ECSTASY MAKER INSPIRED MOTHER'S DRUG-GROWING VENTURE

A disgraced Napier teacher, facing years in jail for drug-making, is
believed to have also inspired his mother to grow cannabis in an attempt to
finance a kidney operation for his dying brother.

The son died before his mother was convicted. She served eight months in
jail and lost her home last year.

Yesterday in the High Court in Napier Reuben John Martin, 31, and cousin
Adam McHardy, 32, were convicted for making the party drug ecstasy.

Martin was a science teacher at Napier Boys' High School when police
uncovered the laboratory from which he and his cousin, a tannery company
supervisor and the drug-scheme chemicals buyer, planned to launch a
multi-million dollar business making and selling the party drug ecstasy.

The raid on a garage in Osier Road, Greenmeadows, on April 19 last year,
came just a month after the Court of Appeal endorsed a district court
decision ordering his mother to forfeit her Meeanee Road home.

She had been convicted of growing cannabis to finance a kidney replacement
for her dying son - Reuben Martin's younger brother, Troy. However Troy
Martin subsequently died.

Both drug-producing ventures were huge failures.

Dianne Martin said she never sold any cannabis from her crop, which police
estimated to be worth over $350,000, but served eight months of a two-year
jail sentence and then lost the home under provisions of Proceeds of Crimes
Act.

Her second husband was also convicted on a charge of allowing the property
to be used for an offence against the Misuse of Drugs Act, a judge
apparently accepting his reluctance in the venture amid his wife's
desperation and sentencing him to two months' periodic detention.

It is not clear whether Reuben Martin and Adam McHardy sold any of their
produce, which police estimate could have yielded up to $1.5 million, but in
the High Court in Napier yesterday they pleaded guilty to charges of
manufacturing criminal class A and B forms of ecstasy and a class C drug,
trimethoxyamphetamine.

Justice Goddard remanded each on bail for sentence in the court on Friday
next week, when the Crown could seek sentences of well over 10 years in jail
- - possibly comparing it with the 16 years imposed on Cambodian Dy Lay who in
September last year was sentenced in the same court for importing more than
$12 million of heroin.

The guilty pleas, relating to manufacture between January 1 and April 19
last year, came as the two were about to go on trial. Alternative charges of
conspiring to manufacture drugs were then dropped.

Martin was represented by Steve Manning, McHardy by Leo Lafferty.

Russell Collins, appearing for the Crown and asked to read the summary to
the court by Justice Goddard, said Class A and B ecstasy tablets sold for
$60 to $100 a tablet.

The ESR estimated that the Greenmeadows lab, one of only three
ecstasy-making operations uncovered by police nationwide in the last two
years, would have been capable of producing at the least 1.5kg of ecstasy -
15,000 capsules or between $900,000 and $1.5m worth of drugs.

McHardy had been posing as his employer's research and development officer
in order to purchase chemicals which could be used to manufacture drugs.

Between December 1999 and April 2002 he bought $31,000 worth of chemicals
and equipment, making bogus statements to the supplying companies about his
intended use of the chemicals.

Mr Collins said it appeared he was helped with filling in the forms by
Martin, who spent a total of $17,000 on chemicals purchased through his job,
and also falsified documentation required by the suppliers.

For a month after the quantity of the ingredient purchases began to arouse
suspicions, police observed Martin collecting goods from his cousin's
workplace at Graeme Lowe Tannery in Pandora and taking them to the garage in
Greenmeadows.

When police took both men into custody on April 18 last year, McHardy sent a
text message to Martin to clear the lab but Martin was already in custody,
Mr Collins said.

Over the following three days there was a thorough examination of a garage
converted into a lab, complete with blacked-out windows and a ventilation
system, on Martin's Greenmeadows property.

It was full of chemicals, the majority of which pointed to the manufacture
of Class A ecstasy. They were highly flammable and toxic - a cause for
concern for police because it was across the road from a girls' college, and
there was potential for an explosion, Mr Collins said.

ESR scientist Dale Semple, who gave evidence at the depositions hearing last
November, described it as one of the most sophisticated labs the ESR had
encountered.

Among the exhibits was safrole, the main ingredient in manufacturing MDA or
MDMA, and a 20-litre bucket containing a liquid solution a stage away from
becoming ecstasy.

New Zealand made ecstasy tended to end up as gel capsules rather than
tablets because pill presses were hard to find here, Mr Collins said. There
were capsules found in the lab.

As part of the investigation both men's banking records were checked.

There were unexplained cash deposits of nearly $15,000 in one of McHardy's
accounts, and more than $20,000 worth of unexplained cash deposited in one
of Martin's accounts.

There had been a dramatic growth in the use and manufacturing of synthetic
drugs in New Zealand over the past 10 years, Mr Collins said. In 2000 police
found nine drug laboratories, 41 in 2001 and last year 147.

Martin had been a teacher at Napier Boys High School since 1999. Staff at
the school, where another of Martin's brothers was also a pupil, were
shocked - the teacher was regarded as enthusiastic and respected by
students.