The meth lollies made world headlines. In August last year, the Auckland City Mission unwittingly bundled pineapple-flavoured sweets laced with methamphetamine into food packages and distributed them to dozens of families. The laced lollies were a potentially lethal dose: three people who consumed the sweets were hospitalised. Perhaps unsurprisingly, police believe the tainted confectionery was unintentionally donated to the mission.
In August this year, a separate investigation led to charges against a man for importation of 3g blocks of meth disguised as Rinda pineapple sweets, manufactured in Malaysia. The man, 32, will appear in the Auckland District Court next April.
In June, police and Customs staff dismantled a Wellington-based drug syndicate, seizing 23kg of methamphetamine and more than 1000 MDMA pills. In July, Customs intercepted two unaccompanied bags from Malaysia, each containing vacuum-sealed meth blocks valued at $22.6 million.
A week later, they discovered 20kg of methamphetamine concealed in vacuum-sealed green tea pouches imported by a passenger arriving from Bali. In late August, at another meth operation in the Hutt Valley, police seized firearms, cash, drugs and pipe-bomb materials.
In September, police raided 120 properties around Auckland linked to Vietnamese organised crime groups using the houses as cannabis nurseries. The police confiscated 10 tonnes of the drug: it took four container trucks to ship it away.
That same month, the National Cyber Security Centre recorded 1315 incidents of scams or fraud over a three-month period with direct financial losses of $5.7m.
Most of the New Zealand economy suffers under conditions of recession and high inflation but illicit drugs are cheaper and more plentiful than ever. In the past seven years, the price of food has increased by 37% while the cost of cannabis has gone down by 10%, MDMA (ecstasy or molly) by 26.6% and methamphetamine by 36%.
The decrease is driven by supply: recent years have seen a radical transformation in the scale and sophistication of organised crime, domestically and across the wider Pacific.
The nation is awash with drugs manufactured, imported and distributed by groups that operate more like multinational conglomerates than street gangs.
And according to a series of studies published by a ministerial working group on transnational organised crime, they are linked to the epidemic of fraud and the exploitation of migrant workers.
“The best way to think of organised crime is as a corporation,” Steve Symon of crown prosecutors MC (formerly Meredith Connell) tells the Listener. “They’re there to make as much money as possible with no moral compass. They’ll make money out of whatever commodity they can: drugs, fraud, migrant exploitation, blackmarket tobacco – whatever generates profit. They’re all franchises of the business. And some of those franchises bring a level of violence we haven’t seen before in New Zealand.”
Symon, a senior partner at MC, has a background in criminal law and prosecution. Last December, he was appointed to chair the working group convened by Customs Minister Casey Costello.
Symon’s team has since published six interim reports, each focusing on the rapid rise of organised crime in New Zealand and the spread of corruption in the wider Pacific. The final report concludes “transnational serious organised crime is becoming the No 1 threat to New Zealand’s national security”.
Something in the water
In 2018, the police and crown agency Environmental Science and Research (now part of the Institute for Public Health and Forensic Science) began conducting nationwide testing of the country’s wastewater. It gives them an estimate of the scale of consumption of drugs like cocaine, methamphetamine, MDMA and fentanyl.
In June last year, they saw a sudden surge in meth use: consumption of the drug increased by 96% – nearly doubling over a single quarter. By the end of the year, about 36kg of methamphetamine was being consumed each week, up from 15kg per week in 2019.
Meth is not the only drug on an upward trajectory. According to the Health Survey Annual Data, cocaine has seen a 229% increase (while starting from a low base). Men are significantly more likely to report using meth than women; people who live in the most deprived neighbourhoods are twice as likely to have used meth than those living in the least deprived.
Cannabis is still the nation’s drug of choice, with 15.6% of adults aged 15+ self-reporting its use over the past year, but habitual meth use is rising fast. The survey found 29% of people who reported using methamphetamine in the past six months were using it daily or near daily, compared with 19% in 2022-23.
