Mad on Meth: How New Zealand got hooked on P

DEDICATION

For Claire, Skye and Maisie.

CONTENTS

Dedication

Introduction

1‘We Ride on Dynamite’

2Amphetamines: ‘A Boon to Mankind’

3‘Spawn of the Devil’

4Hungry for Business

5Crystal Meth Academy

6Moral Panic

7Dread Pirate Roberts

8White-collar ‘Chemical Man’

9‘Horrible, Horrible Man’

10Zombieland

11Straight Shooting

12The ‘Most Sneakiest’ Drug in the World

13‘Havoc, Harm and Upheaval’

14The Punisher

15Frankenstein: Breaking the Cycle

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Photo Section

About the Author

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

IT WAS NEWS I REALLY DIDN’T NEED TO HEAR. ‘HI BENEDICT, I would like to disclose that the meth samples taken came back positive, so you are fully aware.’

I’d been on a run of bad luck lately. It was early 2017 and my Lyall Bay flat in Wellington had just been burgled, leaving me sitting in my lounge sans TV and MacBook after work each night with only my transistor radio for entertainment. The following week I’d spent five minutes unsuccessfully trying to reverse my car out of the carport and onto the street on a pitch-black winter’s night, and while the engine revved and revved the car didn’t budge. Despite my lack of know-how, I popped the bonnet and got out to investigate, but before I even made it to the front of the car I had diagnosed the fault. My station-wagon was sitting on piles of small wooden blocks – its four mag wheels that had been there that morning were gone, meeting the same destiny as my laptop and TV.

The universe was sending me a message: it was time to get out of that flat. So when I came across a just-affordable two-and-a-half-bedroom ex-state house for sale in Cannons Creek, Porirua, on Trade Me, I was almighty keen to put in a bid.

It was freshly repainted, the kitchen and bathroom recently renovated, and the real estate agent let me know that a previously accepted offer on the home had only just fallen through. I contacted a builder to purchase the building report he’d done for the former prospective buyers and, when he asked if I also wanted to purchase the results of the meth testing he’d carried out on the home, I began to get a hunch as to why the former buyers had suddenly pulled out of the deal.

At the time I was working as a journalist at Radio New Zealand and had been investigating the meth-testing industry, airing the concerns of scientists and other experts who were convinced meth testing was nothing but a complete and utter scam. Nevertheless, there were also those who believed traces of methamphetamine posed an immense threat to people’s health – particularly in houses that were used to cook the drug. There was no disputing the fact that homes all over the country were being decontaminated at huge expense and in some cases even destroyed because of methamphetamine contamination. Everywhere you turned there were dire warnings about the dangers of meth contamination, from our politicians, officials, the press, and especially from those who were carrying out the testing.

I had a dilemma on my hands: pay for meth testing which I strongly suspected was a con, or pay up and learn whether I really was about to buy a meth-contaminated house.

After a stern warning from a fellow reporter to not dare pay for it, I emailed the builder declining the results of this meth test – to which he promptly sent the response warning me that the house had tested positive. But he also told me that his tests were so rudimentary he had no way of telling what level of meth there actually was in the home, nor whether those traces of this illegal drug were above or below the health authority’s controversial testing guidelines.

If I wanted to have a more accurate picture, the builder said, I’d have to pay for a specialist meth-testing company to come in and carry out more advanced, and much more expensive, testing at the property. That was something I simply couldn’t swallow.

There was no suggestion the property had ever been a meth lab so, with a little trepidation, I signed on the dotted line. Perhaps ironically, the public’s fear around meth testing had just helped me get a foot on the property ladder. Yet still I applied sugar soap liberally to the walls and surfaces after taking the keys, just to be sure.

I was one of a vast number of New Zealanders who got caught up in needless widespread testing for methamphetamine, consumed by a fear of what even the most minuscule trace could do – even to people who had nothing to do with the drug itself.

* * *

How did we end up here? A little over 20 years ago, armed with online and word-of-mouth recipes, hundreds of amateur Kiwi ‘chemists’ began trying their hand at cooking meth in makeshift labs in homes, on farms and at commercial premises. Seemingly out of nowhere, this illegal drug had become a key commodity in the underworld. The cooks found that by mixing a little pseudoephedrine, sourced from a packet of cold and flu medicine from their local pharmacy, with a handful of additional chemicals, they could recreate the century-old recipe for the powerful central nervous stimulant, methamphetamine.

