A survey of key players in the illegal drug market reveals new insights around the number of new vapers who didn’t smoke tobacco, the slow-crawling progress to make legal medicinal cannabis more accessible, and the greater use of social media and the “ ” to procure illegal substances - and what new dangers that presents. Senior writer Derek Cheng reports.
Drug report on vaping habits, medicinal cannabis users, and the risk of darknet purchases
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Social media, which accounted for 24 per cent of cannabis purchases in 2020, increased to 29 per cent in 2022/23. The online share of MDMA/ecstasy purchases rose from 13 to 17 per cent over the same period, while the share of LSD and methamphetamine purchases remained unchanged (both at 9 per cent).
The most active region for online drug-trading in 2022/23 was Wellington, where 17 per cent of purchases came from social media, followed by Canterbury, and Otago (both on 15 per cent). The rest of the South Island had the lowest rate (10 per cent), as did Taranaki.
Two per cent of survey respondents had bought drugs in the past six months from the darknet - an encrypted portion of the internet that isn’t indexed by search engines, and which requires specific anonymising browser software to access.
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Wilkins has previously written about the role of the darknet in the illegal drugs market, where drugs are sold anonymously, with delivery by post or courier.
The darknet may be connected to social media purchases, Wilkins said, as part of a “new, integrated digital drug market with maybe quite a bit of the supply coming through darknet, but then diffused through social media”.
“People can use their own social networks. That has the advantage that sometimes they know who the person is, or they might be part of their friends-of-friends network, so there’s a little bit more security and trust. They don’t have to drive into a bad neighbourhood and buy from a tinny house.”
But there are also new risks, especially for young people who are more susceptible to potential harm as their brains continue developing up to the age of 25.
“It’s probably opening up the market to a new generation of digitally-connected youth who wouldn’t normally have personal connections to the physical drug market. For example, gamers - really young adolescents,” Wilkins said.
“My real concern with the darknet, and also with social media, is that new drugs turn up that people don’t really know much about - different synthetic compounds. And there’s almost an over-trusting. Just because some friend of a friend is selling it doesn’t mean it’s low risk.”
The survey did not reveal anything about buying new drugs over the darknet, as it only asked about LSD/psychedelics, MDMA/ecstasy, cannabis and meth.
Putting the brakes on darknet trading is “really difficult”, Wilkins said, given how attempts to shut down the physical drugs market have failed.
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A harm-minimisation approach could work well, but its effectiveness would rely on online material and how well it engages users.
“There’s got to be a change in focus away from things like physical pamphlets to more engagement on social media about the risks: ‘this drug is particularly dangerous’, ‘these are things you should be looking out for’, and even if there’s a bad batch of this drug,” Wilkins said.
Useful insights through ‘key players’ sample
The findings have emerged from an online survey between August 2022 and February 2023, with 13,000 respondents whose answers were audited. It’s not a representative population sample, but one consisting of key players with knowledge of the illegal drug market, while still representing the population’s geographic distribution.
Unsurprisingly, drug use among respondents was much higher than it would be in a national survey; in the previous six months, three-quarters of the respondents had used cannabis, 69 per cent had vaped, 45 per cent had used MDMA, and 28 per cent had used psychedelics such as LSD.
“If you do a population survey, it’s 2000 people, and only about 5 per cent have used drugs regularly and less than 1 per cent have used methamphetamine. You’ve got a very small sample, and you can say absolutely nothing about what’s going on throughout the country,” Wilkins said.
“This type of survey won’t suit an epidemiologist, but with 13,000 people who have used drugs and have purchased or sold drugs within the last six months, it’s giving pretty good information about what’s going on - prices, availability, who’s purchasing, the new trends.”
It’s also hardly surprising that only 3 per cent of respondents supported cannabis being kept illegal, a tiny fraction of the 51 per cent who voted for the status quo in the 2020 referendum.
Most of those in the survey wanted to legalise the substance, including 29 per cent supporting a “lightly regulated market”, and 28 per cent supporting the stricter market that the referendum proposed; 22 per cent supported decriminalisation, though this increased among NZ First (32 per cent), Te Pāti Māori (26 per cent) and National (24 per cent) supporters.
The survey has been run in previous years so that comparisons can be made across time periods. For example, 56 per cent of survey respondents vaped in 2018, but in 2022/23 it was 69 per cent.