And these numbers precede the surge detected in the wastewater. Geographically, Northland is the country’s meth capital – the wastewater data indicates use tripled in the region in 2024.
Symon says meth was just a “blip on the radar” 25 years ago. Ten years ago, Customs intercepted about 55kg of meth in an entire year, but last year seized roughly 90kg per week. “Previously with the price of methamphetamine, when we had a large interception – if you stopped 100kg of methamphetamine – within weeks you saw the price spike because there was less available,” he says.
“Now, the disconcerting thing is even when they’re stopping half a tonne of methamphetamine, the price isn’t changing. Which suggests we’re at a point where organised crime is able to price fix. So they are able to do the things that none of our petrol stations or our energy companies can do.”
The working group’s final report also worries about a less conspicuous form of social harm: corruption to the nation’s institutions. In June and July, a string of arrests were made among current and former baggage handlers at Auckland Airport. An international syndicate had been collaborating with local gangs to import methamphetamine and cocaine via unaccompanied luggage, which was removed by the baggage handlers before security screening.
The most valuable targets for capture by organised crime are the police, Corrections, Customs and Immigration. The report notes “We can see from experiences in Australia that organised crime groups will seek to corrupt these pressure points. If our institutions are corrupted, the road to recovery becomes incredibly difficult.”
Diversified portfolios
It’s not just the drugs. There are multiple overlapping revenue streams. When the police raided the Auckland cannabis nurseries they also arrested 30 people, most of them Vietnamese nationals in the country on migrant visas. Some of them had been deceived into travelling to New Zealand on a promise of legitimate employment.
Immigration NZ received nearly four times the number of migrant exploitation complaints in 2023 compared with the previous year, and much of this is linked to transnational crime syndicates. Migrants – typically from India, China, Vietnam or the Philippines – come here expecting genuine jobs, often in construction or hospitality. Some pay tens of thousands of dollars for their visa or incur significant debts to their immigration agency. On arrival they learn that the job does not exist; their passport is confiscated, they find themselves trapped in indentured labour, sometimes of a criminal nature.
Crime has basically advanced much faster than we have. We’re in the premier league now.
Symon’s report notes, “It is highly likely that serious migrant exploitation, such as people trafficking, forced labour and sexual exploitation, is under-reported and growing within New Zealand.”
For Symon, the problems currently facing Australia are “the ghost of Christmas future for us”. His report cites an Australian police officer describing the construction industry in Melbourne as “controlled by organised crime. To the point that you can’t get a large building constructed without, on some level, needing organised crime and an exploited migrant workforce.”
He tells the Listener, “You can see the appeal when you’re looking at it from a commodity perspective because drugs you use once. Exploited people – you can just use them over and over again.”
The black economy
Australia’s lucrative, $10 billion-a-year black market tobacco industry is also a precursor for New Zealand. Half of tobacco products bought by Australians in 2024 comprised black market products. As a consequence, the impacts of the drug are borne by the health system without the revenue from the excise taxes to fund the cost. Smuggling and selling tobacco is seen as a lower-risk activity than prohibited substances, and the syndicates reinvest the profits to finance further criminal enterprises.
Finally, there’s fraud: already endemic, it is the most prevalent and fastest-rising form of crime in New Zealand. According to the 2023 Crime and Victims survey, one in 10 New Zealanders had been a victim of fraud in the preceding 12 months.
Most of this is conducted via a combination of technology and social engineering, and New Zealand appears to be unusually vulnerable – partly because we’re such an easy place to do business: both the public and private sector are open to exploitation.
In July, the National Cyber Security Centre reported that in the first three months of 2025, more than half of the financial losses from scams were suffered by businesses, especially those handling large financial transactions, such as law firms and real estate agencies.
One of the problems identified by the working group is that drugs, migrant exploitation, black market tobacco and crime are generally treated as separate problems, addressed by individual agencies that struggle to collaborate. But they’re being carried out by the same groups.
