GETTING A HANDLE ON DRUG ABUSE

No sensible person doubts that the scourge of drug abuse is the cause
of all manner of social ills, and reports that gangs are using
sophisticated new marketing methods to push the likes of Ecstasy and
methamphetamine on to school-age people are thoroughly alarming,
comments the Manawatu Standard in an editorial.

But despite a report from the United Nations that New Zealand has one
of the highest rates of abuse of such drugs in the world - second only
to Thailand's - there appear to be some distinctly mixed messages
coming through with regard to the incidence of drug use in this country.

Some pharmacies, for example, are now saying that the number of P
"shoppers" looking for ingredients appears to have declined, while the
police, who are at the sharp end of dealing with the issue, seem
unsure about how much abuse is going on. As well, one of the country's
leading researchers into methamphetamine, Massey University's Chris
Wilkins, says New Zealand's figures and remarkably high world ranking
may have been distorted.

The notion that there is an epidemic of such drug abuse has been
around for a while, but some agencies seem more convinced about it
than others.

Of course, any drug abuse is bad news, for individuals as well as for
society as a whole; but before a wholesale moral panic sets in, we
need to know for sure who is using what, how much is being consumed,
and what the effects are. There is some danger at present of losing
sight of what is going on around us, for alcohol is still by far the
most widely used drug of choice in New Zealand and its effects in
terms of road crashes, for example, and violence both in homes and on
our streets continue every day unabated.

It would be astonishing indeed, even given our well-entrenched gang
culture, if Thailand were the only other country where more P is
abused, given its relatively late arrival in New Zealand. In some
other countries, it has been around for years.

P is also said to be a highly expensive drug and one that quickly puts
users under its influence, resulting in often-drastic changes in
behaviour, up to and including a state of murderous psychosis.

If these things, or something like them, are happening on any sort of
widespread scale, as is suggested by claims of an epidemic, one would
expect there to be rather more social visibility of the problem than
is presently the case.

This is not to minimise drug use. Certainly, the number of clandestine
meth labs which have been detected by the police has shown a sharp
rise in the past few years.

And where there is a demand there will always be a supply, especially
if the supplier can create the demand in the first place, which is
said to have occurred in some cases with P. But it is altogether too
complacent to say drug use will always be with us and to soft-pedal
over its use, because not all drugs are "recreational". In the case of
P, there is mounting evidence that it drives users to crime to finance
the habit, as well as being physically and mentally destructive. So it
is a huge health issue as well as a possibly burgeoning law-and-order
problem.

One more thing: First the United States did it in Iraq, now the
Russians have done it to the US. So it must surely be only a matter of
time before an appropriately marked set of playing cards appears in
this country that tells us us more than we need to know about the
denizens of the Beehive.