OPINION: The world understandably boggled when police announced they’d found, bobbing in the sea, enough cocaine to keep New Zealanders snorting or faffing about heating spoons for 30 years.
The question is, how do they know? The census doesn’t require residents to state how much coke they get through a year. Police may extrapolate data from convictions, but it’s unlikely gangs’ inventory spreadsheets are of great actuarial reliability.
Perhaps there are appropriate questions tacked onto those polls and focus groups that plumb for people’s views on politics and toothpaste? “How much smack/crack/whacky baccy do you consume in a month? Please rate the following dealers out of 10 for customer-facingness and rank the following common ratios of baking soda to hydrochloride salt for palatability.”
But would survey respondents be any more honest than they are with their GP – “Just a small sherry at Christmas”– or their dentist – “Flossing? It’s practically my hobby!”
Given the nature of the drug, the cocaine-conversant would wildly overstate their usage. “Me, I need at least a couple of lines before breakfast or I can get quite snarky with the kids.” “Thirty years? That amount wouldn’t last three sessions of my book group!”
Then there’s the assertion that the coke shipment was big enough to last Australia only one year. There’s obviously a relative population calculation here. But given the ferocity of trans-Tasman rivalry, it can’t possibly be that simple. Australians would insist on being known as much more ambitious users of cocaine, or if we beat them pro rata, they’d claim to whoop our arses for abstemiousness. Either way, we’d know all about it.
Whereas New Zealand, as ever, would be that plucky little country that always punches above its weight, cocaine ingestion being no exception. But modest about it, too. “Yeah, nah, you gotta keep a bit in the cupboard in case people pop round, eh?”
The probable source of the 30-year estimate is that the authorities now test wastewater for residue to work out how much naughtiness our bodies harbour, from illicit drugs to pandemic viruses. Humans can swagger about such things or be furtive and in denial, but their kidneys always disclose the truth. Cocaine metabolites can be measured without having to know whether it “got up my nostril by a complete accident, Your Honour” or not.
But even here, doubts persist. As the North Island’s flooding, Wellington’s sewage, a national roster of closed beaches and the Three Waters hoo-ha have dinned into us, nothing is less dependable than New Zealand’s wastewater infrastructure. The metabolites from most of the cocaine New Zealanders take may go straight out to sea, never to be measured. The mega-shipment might be nowhere near 30 years’ worth.
Market economics further complicate assumptions, given the fact that this consignment might otherwise have hit the market. Unless the water analysts find cocaine use ceases overnight, we must assume there is still 30 years’ worth of cocaine out there or in train, and that this bumper shipment might simply have made the drug less expensive for being more plentiful. Its confiscation may now make cocaine dearer and scarcer, so consumption may go down, which may mean that it ends up being more like 60 years’ worth.
A further reproach will come from drug reform campaigners who wish to correct the fallacy that cocaine is a crime issue. It’s a health issue, so should more correctly be categorised as representing 30 or however many years of free entitlement to counselling, rehab and community empathy.
One safe assumption: this is not the approach that’ll be taken by whoever it was who despatched the drugs to whoever it is who won’t now wish to remunerate them.
