Meth testing: From boom industry to pariahs

Thursday, 27 June 2019

Summit property management general manager Stewart Henry says about 10 per cent of landlords are now testing their properties for meth contamination.

It was not that long ago that Miles Stratford was something of a household name in property investment circles. He was the face of Meth Solutions, one of the country's biggest meth-testing businesses.

The company would put out a regular 'MethMap' report that struck fear into the heart of any potential house buyer.

It showed the percentage of homes its testers found to be contaminated by meth in various parts of the country. In the last widely published map, in September 2017, 43 per cent of the houses MethSolutions tested were 'contaminated'. Coromandel hit 46 per cent.

Coupled with stories of hundreds of thousands of dollars being slashed from the value of houses found to have contamination, and even people demolishing some buildings entirely, it was concerning stuff.

* Meth contamination rules still unclear, confusion for landlords

* HNZ meth tested after a DHB told them a tenant was seeking drug help, Tenancy Tribunal ruling says**

Now, Stratford, operating out of an evangelical-type church in a semi-industrial Auckland complex, says business has halved. He's had to lay off staff. Where once his smiling photo popped up in inboxes across the country, now he is fuming at what he says is an orchestrated campaign to take down the meth-testing industry.

The reason? Last year's report from the prime minister's former chief science adviser, Peter Gluckman, which said almost all the claims the meth-testing industry staked its existence on were false.

Unless someone was buying a house where the previous inhabitants were virtually smuggling their clan lab out the back window, testing was probably unnecessary.

After that report was published, the number of people requesting meth tests plummeted.

Bindi Norwell, chief executive at the Real Estate Institute, said agents estimated that up to 30 per cent of buyers, or 2100 a month, used to specify a meth test as a condition. Now, it's as low as 3 per cent to 5 per cent.

Miles Stratford in one of the offices left empty after he laid staff off.

It was big money. The cost of testing can range from a couple of hundred dollars through to several thousand.

At least 100 meth business incorporated since 2015 have been removed from the companies register.

The report by Gluckman and Anne Bardsley found that New Zealand authorities had made a 'leap in logic' setting standards. Essentially, a standard based on what 'clan labs' should be cleaned to was now being used as a trigger to start cleaning here, despite no real health risk at that level.

That standard was NZS8510:2017.

It is still the official standard in force and says that high-use areas with a level of more than 1.5 micrograms per square metre should be regarded as contaminated, whether that contamination came from meth being smoked in a house, or manufactured.

Limited-use areas could get away with 3.8 micrograms, according to the standard. Most insurers have so far linked their policies to those rules.

'The development of the standard followed Standards New Zealand's robust process in compliance with the provisions of the Standards and Accreditation Act 2015, and aligned with international practice,' the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment said.

'The content of the standard was developed by the standards development committee, comprising of 21 relevant industry and government experts.'

The issue, some point out, was that the board was stacked with representatives of cleaning companies in whose interest it was to ensure the standard was low and clean up was required in more houses.

Among their number was Stratford, Billy Royal, from NZ Remediation Services, Paul Pritchard, from Cleaning Systems, Victor Boyd, from Contaminated Site Solutions, and John Campbell, from NZ Decontamination Services.

'Standards NZ followed their process of 'balance' for the committee – we questioned this process and I believe it is still being reviewed. I think the main problem with the standard setting was that the wrong questions were being asked, and the standard was set for an unnecessary purpose,' Bardsley said.

Bardsley and Gluckman said in their report the standard was out by a factor of at least 10.

In a house where meth had only been consumed, contamination would have to hit 15 micrograms per square metre before it needed to trigger a clean-up.

Gluckman said he wouldn't be worried about 'toddlers crawling around on the floor' until the meth residue reached the level of several hundred micrograms per square metre.

The level of contamination in a lab site before a clean up was needed would be lower but only because the meth was a signal of potential other harmful chemicals being present.

This week, Caroline McElnay, director of public health at the Ministry of Health said it had receive no notifications of 'poisoning due to chemical contamination of the environment' which is how a case of someone affected by living in a contaminated property would be reported.

'We have not been made aware of any cases where people have suffered adverse health effects as a result of living in properties where methamphetamine has been smoked. Exposure to meth in such properties is unlikely to have an acute effect which may make case identification difficult.'

Bardsley said no one was suggesting that meth was a safe drug.

'But there's no evidence that you can get sick from meth on the walls. It's not volatile, it doesn't come off the walls, Unless you're rolling around in it, licking it off the walls, if you've cleaned the areas you come into contact with you'll be fine.'

Bardsley expected her report to get a reaction.

'We knew when we did the report we were opening up a minefield.'

Landlords and real estate agents were 'buried so deep' that another perspective would be a shock, she said.

'The industry response was, I guess, not unexpected. That they think they have a leg to stand on with their arguments has floored me.

'I don't feel sorry for them. I think they could have saved themselves. They've made themselves a target because of how they behaved.'

Bardsley said New Zealand was unusual in that there had been concern here about contamination from smoking.

In the United States, the focus was on laboratories.

Requests to test for meth have dropped dramatically.

The meth-testing industry had now started to move from New Zealand to Australia, she said.

'Some of the players are operating over here, trying to hype things up.

'The industry is trying to say New Zealand is ahead in the way it's dealing with it but the way of dealing with it is completely wrong. Australia should not be following our standards. The industry is trying to get them to go in the same direction but people are waking up.'

The Tenancy Tribunal now uses the Gluckman report to determine damages for landlords.

If the industry has now been chopped off at the knees, how did it grow so big in the first place?

