Denis O'Reilly: Let's cut the hype and look at the realities of methamphetamine

Opinion

I've been following the War on P campaign being run by the Herald and would like to contribute to the discussion. I take a different line than many of the opinions reported in the paper to date but endorse the general view - so powerfully expressed by Joe Walsh when we started campaigning against P some six years ago.

He said: "Methamphetamine is evil. If you are involved in bringing it into the country, or selling it, or manufacturing it, your ancestors are not at peace with you. You will eventually be responsible for people's deaths and when you go to meet your God, it will be a burden on your shoulders.

"I have tried it. It is a dead end. It goes nowhere. It's a demon and it eats your soul from inside you.

"If you are doing meth I say to you, no matter how awful things are, they will get worse beyond your wildest imagination.

"But you can come back, as hopeless as it looks. It was the hardest thing I have ever had to do but it can be done."

So Joe Walsh's message was that P is a go-nowhere substance and has no place in our lives or our communities.

Let me start with the good news. As hard as it is, if you put your hand up and ask for help, you can beat this awful addiction. I have seen people who I once considered to be so addicted that they would be forever lost, rejoin society and play their role as contributing citizens.

Secondly, Dr Chris Wilkins' research for the NZ Police suggests we have moved from an epidemic to an endemic stage in the life cycle of this particular substance. The community awareness-raising about the negative impact of P has had a positive impact and the uptake rate of new users has reduced although those addicted are using more.

There is a great deal of media hype around P and it doesn't help resolve the problematic subject.

Let's calm down and deal with the facts, or as near to them as we can get. For instance even though the Herald carried a bar graph illustrating the exponential growth of P precursors that have been detected coming across our border (and the admission by Customs that this is likely to be only a 20 per cent indicator of the actual volume) the stories still seems fixated on the availability of across-the-counter pharmaceuticals.

I don't deny that there will be instances of home-bake P derived from these products, but compared with the inflow from China this will be small change. An unintended consequence of our Free Trade Agreement is that the volume of inbound goods acts as a vector.

Although the "P devils" are generally portrayed as being the poor Polynesians from South Auckland, in fact the common denominator of recent major importing busts is that the traffickers are Asian.

Far from making assertions about the criminal activities of Maori and other Polynesian people, it would be more helpful if Auckland's Asian politicians, Pansy Wong and Melissa Lee from the National Party, and Peter Low from the Asian Anti-Crime Group got together with John Key and discussed how they might apply moral suasion over their own cuzzies.

From all the evidence available it would seem apparent that a "war on" approach - the interdiction and supply reduction strategies - will not win the day on its own. In fact, in light of the laws of supply and demand, I would argue that we need to lead with demand reduction strategies, with the "Force of Law" being a secondary strategy to be firmly applied against the recalcitrant and those who insist on trading.

* Denis O'Reilly runs a national project called Mokai Whanau Ora that targets the leaders of Black Power and the Mongrel Mob seeking to enrol them in a movement to prohibit the manufacture, distribution and use of methamphetamine.