Pubdate: Sun, 27 Mar 2005
Source: Sunday Star-Times (New Zealand)
Copyright: 2005 Sunday Star-Times
Contact:  http://www.sundaystartimes.co.nz
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1064
Author: Tim Hume And Irene Chapple
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)

'I SMOKED P AND I'M OK . . .'

Is P really that bad? No, say a growing group of middle-class users
who claim they use the drug without negative consequences. By TIM HUME
and IRENE CHAPPLE. The drug P has been good to Matt Heath. As well as
occasionally spicing up the Auckland comedian-musician's nights out,
the vilified drug inspired an underground hit single for his band,
Deja Voodoo.

When Heath and bandmate Chris Stapp returned from London in 2003, they
found newspapers full of headlines about P.

His curiosity piqued, Heath tried the drug at a party, but was
distinctly underwhelmed. Detecting fertile comedic ground in what they
saw as an over-reaction to methamphetamine, he and Stapp wrote the
song "P" (sample lyric: "I smoked P and I'm OK . . . I smoked P and
didn't cut anyone's hands off").

"It's saying the idea that anyone who takes P is immediately going to
grab a samurai sword and start running amok is bullshit," says Heath,
referring to Antonie Dixon, the P-user convicted of murder last week.

Now, as one of the few people willing to talk about meth use in
anything other than condemnatory tones, Heath uncomfortably finds
himself a public face for the drug.

He said he was just drawing attention to the divide between the
official line, which holds that the drug is an unprecedented social
scourge that creates violent psychopaths, and the experiences of a
growing number of middle-class, recreational meth users, his friends
included, who routinely use the drug socially without any major
consequences.

"I'm not saying some people don't go crazy on it, but for the vast
majority of people it's like, 'P, so what?"'

Heath's attitude is common, but his openness is rare. Media attention
to P has been intense, and some recreational users spoken to by the
Sunday Star-Times said publicity had put them off the drug. Others
considered the press histrionic rather than informative, and said it
only served to hinder the fight. The drug, they said, was becoming
increasingly entrenched in middle-class circles.

Police Association president Greg O'Connor recognised P as a problem
10 years ago. It irked him that police did not take action then,
leaving it to infiltrate all classes of society.

P had created millionaire drug dealers who had arisen from a gang
culture, said O'Connor, creating an infrastructure for organised crime
which he expected would ease the way for other hard drugs, such as
cocaine and heroin.

Last week police also warned of "kiddie packs" - smaller deals
intended to appeal to younger users - coming on to the market. And
last week a Hamilton man believed to be high on P jumped into the
Waikato River and drowned.

Detective Inspector Don Allan, manager of the National Bureau of
Criminal Intelligence, says the P market is worth $168 million a year,
roughly the same as the cannabis trade.

Police said about one in 10 New Zealanders aged 19 to 29 has tried the
drug, which sells for $80 to $100 a point (0.1g).

O'Connor said perhaps several dozen king-pins were driving the market,
and they often had covers such as a motor-trade business.

The business had grown exponentially, and "the legacy of P is
organised crime".

As for people who said they could take it and be OK, O'Connor said:
"It very quickly becomes a monkey on your back."

Withdrawal of P will not necessarily lead to the physical symptoms
associated with heroin, but P users can become "dependents" with
severe psychological problems such as paranoia, tendencies to
self-harm and violence.

It depletes dopamine, a brain chemical associated with feelings of
pleasure, which can lead to long-term degenerative brain diseases.

O'Connor says Heath's comments remind him of "when Dave Dobbyn said
'tell those policemen to put their batons away', just prior to when
the (Queen St) riots erupted. We don't want to wait until the
musicians think it's OK."

Crack and heroin have long stalked the streets of New York and London,
and Australia's big cities have shooting galleries for addicts to use
clean needles, but New Zealand is not as familiar with hard drugs.
However, amphetamine use is not new.

David Herkt, who is researching a documentary on drugs in New Zealand
between 1960 and 2005, said speed tablets of different sorts dated
back decades.

During the world wars, soldiers used pep pills, and in the 1960s
housewives used amphetamine pills as appetite supressants to lose weight.

In the 1990s New Zealand moved on to ecstasy, and media coverage -
triggered particularly by the death of 27-year-old Ngaire O'Neill in
1998 - was sensationalist.

Then P arrived and media focus shifted to the drug, which gives users
a frenetic boost of energy.

P-making in New Zealand was slowed by a law, which came into force
last October, tightening controls on the sale of pseudoephedrine, a
key P ingredient found in common cold medications.

Police said a purer form of P, called "ice", was now increasingly
being imported from China.

