Seizures of illicit drugs and precursor substances at New Zealand's border are escalating in both amount and frequency, the Customs Service said today.
The latest incident occurred last week with the arrest of a 32-year-old South African woman.
The hard shell of a suitcase the woman was carrying was found to have
600g of methamphetamine concealed in it, customs drug investigations manager Simon Williamson said.
A 43-year-old New Zealand man was arrested in a central Auckland hotel the next day.
The pair were both before the courts on drug-importing charges.
Mr Williamson said the seizure was the 15th of significant or "trafficable" size made by customs officers this year, compared with 28 for the whole of 2003.
He added that over 15kg of cocaine, all believed destined for Australia, had been intercepted in eight separate cases this year.
One of the larger cocaine cases involved the use of more than 200 envelopes, each containing 10g of the drug.
The envelopes were mailed from Canada and each had the insignia of a fictitious charity on the front.
Interception of the envelopes resulted in two Australian men being charged with importing a class A controlled drug into New Zealand.
Mr Williamson said one reason for the increase in seizures was the use of New Zealand as a transit point for drug shipments to Australia.
"The second is the targeting of New Zealand as a viable drug-user market by off-shore transnational drug trafficking syndicates, particularly in the case of crystal methamphetamine," he said.
Customs officers had reported the interception of increased amounts of precursor substances believed to be destined for methamphetamine production.
Precursors are chemicals that might have legitimate uses, such as pseudoephedrine in cold medicines, but were also employed for producing illicit drugs such as P or Pure.
In the first four months of this year, more than 770,000 tablets or powder equivalent of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine-based substances were seized.
This compared with 830,000 tablets for the whole of 2003.
- NZPA
