We’re ‘losing the fight’ against meth: This is how its use doubled in just months

Saturday, 26 April 2025

At the end of last year, the use of methamphetamine in New Zealand suddenly spiked. It doubled in just a few months.

The huge increase in meth use, seen with a 96% rise in waste water detection of methamphetamine in the second half of 2024, hit the Government, police and others by surprise. When those figures came out in March, some questioned if that result was even possible. The Government tasked a ministerial advisory group with tackling the problem.

That expert group’s initial response compared New Zealand’s battle against meth to the Titanic.

“New Zealand is losing the fight against transnational, serious, organised crime,” the advisers warned.

“Despite these efforts, organised crime is worse than ever and continues to grow,” they concluded.

At this point, they said New Zealand’s fight against meth was only a “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”.

How did we get here?

Over time, the sources of New Zealand’s methamphetamine have changed.

In 2011, amid concerns of “clan labs” cooking up meth locally using ingredients such as the cold and flu medicine, the Government banned the sale of medicine containing pseudoephedrine.

But in the middle of last year, pseudoephedrine was reintroduced - sparking some questions about whether “clan labs” were to blame for last year’s meth spike.

Insights from the Police National Drug Intelligence Bureau have ruled out the availability of pseudoephedrine as a significant cause of the massive rise in methamphetamine use.

“Domestically-made methamphetamine continues to be predominantly made from importations of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, so there is unlikely any correlation between increased meth use and availability of the pre-cursor substance here,” police said.

Instead, police, Government officials, and public health experts, believe a competition war between transnational cartels is driving down the price of methamphetamine and flooding the market with imported meth.

Professor Chris Wilkins, a public health expert behind the NZ Drug Trends Survey, said the black market had bucked inflation, and prices were falling.

“Everything in the legal market has been going up with inflation, but it seems illegal drugs prices have been immune from that,” he said.

For methamphetamine, the Drug Trends Survey showed a 36% decline in price.

“There seems to be a little bit of a price war going on. Increasingly, even for New Zealand, some methamphetamine is coming from North and South America rather than traditional Asian locations,” Wilkins said.

The competition between cartels has been pushing down the price of drugs for New Zealand consumers.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said global drug cartels were targeting New Zealand because meth prices here had tended to be higher.

Customs Minister Casey Costello said the re-opening of New Zealand’s borders following the pandemic had brought Aotearoa into the global price war between drug cartels.

“The cartels are now manufacturing meth. And synthetic drugs like meth are far easier to make, so supply has boomed and the prices that people pay for the drug here are very high internationally,” she said.

How bad is it?

During the second half of 2024, meth use started to quickly increase. For the first time in history, New Zealand’s estimated meth use rose above 20kg per week.

For reference, the typical dose of meth for recreational use is just 0.1 grams.

So each week, the latest figures show meth could be used more than 200,000 times in New Zealand.

Given the data is still new, public health experts said it was still too soon to know whether the spike in meth use was being driven by pre-existing users consuming more or by new users.

Massey University’s Shore Research Centre said the latest figures indicated “a saturated methamphetamine market”.

What is the Government doing about it?

Luxon said the Government was focused on “defending our borders” and would work with Pacific nations, which were also being targeted by organised crime.

“We need to make sure that we're actually disrupting distribution, which is why we are smashing gangs and going after them really hard. And the third thing we do is make sure we're supporting addicts,” he said.

As well as the Ministerial Advisory Group, which started in November, Luxon tasked Police Minister Mark Mitchell, Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey, and Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith to lead the Government response to meth use.

Labour police spokesperson Ginny Andersen said the Government should have been more prepared to combat transnational crime, but she said it had been distracted by “surface actions like banning gang patches”.

“That was a waste of resources and time. The Government has the wrong focus on how to get on top of organised crime,” she said.

Costello also has responsibility for tackling transnational organised crime.

She said New Zealand’s isolation used to provide security, but highly organised crime groups were travelling by sea and dropping drugs around the Pacific.

“Customs are stopping more and more drugs entering the country and are working with police to make seizures and break supply chains,” she said.

She denied accusations from the Public Service Association and Labour that the Government’s cost cutting had impacted Customs.

“Customs has gained rather than lost capability. Over the last two years it has increased the number of frontline maritime positions as well as those in intelligence and investigative functions,” she said.

She said there would be law changes and increases to Customs capability to help stop meth imports.