“Crime has basically advanced much faster than we have,” says Symon. “We really need to reset and go. We’re in the premier league now. And accordingly, we need to put the resources in that match that.”
The 501s
On September 27, 2013, the Bandidos Motorcycle Club invaded Broadbeach’s Surf Parade, one of the most popular tourist spots on Australia’s Gold Coast. It was a Friday night: the restaurants were crowded with families: footage of the 60 estimated gang members brawling, trashing bars, assaulting police and laying siege to a police station played on Australian media for weeks. A number of commentators emphasised the transnational character of “outlaw motorcycle gangs”: American criminal organisations had established themselves in Australia. Many gang members were migrants from the US, the Pacific – and New Zealand.
The Broadbeach riot helped lay the groundwork for Australia’s hardline criminal deportation policy. In late 2014, then-prime minister Tony Abbott amended Section 501 of Australia’s Migration Act, dramatically expanding the government’s power to cancel visas on character grounds. In subsequent years thousands of Australian residents were apprehended and deported.
One of the gang members – present in the crowd at Broadbeach but not involved in the brawl – was 23-year-old New Zealander Jim David Thacker. He was sentenced to 150 hours of community service and, in 2018, he was detained by Australia’s immigration police and deported to New Zealand under the “bad character” provisions of the 501 policy.
By 2019, Thacker had co-founded the New Zealand chapter of the California-based Mongols Motorcycle Club alongside two fellow deportees. Under his leadership the Mongols established a drug trafficking and money laundering operation. He was arrested in June 2020 and in August 2023 was sentenced to 22 years in prison. But the gang remains. So does the Comancheros, founded by another 501 deportee, Pasilika Naufahu (in February 2021 he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for meth distribution, money laundering, unlawful possession of ammunition, and assault).
The 501s did not just come to New Zealand – they have been distributed across the Pacific alongside gang members from the US and New Zealand. The same pattern of deportees establishing new chapters recurred in Fiji, Samoa, Tonga and the Cook Islands, none of which enjoyed the same resources as New Zealand to cope with the influx of career criminals. The unintended – but, in retrospect, highly predictable consequence – of deportation policies has been the establishment of sophisticated networks with strong links to triad organisations in Asia and cartels in South America. The Pacific Islands Forum has recognised criminal deportations as an acute regional security threat.
For Jose Santos-Sousa, head of the Pacific Regional Security Hub at the University of Canterbury and an expert in transnational crime and security in the Pacific, “the Pacific is at risk of becoming a semi-narco region, and the New Zealand government has taken a long time to take it seriously.” Sousa-Santos points out it is the Australian and New Zealand drug market that creates the primary economic incentive for transnational crime to operate in the region while deportation has strengthened the international nature of that industry.
“The Pacific is paying a price for the neglect of law enforcement and government in this sector.” And he’s critical about the lack of engagement from New Zealand. “Everything that’s been done is New Zealand-led. The Pacific basically has to buy into it.”
The worst-case scenario for island nations like Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and the Cooks is that it follows the Ecuador model. Once one of the most peaceful nations in South America, Ecuador’s position between Peru and Bolivia – both major cocaine producers – turned it into a regional transit hub for drug trafficking. It now has one of the highest murder rates in the world, kidnappings are frequent; government corruption is endemic.
The enormous profits from selling drugs in developed economies creates an incentive to corrupt the legal and political systems of their neighbours. “I was in Fiji,” Symons recalls, “and some police officers have been offered bribes of $20,000 each to not be at a particular place at a particular time.” With the average salary for a beginning police officer in Fiji at $18,000, the bribe was significant.
“So when we speak about corruption, we need to make sure we’re not going to let them eat cake about it. Because these are very vulnerable communities.”
Breaking the market
A few days before the release of the ministerial advisory group’s final report, the New Zealand Drug Foundation published a report advocating “Safer Drug Laws for Aotearoa New Zealand”. It noted that drug harms have increased: in 2024, deaths from overdoses averaged three a week. And it agrees this is due to an “increasingly volatile and toxic global drug supply”.
