We now have an accurate picture of drug use in New Zealand. Photo / 123rf
As we say goodbye to 2021 and welcome in 2022, it's a good time to catch up on the very best of the Herald columnists we enjoyed reading over the last 12 months. From politics to sport, from business to entertainment and lifestyle, these are the voices and views our audience loved the most. Today it's the top five from Jarrod Gilbert.
One day, a few years back, someone came up with the kooky idea to regularly test the wastewater in New Zealand for illicit drugs. That person deserves a medal.
We now have an accurate picture of drug use in New Zealand - where and what drugs are being consumed. We can also track consumption trends over time.
This is not just a curiosity, this science from the sewers has a range of important policy implications.
Read the full article: An accurate picture of drug use in NZ
The former Reserve Bank governor, once National Party leader and grand antagonist of Māori, Don Brash, recently joined a Mongrel Mob trust. In doing so, he became the most high-profile and unlikely example of a person working with the gangs since Prime Minister Robert Muldoon in the 1980s.
Muldoon, who was hardly known for his sympathies around Māori issues – he once proposed to sending errant "Māori louts" back to the countryside – became a champion for the predominantly Māori gangs. He set up an agency to work with gangs in an effort to encourage their members into "make work" schemes popular at the time. His thinking was that getting the gangs into work would decrease their anti-social activities. This was a time before gangs were linked to organised crime; inter-gang violence was the big concern.
Remarkably, Muldoon once left the 9th floor of the Beehive to have a drink with Black Power at a local pub, where the gang members and the Prime Minister were abruptly kicked out by management. That story in itself deserves a column. But just like the drinking session, working alongside gangs came to an abrupt halt in the late 80s, and with that a return to the gangs being seen simply as a police issue.
The current efforts to work alongside the gangs extend beyond the independent efforts of Don Brash, and are being seen by many in the Wellington bureaucracy as the way forward.
Read the full article: Why I applaud Don Brash for working with gangs
In 2013, I wrote that the prospect of increasing gang violence was inevitable. That wasn't rocket science; the scene was growing and changing and given a bit of elementary knowledge of gang dynamics, gang conflicts were boringly predictable. In a crowded room, someone invariably gets elbowed. And in the gang scene that means loading up the guns.
I may have been a little early in my prediction, but two recent gang shootings have brought attention to the issue. The latest occurred at Auckland's upmarket Sofitel Hotel where masked men stormed the place firing shots at a rival. The other, which occurred in Napier, got less publicity but was more serious, as two innocent bystanders were injured outside the West Quay bar in a gang drive-by shooting.
The question is: what do we do about it?
Read the full article: How NZ should tackle public gang warfare
For many people, the sporadic outbreaks of gang violence that have occurred in the past couple of years may feel like the start of something new and unnerving, largely because gang violence went quiet for the first decade of the 2000s. But gang violence is far from new.
In fact, New Zealand's most serious incident of gang violence occurred around this time of year in 1979, but it wasn't the violence that was surprising at that time – that was rather commonplace – but the responses to it may prove illuminating for us now.
When I visited the small Northland town of Moerewa for the first time in 2014, it was a sunny, warm day and it, like many places up that way, was friendly as hell but gave every indication that it was struggling; crumbling around the edges and sharply poor. But on August 3, 1979, it was a warzone.
Read the full article: The brutal gang battle you've never heard about
Last week's large international drug operation that caught a bunch of New Zealanders in its net was curious for a number of reasons. Many of these reasons have been well canvassed, but a couple have only been touched on and are worthy of examination.
The amounts of drugs and firearms seized in this operation – in this country, at least – were relatively modest because the timing of the raids was dictated by international partners. But the size of the take does not diminish from the preventative outcome of the operation, and the co-operation between New Zealand agencies and their international counterparts is without question an important highlight.
But by far the most intriguing, and movie-like, aspect of the operation was the planting of communications devices. In short, the organised criminals were duped into using phones with an application they thought was secure. In reality, the devices were an ingenious plant by the FBI, and all of the communications were being recorded.
Read the full article: How drug busts hold corruption in check
