KEY POINTS:
Former drug squad detective Mike Sabin says he would still be policing if he thought he was getting on top of the P problem.
Instead, Mr Sabin, the managing director of methamphetamine education organisation Methcon Group, has spent the past year overseeing the making of a hard-hitting video he hopes will bring home the horrific realities of a P addiction.
"I would still be in the police locking people up if I thought that was ever likely to resolve the problem," he said.
"It has now become the world's worst drug problem by volume, and in terms of the rapid progression to addiction, the world's never seen another drug like this."
Mr Sabin has just returned from a visit to the United States where methamphetamine has been around for decades. He said veteran detectives there told him P was undoubtedly the biggest scourge on society when it came to drugs.
His own observations here also suggest P is unrivalled in terms of general destruction to communities and individuals.
After meeting key people in the US to discuss the topic, Mr Sabin said, he believed lessons had been learned there and he was able to get a feel for what seemed to work and what didn't when it came to tackling the problem.
He has been preparing a research paper over the past few months on the best ways to do so and will present it to appropriate authorities here.
"It's really a case of looking at demand and supply side intervention," he said. Apart from dissuasion, solutions included putting the squeeze on suppliers of core ingredients for P and making ingredients more difficult to obtain.
"Preventing uptake, getting to people that are using quickly and treating their addiction ... that we give the same level of attention to policing drugs as we do to policing traffic," Mr Sabin said.
"There has been a huge downturn in the number of detectives around New Zealand that are specifically working drugs."
Mr Sabin said research on early intervention and treatment initiatives in the United States showed there were substantial long-term savings in terms of incarceration, crime and other social costs.
New Zealand already had a sub-culture of stimulant and alcohol abuse out of proportion with many other countries, "and we're heading down a dead-end street when you add meth into that mix". The DVD gives first-hand accounts of the experience of addicts and aims to educate people about exactly what they are doing to themselves if they become users.
As well as pseudoephedrine, acids, caustics and solvents were also used as main ingredients in P.
"So the typical chemicals will be concrete cleaner and battery acid, solvents like nail polish remover, engine additives, strong organic solvents that are used in paint thinning," Mr Sabin said.
"There is also red phosphorous, which is explosive and used in fireworks. It decays people from the inside out.
"Four months of methamphetamine addiction is likened to decades of alcohol abuse in terms of organic tissue in the brain decaying and dying."
Mr Sabin said he knew of users under the age of 10 and others over 65.
While pushing his message at schools, he heard of primary school pupils being offered P while waiting at a bus stop.
Mr Sabin said a lot of parents were ignorant of P because it was not around when they were young.
"But in the schools we've been to, maybe a third to half the hands will go up when you say to the students, 'Do you know someone who is using this drug or has tried it before?"'
Efforts to try to educate people about methamphetamine use have been few and far between for what is a relatively new problem in New Zealand, but it's a fulltime focus for the Methcon Group.
"The idea of the DVD is to bring home to New Zealand families the must-knows about this drug.
"We're all better off for knowing that."
Mr Sabin said the awareness campaign was targeting parents in workplaces just as much as students in schools.
"The fundamental message is the way in which addiction occurs and the inevitability with which use of the drug will lead to that."
Information and a preview of the DVD can be viewed at the website www.methcon.co.nz.
- NZPA