When vaping was introduced, it was hoped to lead to health benefits by turning tobacco smokers into vapers. The survey shows this has happened, with 36 per cent of nicotine-vapers saying they had stopped smoking, while 22 per cent said they now smoked less.
However, 19 per cent said they hadn’t been smokers before taking up vaping, and while vaping remains a healthier alternative to smoking, the increase in youth vaping has become a national concern; the ASH Year 10 Snapshot Survey showed that 10 per cent of 14- and 15-year-old students were daily vapers in 2022, while 18.2 per cent were monthly vapers.
“Vaping has gone the wrong way,” Wilkins said. “It’s probably too commercialised in New Zealand at the moment, and is really focused on the youth market.”
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has promised to tackle the youth vaping problem, and during one of the leaders’ debates before the election he adopted Labour’s vaping policy of state control over the number and location of vaping stores around the country.
Legal medicinal cannabis still with tiny market share
The 2022-23 survey showed more people were getting prescriptions for medicinal cannabis, but it was still only a tiny share of the hundreds of thousands of medicinal cannabis consumers.
Three years after the new legal regime came into effect, in April 2020, to make the drug more accessible and affordable to those who need it, 85 per cent of medicinal cannabis users still didn’t ask their doctor for a prescription.
The proportion of users with a prescription increased from 2 per cent in 2020 to 9 per cent in 2022/23.
“This increase from a low baseline may reflect increasing GP familiarity with the scheme, a wider range of products, and the opening of private cannabis clinics,” the research centre’s report said.
“Geographical inequities in access remain, perhaps reflecting regional GPs’ reluctance to discuss cannabis as a treatment option due to fears of reputational damage, and lower numbers of specialised cannabis clinics.”
The NZ Drug Foundation’s State of the Nation report in 2022 estimated 266,700 people were using cannabis for medical reasons; 9 per cent of them with a prescription would equate to 24,000 people, leaving some 240,000 users who still risked being criminalised for acquiring the drug by illegal means.
One of the main criticisms of the legal regime was that manufacturing standards were too high, with the costs of meeting those passed on to consumers who were unwilling to pay so much when the black market could provide for cheaper.
The survey shows these issues persist: half of the users cited price as a reason for not asking for a prescription, while half of them said they were “happy with current supply (eg green fairy/black market)”; 56 per cent said they didn’t think their doctor would prescribe - the dearth of clinically-robust information persists, despite new information becoming available every year – while 44 per cent cited “negative stigma/too embarrassed”.
A strong majority of users said legal medicinal cannabis was either very difficult (45 per cent) or difficult (38 per cent) to obtain. The region with the hardest access was Manawatū-Whanganui (55 per cent of users saying access to legal products was very difficult) while Northland was the easiest (35 per cent saying access was very difficult).
Black market supply is unregulated and far more likely to be something other than what it’s supposed to be; a 2021 ESR study tested 100 green fairy samples, finding “a wide range of cannabinoid concentrations, and the claim that a product was high in CBD was often not correct”.
“The proposed dose size was not specified for these products, but few would provide what is considered an effective dose when compared with the administration of commercially purified cannabinoid products available by prescription,” ESR said.
Wilkins: “The scheme isn’t being used by most medicinal cannabis users. That really raises questions about whether it’s working. The system needs to be improved.”
Other survey findings included:
- An increase in cannabis availability and falling prices – by 8.7 per cent over the past four years – perhaps due to police directing more attention to illegal methamphetamine operations and growing social acceptance of cannabis use.
- Falling meth prices – by 28 per cent over four years for the price of a gram – which indicates the huge increase in global meth production and trafficking, mainly from Southeast Asia, East Asia and the Americas, rather than any fall in demand; wastewater surveys do not show a steady fall in methamphetamine use.
- 12 per cent of respondents being victimised when buying drugs in the past six months, most commonly by being “ripped off”.
The proportion of survey respondents - 11 per cent - being “ripped off” in the past six months was “relatively high”, Wilkins said.
“The fact that people are getting fraudulent drugs or drugs they’ve not expected is quite a big deal.”
Only 1 per cent said they had experienced physical violence.
Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who first started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the press gallery and is a former deputy political editor.
