Meth mania ended four years ago, why has the Govt been so slow to clean up meth contamination standards?

Friday, 25 November 2022

Christchurch property investor Sue Harrison says the country suffered from ‘meth mania’.

Property investor Sue Harrison had a property sale fall over in early 2018 after low levels of meth contamination were found in a rental home she owned.

The country was gripped by what she calls meth contamination mania, and even small amounts of contamination posing no threat to human health were enough to derail a sale.

“Suddenly, we thought we would be ripping off the Gib board,” says Harrison.

Just weeks later meth mania suffered a fatal blow from the prime minister’s chief science adviser Sir Peter Gluckman, who the Government had asked to look into meth contamination.

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Gluckman’s report said there was no evidence of harm to human health from “third hand” exposure to meth residue on walls in rental homes where the drug had been smoked.

It was a huge blow to the private meth-testing industry, which had been doing lucrative meth clean-ups when they detected contamination at levels 10 times lower than Gluckman said was safe.

Yet, 4½ years later, and the Government has only just begun a consultation to set a meth-testing contamination standard for rental homes, with current Housing Minister Megan Woods still blaming National for the “dog’s breakfast” of meth contamination standards.

Government foot-dragging over setting a national meth contamination standard has been an albatross around the necks of landlords, says landlord lobbyist Peter Lewis.

Lewis said before the Gluckman report some landlords were hit with huge, and needless, costs to remediate homes in which meth had been smoked.

After Gluckman, there was an end to rentals becoming unrentable because of the testing industry’s bogus standards.

The toll of the meth mania on some tenants was also high. Some were kicked out of tenancies, including at Kāinga Ora.

When Gluckman’s report was published, the Government ended those evictions, which slotted into a wider tolerance for bad behaviour of Kāinga Ora tenants, which has drawn heavy criticism.

Exposure to ‘third-hand’ residue from meth smoking that has taken place in a home has not been shown to be harmful, Sir Peter Gluckman concluded in 2018.

“There has been a widely held perception that the presence of even low levels of meth residue in a house poses a health risk to occupants,” former housing and urban development minister, Phil Twyford, said at the time.

“As a result, remediation to eliminate contamination has been an extremely costly business for landlords and an upheaval for tenants being evicted at short notice,” Twyford said.

The official explanation for why it has taken the Government to get meth contamination regulations in place is that the Covid pandemic slowed things down.

Lewis said he did not buy that. He believed shame played a big part.

“It’s embarrassing and difficult to say, ‘We were wrong’,” he said.

ACT leader David Seymour says the Government is not expert at regulating, and not always quick at it either.

“It would not turn your hair green, it would not render your children sterile, that was an embarrassing thing for them to admit.”

But after the Gluckman report, Kainga Ora moved quickly to adopt Gluckman’s standards, and so did the Tenancy Tribunal.

Tenants and landlords were no longer suffering needlessly, reducing the sense of political urgency, landlords believed.

ACT party leader David Seymour said regulating had never been an area of expertise for the Government.

Some regulations put in place were done without cost-benefit analysis, he said.

“Other times they can take five years to put anything in place,” Seymour said.

Dr Nick Kim, senior lecturer at the Massey University’s school of health sciences said, the meth-testing industry was built on the back of a number plucked from a 2010 Ministry of Health paper called Guidelines for the Remediation of Clandestine Methamphetamine Laboratory sites.

But, Kim said the contamination level the meth-testing industry adopted for rental properties, and which Kāinga Ora also used, was only ever intended for clandestine lab clean-ups.

Meth labs often contained contamination from other dangerous chemicals used in the manufacture of meth, chemicals which were often hard to spot.

The contamination level the Ministry of Health guidelines contained was never intended as a measurement of when a property owner should begin cleaning.

It was a test to indicate whether a property that had been used as a meth lab, with all those other dangerous chemicals possibly present, had been decontaminated to an acceptable level.

It never made sense to use it to test homes where meth had been smoked, Kim said.

“It was used out of context. They were looking around for a number, and that’s the one they found,” he said.

“They took one number from a single table on a single page, and that was applied.”

Kim said the meth-testing industry was totally unregulated, and as it grew, scientists were prevented from speaking out because they worked for employers, the government included, for which they were not spokespeople.

“They were powerless to do anything,” Kim said.

Gluckman’s report gave everybody permission to say what they thought and everyone expected the Government to pass regulations fast, he said.

When the regulations finally give landlord certainty, Woods said they would be at a level consistent with Gluckman’s report.

Seymour wryly pointed out that after five years of the country having effectively adopted a workable solution using Gluckman’s science, perhaps regulations were not needed.

But Woods said once in place in 2024, landlords could be fined up to $4000 for renting out homes contaminated above the levels set out in the regulations.