Bardsley said it was given a foothold by Housing New Zealand's zero-tolerance policy for methamphetamine, with high-profile cases of people being evicted from their homes when contamination was found.

Private homeowners picked up on the concern about how it might relate to other properties.

'The industry hyped it up with completely false statements.'

In 2010, the Ministry of Health provided guidelines on the clean-up of meth labs. These guidelines were peer-reviewed by three people from a meth testing firm, among others.

In 2015 Local Government New Zealand and a number of other organisations requested the development of a new standard for the testing and decontamination of methamphetamine-contaminated properties, including where it had only been used.

This was to address inconsistencies in the approach to dealing with meth contamination including the lack of accreditation for testing and clean-up companies.

The Ministry of Health issued a report, which was then superseded by the standard.

All the while, the Tenancy Tribunal was taking a hard line, awarding costs in the tens of thousands against tenants in some cases.

Methsolutions' report on the state of New Zealand's houses was widely read.

Eric Crampton, chief economist at the New Zealand Institute, said it was probably a snowballing moral panic that went something like this.

'Nobody wants meth users as tenants. They're too high risk.

'Some at Housing New Zealand started applying far too stringent a test. It's easier to make those kinds of mistakes when it's on the public's account rather than coming out of a landlord's own back pocket.

'That then started triggering news stories about meth contamination, making the issue salient for others. Some tenants started demanding them, and some landlords started running them, taking the Housing New Zealand example as what good landlords should be doing.

'And every meth contamination and clean-up provided another news story that fed demand for more.

'It's an example then, of what Timur Kuran calls an 'availability cascade' – a few news stories on a weird scary thing has journalists watching out for more of them, so they all become more likely to be published but at the same time, in this case, also increase the number of real events because it fuels demand for more testing.'

Ross Bell, chief executive of the Drug Foundation, said the industry was self-promoting and self-fulfilling.

'They'd say we will come and test and if we find meth at a certain level we can do the clean-up as well.'

He saw instances of real estate agents working with testing companies so they could both recommend to a buyer that they had a test, and do it for them, for a fee.

He blames the media, too. Many stories were published about people losing the value of their homes or having to spend hundreds of thousands on clean up.

'It was reported at face value without a critique of 'is this really a thing'.'

Bell also questioned the industry practice of taking a number of swabs and combining them for the final total contamination level of a house. So if you had three 0.5 microgram swabs and a 1 microgram swab, you'd end up with a total of 2.5 micrograms, rather than the average of each result of 0.6.

'That's why some came back at 20 times the recommended amount. It's not true, they were adding the result to get the total.'

Stratford argues there's a reason for the cumulative total being used.

'The problem with focusing on an average, is that it can create a false sense of confidence.

'The average may be within the recommended level across say 10 samples. If there is open use of meth, this reduces the likelihood any one area will exceed. But if it was a hidden meth habit, the contaminants could be in just one or two areas sampled, putting you over.'

Stratford says business is 'different' now.

'You would expect that when the Government lines you up in the crossfire and deliberately targets the industry … if they can do this to one industry they can do it to any industry.'

He's been 'profoundly unfairly targeted,' he says, and has had to lay off about half of his staff although he says the risks associated with meth have increased.

'There's a situation where less people are actively managing the risk.'

He says vested interests prompted the Gluckman report – the Government, because it wanted to limit its exposure through Housing New Zealand, real estate agents because meth was holding up deals, and homeowners because no one wants a meth-infested house.

The much-criticised Housing New Zealand policy of evicting people when meth use was detected was not wrong, he says.

'Those people, on the balance of probabilities, used or allowed meth use in the property. Those communities were no longer affected by people who thought meth was a good idea.'

With a touch of incredulity in his voice, he adds: 'Those people are now being financially compensated.'

He maintains it's still worth screening at the time of purchase to avoid the potential cost of remediation in future.

'But you've got what should be the most trusted source of advice in the country telling them not to bother.

'The Government's said 'don't do it' but they've done that on the back of a statistic they've got that there's a one in 100 chance of getting a level that indicates manufacture. But while that's one in 100 samples they came from only 5 per cent of houses.

'The biggest financial beneficiary of the Gluckman report is the Government.'

The Real Estate Institute's Norwell said more investor buyers wanted meth tests than people who were buying homes to live in.

Andrew King, executive officer of the New Zealand Property Investors Federation, said meth contamination wasn't the big thing it once was.

'When you are made aware of the facts, it is extremely obvious that the low levels of meth residue we were looking at were not going to be harmful,' King said.

'Although technically correct when calling it meth contamination, that word means something quite different o the general public than it does to scientists.

'To most people, if something is contaminated it is harmful, whereas contamination is just the presence of an element that shouldn't normally be there,' he said.

'It is the level of the element that may make it harmful and the previous meth contamination levels were extremely cautious to the point of being ridiculous.'

He said it was still an issue for investors, though, and required Government clarification.

'The Gluckman report still recommended 1.5 micrograms per 100 square centimetres as the cleaning target level if meth has been manufactured in a property.

'This is extremely difficult to achieve and will cost a lot of money. It also creates uncertainty as to whether rental property providers still need to conduct meth tests just in case their rental has been used for manufacture.

'We urgently need clear guidelines from [the] Government to clarify the situation and provide instructions on what, if anything, we should be doing.'

The next step for the industry will be the Residential Tenancies Act amendment bill, which is currently before Parliament.

If passed, the bill will allow methamphetamine regulations to be made under the act, which would be legally binding.

MBIE said the standard, and the Gluckman report, would be considered when developing the regulations.