Foundation executive director Sarah Helm confirms the transformation of the market is having a devastating impact on Pacific nations. “Fiji is seeing a surge of HIV cases,” she says. “And a big part of that is driven by people sharing needles for intravenous drug use.”
The foundation’s model is to reduce harm via treating personal drug use as a health issue rather than a criminal matter: it cites international evidence showing decriminalisation does not increase use and instead reduces harm, crime, and health costs. Criminal penalties worsen harm by deterring people from seeking help and embedding them in the criminal justice cycle.
“Policing supply has been overinvested in at the expense of health interventions,” Helm argues. “If you’re treating people for their addiction you’re attacking the demand side of the market. You’re taking away the revenue stream for the organised crime groups. People avoid seeking help for many years for fear of being criminalised. This approach has been failing in New Zealand for 50 years.
“Now, we’re starting to see high-risk substances like nitazenes and fentanyl entering the New Zealand drug market and we are not prepared for that at all.” Nitazines are a class of synthetic opioid that can be fully synthesised in a lab at very low cost. Hundreds of times more potent than traditional opium-derived drugs like heroin, microgram level quantities can suppress breathing, leading to death by overdose. The foundation warns their spread marks “a new phase of the synthetic-opioid era”.
The ministerial working group’s final report does admit “we can’t arrest our way out of this problem”. It advocates for drug use as a health issue, expanding access to treatment, partnering with iwi and local communities and investing in community resilience, all with the goal of reducing the demand side of the market.
The report is currently before cabinet and Casey Costello says the government is considering the recommendations, which are political and bureaucratic, and aimed at the supply side. It calls for a ministerial portfolio dedicated to transnational organised crime, and an executive board that sits above police, Customs, MBIE, MFAT and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to try to force the siloed agencies to co-ordinate their work, with a business unit beneath it setting and monitoring the KPIs.
Does Wellington really need more ministerial portfolios, executive boards and business units? Symon laughs. “It’s a fair question. There are about 13 core agencies involved in the organised-crime response – and around 25 that touch it somehow. Each has its own mandate and tensions.
“If you were designing a society from scratch, you’d never structure government this way. MBIE, for instance, is meant to grow the economy, but it also enforces immigration and company law. The business unit will focus solely on implementation – ensuring each agency not only does its part but helps others. And it needs to handle cross-cutting issues like information sharing and the data lake project.”
Big Data and Old Friends
A “data lake” is a key recommendation. If built, it will function as a massive repository of information pooled from diverse government agencies – financial transactions, tax records, company registrations, immigration records, border movements, telecommunications data. It will be hosted on a secure platform, and capable of advanced analytics to detect patterns of crime networks. “Organised crime is organised,” Symon notes. “We are not.”
The lake would feed into two more key recommendations: a central anti-corruption authority and a national anti-corruption strategy. New Zealand is one of the few developed countries that doesn’t already have a specialist body for corruption investigations and prosecutions.
It will also drive a radical overhaul of the nation’s antiquated money-laundering and financial crime laws, which would restrict the use of cash in high-risk sectors. “It’s hard to think of a valid reason for people to be paying lawyers or accountants $10,000 in cash,” says Symon.
There’s also a commitment to strengthening regional partnerships, on building a Pacific anti-corruption strategy and capability, and redirecting aid and technical assistance towards organised crime.
For Sousa-Santos, New Zealand’s previous inaction on these issues and the working group’s lack of expertise on the Pacific region are both errors. He notes “New Zealand doesn’t have the resources that Australia and the US have, but we do have the expertise and we have the contacts.
“This is one of the few times where we’re actually in time to do something to make a change in the region – if we’re proactive and use all the tools at our disposal. And we can’t address what’s happening in New Zealand if we’re not addressing what’s happening in the Pacific.”