And P was proving to be pretty popular with the public, with tens of thousands of New Zealanders soon sampling this crystallised rocket fuel. Why wouldn’t they? A good hit of methamphetamine sends your heart rate and energy levels soaring: you’re more awake and focused, your senses are heightened and mass amounts of dopamine start firing around in your brain – you’re absolutely amped.

Got chores to do? No problem. Want to party? Bring it on.

But as more and more people began experimenting with P, it wasn’t long before cases of full-blown addiction and reports of meth-related crime escalated. New Zealand politicians retaliated, following the lead of other nations, by cracking down on the sale of pseudoephedrine. However, while this was well-meaning, cracking down on the domestic manufacturing of P inadvertently turbo-charged the meth trade, because it didn’t take long for warlords, triads and cartels around the world to spot a lucrative opening in the drug market.

In the last 15 years or so, there’s been an avalanche of P cooked and trafficked and dumped on the world. In 2021, a record 393 tonnes of meth were seized by authorities, globally, and if that’s just the amount intercepted, you can safely assume many more thousands of tonnes of it is being consumed. That 2021 haul was well over five times more meth than law enforcement had seized a decade earlier, and if you wind the calendar back to 1998, just a couple of tonnes of meth was seized in total around the world. The international meth trade is growing exponentially.

If you’re into making and trafficking illegal drugs, it just doesn’t get much better than meth. The return on investment is simply incredible. Not only is it fast and cheap to make, but you’ve also got between 30 and 50 million customers out there, a good number of them becoming steadily hooked on your product. You can swamp regions with cheap meth like they’re doing in South-east Asia and reserve your top-quality crystal meth for your wealthier clients in New Zealand and Australia.

Synthetic drugs like meth are a godsend to criminal groups – they’re just so much less hassle than plant-based drugs like cocaine or heroin. With meth, there’s no need for growers, so you don’t have to go through the rigmarole of planting crops or providing security to ensure they’re protected and safe until you harvest. All you need to make quality meth is a chemist and lots and lots of chemicals. You’re not reliant on the seasons or the soil, there’s no battling the weather or pests, and you’re nowhere near as visible to the authorities in a clandestine meth lab compared with hectares of illegal crops out in the open.

Another big advantage of manufacturing P, from an organised crime perspective, is that recipes can easily be tweaked – you can substitute chemicals in and out at any point along the chain. Also, should one of your shipments get busted by authorities, sure it’s an inconvenience, but in the bigger scheme of things, it’s kind of irrelevant, because you can cook up another batch tomorrow. The speed and ease with which it can be made means having your meth seized just isn’t as big a blow as them seizing your blow.

Nowadays, most of New Zealand’s P is manufactured in super labs in Myanmar and to a lesser extent Mexico. At a minimum hundreds and hundreds of kilos of high-quality meth is now being sent here every year. Much of the importation and distribution of it is controlled by the underworld, a mix of well-connected Asian criminal organisations and some gangs, both equally attracted to the immense profits that can be made trading meth.

As we’ve seen over the last 25 years, when some of the most ruthless members of society control the supply of a powerful and addictive drug like meth, it creates the perfect conditions for maximising harm and carnage in our communities.

But meth didn’t just arrive out of the blue on our shores in the late 1990s. It had been used here legally by thousands of New Zealanders – along with other similar and now forbidden stimulants – decades earlier, and often without too much of a fuss. So that is what this book explores – the evolution of the drug we now know as P.

As a journalist who’d investigated the hysteria around meth testing, the opportunity to take this deep dive into the nation’s most feared drug was one I just couldn’t pass up. I’ve interviewed those in charge of the global fight against meth who concede that many governments are now at a loss over what to do, and families in small-town New Zealand whose lives have been turned upside down by a loved one’s meth addiction.

I delve into specific cases over the years that helped cement methamphetamine’s notorious reputation and which illustrate the catastrophic outcomes of dangerous people out of control on meth, people like Coral Ellen Burrows’s stepdad, and samurai-sword attacker Antoine Dixon. And I talk to heavy users who don’t think meth’s as bad as it’s made out to be. Ultimately I trace and evaluate the success of the strategies of governments here in New Zealand who have tried to pull every lever they have to combat P, and I question whether there’s a better way to get on top of the meth problem.

What’s the full story about meth? Well, let’s find out.

