How has P affected you?
Tell us your story at the Herald newsdesk
The Herald is running a six-part series on the damage methamphetamine is doing to New Zealand. We examine how the drug gets in, its devastating effect on society and what we can do to fix the problem.
When Kristy Pearson was 14, she used to deliver P from the gang cooks to the dealers in her school uniform.
The gangs paid her each day with a "baggie" of P to feed her own addiction.
"Gang members had the mentality that no one would suspect a kid in a school uniform - and they didn't, ever," she said. "It makes me sick, looking back."
Kristy had first tried P only a few months earlier with friends at a party.
"It was like nothing I'd ever had before," she told the Herald. "It really blew my mind.
"My home life wasn't great at all and school wasn't going too well and this made me feel amazing, just on top of the world."
After trying the drug a second time, the Whangarei schoolgirl became hooked. She started skipping classes and worked for a month as a courier for the gangs who made the drug.
She was addicted for six months. Once she didn't sleep for 11 days.
"I was just out of my mind. Some parts I don't remember at all. Other parts I was really, really down with the comedown.
"My moment of realisation came when I saw one of my good friends ripping holes out of his arms with his teeth. Once I saw that, I looked around and all I saw was backstabbing and lies."
Kristy cut herself off from her family and her drug-using friends and went to stay with another group of friends.
It took three weeks to come clean the first time. Then she had a relapse and had to start again.
It took six months to break free of the drug and more than a year before its long-lasting psychological effects - depression, paranoia and anger - faded away.
Kristy says it was hard to feel good about anything for a long time because the drug destroyed her mind's ability to feel the "natural highs" of everyday life. "It makes you feel so hollow and lifeless. It just takes your soul."
Kristy, who turns 18 on Saturday, is now studying film and te reo Maori at the Southern Institute of Technology and wants to make documentaries.
She hopes telling her story will help the country wake up to the danger of methamphetamine. A whole generation has grown up with the idea that drug use is okay and that attitude needs to change, she says.
"People are fully aware that Kiwis are destroying themselves and their families with this drug but just refuse to do anything about it.
"The horror stories are true. It's terrible. It really is."
