.

Eventually, Governments around the world banned the use of amphetamines but the US had more epidemics in the 1960s and 1980s.

In New Zealand, the first clandestine laboratory manufacturing amphetamines was found in Napier in 1981, but it was apparently a one-off. Through the late 1980s, there were rumours about the Road Knights gang operating an illegal lab in the South Island, but it was not until 1996 that the first large-scale illicit operation of the modern era was uncovered (in Cheviot, Canterbury).

While US motorcycle gangs were producers of amphetamines throughout the 1980s, their New Zealand colleagues had been slower into the market. In the mid-1990s, two Americans with knowledge of how to cook methamphetamine came here and passed on the skills, taking advantage of the availability of ingredients, including ephedrine from across-the-counter cold pills.

In the meantime, there had been importations of ready-to-consume amphetamines. Satan's Slaves gang members importing LSD during the early 1990s were found with a small amount of meth, although they probably had it for personal use.

Hells Angel sergeant-at-arms Andrew Sisson was caught importing methamphetamine in 1993.

Six years later, he was convicted of conspiring to manufacture methamphetamine.

By 2000, New Zealand was in the grip of its own meth epidemic and it's not over.