CHAPTER 1

‘WE RIDE ON DYNAMITE’

Meth and Its Many Uses from War to Sports

THE KIWI TROOPS COULDN’T BELIEVE THEIR EYES, OR THEIR luck, as waves of German troops, who were frothing at the mouth and screaming, with their arms linked, charged recklessly at the ANZAC’s fortified positions around Mount Olympus in April 1941. Company after company of drug-crazed soldiers were blown to pieces as they ran straight into the blazing muzzles of the Aussie and Kiwi guns, and even as they dropped like flies, the Germans just kept on coming, with apparently zero regard for their lives.

And if that wasn’t bizarre enough, the Nazi corpses quickly turned green.

This was the story that those picking up a copy of their local paper in Manawatū were greeted with on 19 June 1941, the article, headlined ‘Yelled Like Maniacs’, recounted the experience of a New Zealand soldier, who had recently landed in Sydney on his way back home after fighting the Germans in Greece. ‘The Nazis were clearly doped to the eyeballs,’ he recalled, and their suicidal behaviour must have been the result of being under the influence of a very powerful drug indeed.

A chemist, who was also interviewed for the article, suggested the drug may have been Methedrine, which, he said, can produce intense stimulation, bucketloads of self-confidence, quick thinking, a loss of fear, and restlessness. And in hot climates, the chemist confirmed, the corpses of those doped would certainly turn black and then green.

So why do I bring up this report about hundreds of frothy mouthed suicidal soldiers? It might sound far-fetched, or just wartime propaganda, but there’s no doubt German troops were consuming methamphetamine by the tonne during the Second World War.

When German paratroopers jumped out of their planes high above Crete on 20 May 1941, directly above a battalion of New Zealand troops who were just finishing up their breakfast, they must have seemed like they had a death wish, too, as the first 100 to 150 German paratroopers were dead before they hit the ground, while one poor Jerry who floated down directly above the platoon kicked and writhed in his harness as he was turned into Swiss cheese by bullets before landing with a thud. It reminded 2nd Lieutenant Buck Taylor of duck-shooting season back home. But the enemy kept coming and soon enough Taylor himself had been shot in the hand.

As he returned to New Zealand, he brought back a number of items including a 1942 British intelligence report that detailed the disastrous Battle of Crete. His son, military history enthusiast retired Major Noel Taylor, sent me part of the report that had been produced by Britain’s War Office and distributed to New Zealand officers with this instruction on the front page: THIS DOCUMENT MUST NOT FALL INTO ENEMY HANDS. It was Britain’s assessment of how the German paratroopers had operated in the battle, in which approximately 670 Kiwi troops were killed and 2000 more taken as prisoners of war.

The first German paratroopers to land were armed with a large jack-knife, four grenades and an automatic pistol with two magazines, while every fourth paratrooper carried a submachine gun strapped to their back. But the report also said that the soldiers were fuelled by drugs, that they used Pervitin, ‘a drug allied to Benzedrine, to produce wakefulness and alertness . . . and is said to make one thirsty’. Pervitin was another brand name for methamphetamine. In addition to securing a camera and a Luger pistol from a dead paratrooper, Lt Taylor brought home a container of pills, which family legend had always believed were Nazi meth pills, but on closer examination turned out to be less illicit Vitamin-A-infused Nazi sweets.

* * *

German scientists at a pharmaceutical company, Temmler, had become interested in Benzedrine after it was used, legally, by athletes to boost their performances at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and they decided to research this. A Romanian chemist of Jewish origin, Lazăr Edeleanu, had written a paper about how he had synthesised amphetamine, while working at the University of Berlin in 1887, although he became much more famous for figuring out how to refine crude oil. Not much happened with amphetamine for another 40 years until it was realised that the drug mimics our brain’s natural stimulant, norepinephrine, which is released in huge amounts when we’re stressed or in danger, and boosts our alertness, vigilance and focuses our attention. It also spikes our heart rate and blood pressure, and opens our airways.

Amphetamine was initially used to treat narcolepsy (a sleep disorder characterised by extreme tiredness and sudden sleep attacks during the day). As it also affects the airways, it was then sold as a nasal decongestant and marketed as Benzedrine from the mid-1930s. But the scientists at Temmler were more interested in a similar but more powerful stimulant, methamphetamine, the origins of which can be traced back to a chance discovery made in 1885 at the Tokyo Imperial University. A Japanese chemist, Nagayoshi Nagai, and his team were experimenting with traditional medicinal herbs, trying to unlock and understand the secrets behind their healing properties, when a colleague crushed up a sample of ma huang and noticed that there were tiny fine crystals present in the paste. Ma huang is a plant that had been brewed in tea for thousands of years across Asia, used to help alleviate the symptoms of the common cold. In the West the plant is known as ephedra.

