Barry Soper: Meth house myth - Have we been duped?

Sir Peter Gluckman has a string of academic letters after his name longer than the alphabet, the honorifics to go with the gongs aren't much shorter, the unique list fellowships for a Kiwi around the world would keep a travel agency in business - and he holds a unique position in the Beehive, the Prime Minister's chief scientific adviser.

Gluckman's far from a mad professor, he's a quietly spoken, unassuming chap who has kept very much in the background since he was appointed by John Key to the Prime Ministerial job, the first appointment of its kind which has been maintained by Jacinda Ardern.

His extensive academic background covers both medical and scientific qualifications and the one thing that Phil Twyford's done right in his tumultuous ministerial career was to ask him last December to have a look at the health risks associated with exposure to methamphetamine residue in houses.

Given all the hype and panic that's surrounded so called meth-contaminated houses - and the very significant industry that's built up around it - it can come as no surprise to Gluckman that his finding about the negligible, if any, health risks associated with it was like dropping a hand grenade.

Houses have been ripped apart, costing tens of thousands of dollars, tenants have been evicted and insurance premiums have risen as decontamination workers, kitted out like astronauts, have stomped their way up hallways, through bedrooms and into kitchens to spray them clean.

Even the government's own Housing New Zealand was sucked in, spending more than a hundred million bucks over the past four years, decontaminating state houses and sending tenants to motels.

Detergent in a bucket of warm water would have been enough to do the job it seems. Gluckman confided that people are more at risk of damp and mould than they would be from meth residue and said the moral panic around houses thought to be infected is unique to this country.

The level of methamphetamine in houses here that test positive is low. Exposure to the Class A drug on surfaces presents an extremely low, if not negligible, health risk, says the professor who's well qualified to make the claim in his comprehensive report.

Need any more to be said, most of us have been duped.

But in a conspiracy theory worthy of Winston Peters, although he's less conspiratorial these days, the boss of real estate company First National is accusing Gluckman of collaborating with the Beehive to release uninhabitable houses onto the desperate market.

Bob Brereton says the Government needs a win on social housing and has chosen to put the health of children at an unquantifiable risk in order to achieve it.

To suggest Gluckman, a former professor of Paediatric and Perinatal Biology, would take that risk is laughable.