Some said the media had been a prime marketing tool for meth, marking
it out as dangerous and exciting.

But O'Connor said the coverage - which talked of an "epidemic" or
"scourge" of P - had helped the police fight.

Despite this, P remains common and many users are young,
apartment-dwelling professionals with no mortgage and a high
disposable income, who dabble in the drug at the weekend.

Tony Smith, an intensive care specialist at Auckland Hospital and
medical adviser at St John ambulance, has acquaintances who have used
P for years.

"These are people who are affluent, intelligent, professional, highly
functioning and continue to be highly functioning while using
methamphetamine."

Smith's acquaintances are among the many who appear to be able to use
P without negative consequences. But his job brings him into contact
with the flipside of the drug, as he encounters a small number of
emergency patients every week who P has turned into "violent
psychopaths".

"When things go wrong they go very wrong."

Many of the well-read, well-paid middle-class users viewed the
reported link between the drug and violent crime as media hysteria.

Even those who worked in drug rehabilitation questioned whether the
public image of the drug was accurate.

Major Ian Hutson, director of the Salvation Army Bridge centres, a
residential alcohol and drug treatment programme, had reservations
about whether P was the great scourge of society police made it out to
be.

"I'm not trying to say the drug is not dangerous," he said. "But
there's a history with marijuana and ecstasy of drugs being talked
about as if doomsday was coming. The objectivity of the debate is not
always there and it's difficult to say whether the rhetoric about P is
not another of those overstatements."

The Salvation Army programme did not see a lot of P addicts coming
through its doors, and Hutson said knowledge of the drug, like whether
there could be a "safe" level of experimentation, was limited. It was
clear P was a dangerous drug - people on it seemed to deteriorate
quicker than those on other drugs, took longer to detox and had mood
swings which were harder to control. But Hutson said alcohol was still
far and away the biggest problem substance.

"If indeed P is as bad as people are saying, then we're paying the
price for past scare tactics over previous drugs," he said. "People
smell an over-reaction."

As a result, many continued to use the drug in the face of police
warnings, although users agreed recent high-profile cases had given
the drug a nasty reputation.

P users spoken to by the Star-Times all referred to Dixon, whose
paranoid stare has replaced the image of cleancut newsreader and
former addict Darren McDonald, saying such high-profile examples of
the drug's dangers had played a central role in stripping it of any
chic.

One person spoken to by the Star-Times said he knew friends who smoked
P, but they were "too ashamed" to talk to the press. "Rebecca" is a
38-year old former recreational user who works in the media. "A few
years ago it had that allure of it being a 'new drug' . . . now it's
got a really seedy and nasty edge to it - thank you Antonie Dixon."

Cocaine, which was gradually becoming more accessible, was the more
desirable option, she said.

"I was talking to a friend about this over the weekend, and she said
'P is for peasants'."

Simon, a 32-year-old in the music industry, has used P frequently over
the past two years and has watched it change from an openly used drug
to one where only trusted peers will be invited to join a session.

"In 2000, people where quite open about it, they were using it in the
toilets heaps with p-pipes - it was the new naughty thing to do, but
now it has such a stigma people don't openly invite you to join."

Simon was frustrated by what he saw as a focus on P over other
dangerous substances.

"It's just speed, and that has been available for ages. It is
supercharged . . . but people just have to take some responsibility.
It's my personal choice."

Plus, said Simon: "Aren't we being a bit hypocritical when people get drunk 
and smash other people up? Where's the stigma there? It's just, 'oh, yeah 
we're having a drink mate'." Smith also saw a degree of hysteria 
surrounding P, but said it was justified to an extent. P was different to 
other drugs.

"People don't become violent psychopaths through regular ecstasy use.
With P, people's lives can be completely, utterly and irrevocably
destroyed - not just the users but the people around them. It strikes
me the disadvantages to society outweigh the advantages."

He knew of several previously high-achieving people whose businesses
and marriages had collapsed under the financial pressure of supporting
a P habit.

Even Heath acknowledged the drug's bad side.

P had never had any adverse effect on him, but he had occasionally
glimpsed it in others - including a friend who eventually lost his
business, and one wasted New Plymouth concert-goer who arrived at a
Deja Voodoo gig announcing he was going to break a bottle on Heath's
head for what he had said about P.

"I don't know what his angle was because we weren't saying anything
bad about P," Heath said. "That was the first time I thought, 'Yeah, P
can make some people pretty crazy'.

"But I reckon the people P turns into dickheads were dickheads anyway.
There are people who have six beers and want to punch someone in the
head."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Derek