Professor Nagayoshi, who had only recently returned from Berlin where he too had studied how to synthesise chemicals for medicinal purposes, began to experiment with ma huang, and two years later he isolated the stimulant ephedrine from the plant. It didn’t take long before ephedrine was on the market as a bronchodilator drug – one which widens the throat and airways – making it easier for people with colds, flus or asthma to breathe, and has been used in medicines ever since.

But Nagayoshi didn’t stop there, continuing to experiment with ephedrine until in 1893 he synthesised a substance he called methamphetamine. At the time, he felt it didn’t appear to have any beneficial properties for humans, so the recipe for meth sat on the shelf for the next few decades. Then in 1919, Professor Nagayoshi’s apprentice Ogata Akira went a step further when he reduced ephedrine with red phosphorus and iodine and produced methamphetamine hydrochloride. Observing the tiny crystals in front of him, he couldn’t have known he had just made the most powerful stimulant on the planet.

Crystal meth was born.

When Professor Nagayoshi became the first president of Japan’s distinguished Pharmaceutical Society he issued this advice to his fellow chemists: ‘Invent medicines that can be easily absorbed by the body through research on natural medicine and chemical synthesis. Then let’s introduce Japanese pharmaceutical sciences to the world.’

By 1937, the scientists at Temmler did just that. They’d done their homework on crystal methamphetamine and explored new ways of making it and on 31 October that year they patented Pervitin; Benzedrine on steroids. The following year, posters for Pervitin, advertising that it could reverse low energy and depression and even frigidity in women, were plastered on the walls at train stations and at tram stops across Berlin. German doctors were being sent three free pills in sample packs by Temmler, which wanted to receive feedback regarding their experiences taking the drug, and soon citizens were purchasing hundreds of Pervitin pills at a time when they visited the chemist.

Not only was Pervitin marketed as something that could help boost your confidence or give a little pick-me-up before a party or performance but they were also advertised to help make household chores a lot less tedious. Boxes of Hildebrand’s chocolates, containing 14 milligrams of methamphetamine per chocolate (three times the dose of a Pervitin pill), were marketed to German housewives. ‘Hildebrand chocolates, always a delight’ the packaging read.

But it was the Nazi military that really seized upon methamphetamine’s fatigue-fighting properties and used it to chemically fuel their troops, so they could fight for days without rest and their pilots could stay alert on long bombing missions. In his 2017 book, Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany, the writer Norman Ohler details how, following the Olympics, the Third Reich’s top defence physiologist Otto Ranke carried out experiments on about 150 army medical officers with different stimulants – Pervitin, Benzedrine, coffee or a placebo – keeping them up through the night solving maths equations. By the following morning, those who had been given the placebo were propping up their heads on their hands at the desks while those who had taken Pervitin were still beavering away at their sums. Although they were wide awake, it actually didn’t make them any smarter as their calculations contained more mistakes, nevertheless Ranke concluded that Pervitin was ‘an excellent substance for rousing a weary squad’ and that methamphetamine could have far-reaching military significance.

The recommended dose of Pervitin had the added bonus of being about a third of the price of coffee, and so the German military began buying vast quantities of Pervitin to turbocharge their forces. An order was placed with Temmler for 35 million Pervitin pills; the factory pumped out more than 800,000 methamphetamine tablets a day. German soldiers on the frontlines wrote home asking to be sent more Pervitin, while one pilot wrote of their experience after taking three tablets while flying above the Mediterranean:

The engine is running cleanly and calmly. I’m wide awake, my heartbeat thunders in my ears. When the sky is suddenly so bright, my eyes hurt from the harsh light. I can hardly hear the brilliance: if I shield my eyes with my free hand it’s better. Now the engine is humming evenly and without vibration far away, very far away. It’s almost like silence up here. Everything becomes immaterial and abstract. Remote, as if I were flying above my plane.

Ohler also records how thousands of German troops took the prescribed Pervitin as they launched their blitzkrieg across swathes of Europe, racing their tanks, troops and artillery through the Ardennes Forest and into Belgium, the speed of their offensive catching defending soldiers off-guard. The German military went days without sleep, allowing