Sunday 11th October, 2009

Q+A’s Paul Holmes interviews PM, John Key about methamphetamine.

Points of interest:
- Key set on changing laws, empowering police to “destroy” gangs
- Government’s new anti-P strategy will have worked if the price of P goes up
- Police being given a new “tool box” of “heavy-handed” laws to go after the heads of organised crime
- P a $1-1.5 billion problem, says Prime Minister
- Two percent of adult New Zealanders - 55,000 people – are addicted to P
- Courts not using diversion because of a lack of detox beds available; half of all people looking for bed can’t get one

The interview has been transcribed below. The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can be seen on tvnz.co.nz at,
http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

JOHN KEY interviewed by PAUL HOLMES

PAUL On Thursday the Prime Minister John Key launched a heavyweight cross departmental initiative involving well many departments but principally Police, Customs and Health, and in the speech he declared war on the gangs, he was unequivocal about that and he declared war on the supply of the addictive and ruinous drug P, pure methamphetamine. Good morning Prime Minister welcome to Q+A. We should start I spose with the particular issue that has caught most attention, and that’s banning over the counter sales of drugs containing cold and flu remedies containing pseudoephedrine, and your opponents of that have a point don’t they, why should the greater number of people pay the price for a few bad boys.

JOHN KEY – Prime Minister
Well I think firstly we all pay the price when we have a society that has the scourge of P running through the heart of it, and we're a country where you know roughly we're in the top three in the developed world having a P problem. >From the evidence we see about 2% of the adult population, so 55,000 odd people are addicted to P. Now if you look at the over the counter issue very briefly about somewhere between 70 and 80% of all the cold and flu remedies that you go and buy from the chemist do not include pseudoephedrine, so actually as it currently stands the bulk of people are not buying a tablet that has pseudoephedrine, they will still be able to do so if they go to their doctor, but one in three of those clean labs that we see are used in over the counter product. We're not gonna be on our own here, if you go and have a look at a country like the Netherlands, they’ve completely banned pseudoephedrine in all forms, so we're confident and the scientific advice is confident that you don’t need it.

PAUL I spose you'd be under the belief the temptation really to the bad boys is too great. Alright. How big – I mean do you believe as you say 55,000 people are addicted in New Zealand, wow, how big do you believe the P problem to be, even beyond those 55,000, why do we need such a massive interdepartmental initiative?

JOHN KEY Well it's a billion to a billion and a half dollar problem, it's illegal, so it's difficult to measure.

PAUL How do you know that though?

JOHN KEY Through a whole lot of information that we have, they run everything from surveys to the number of people that are getting treatment, the number of people that can't get treatment, right through to it's not just those 2% that are affected, and this is a crimes industry where people are supporting their drug – I mean our house was robbed in Auckland by a guy that admitted he was supporting a P habit.

PAUL Well let me just mention some numbers there. From your speech you say the average addict has to steal $1,840 worth of goods a month to pay for the habit and a P user, a P addict has to sell drugs worth $5,000 a month again to support the habit, so it's a vicious cycle. How ruinous to people's lives do you believe P is?

JOHN KEY Well totally destructive and one of the problems with P is that it's so addictive that the belief is that people who try it once may never get off the drug, and like all drugs they end up having to feed that habit with greater and greater volumes of the drug, so in the end it's destroying lives, it's destroying families and it's destroying communities.

PAUL Has New Zealand come at this too late, did we miss the boat about ten years ago on this?

JOHN KEY It's never too late, I mean I don’t think you can eradicate drugs from your community, I wish you could, that would be the aim, but I think any politician that tells you they can do that is either being dishonest or a bit deluded in their outlook, but we can get New Zealand away from the position where so many people are addicted to P, and where it's having such a large impact on our community. Now we've got to stop the demand for that and the supply of the drug.

PAUL Okay but let me talk about the gangs because you stood up there on the stage behind that podium and you said 'my message to the gangs is clear, this government is coming after your business and we will use every tool to destroy you' – tough talk but how are you going to do that?

JOHN KEY Well quite a number of things, I mean firstly you’ve gotta change the law, so the Proceeds of Crime Bill that was passed through parliament recently actually changes the burden of proof, and quite clearly says unless you can prove that that money was legally gained, we'll assume it was illegally gained. Secondly we're giving the Police much greater surveillance powers, much greater ability to listen in, we're changing quite a number of Acts of Parliament to do that. Now in one sense that’s quite heavy handed, we're actually giving the Police a tool box which will allow them to go after no just the dealer or the cook, but actually the people at the head of the organised crime rings.

PAUL But who are these people, who are the gangs? Where are these people, presumably they're not the boy with a patch wandering around Wanganui that Michael Laws wants off the street? Free loader, free lancers maybe.

JOHN KEY Some of them might be. Yeah well we think the patch gangs are at the forefront of the distribution of P, but actually there's an organised crime unit internationally driven which is at the forefront of the sourcing of the drug and the importation into New Zealand, so it's a combination of things

PAUL Which brings me on to Customs, you said you have directed, as Prime Minister you have directed Customs to beef up their inceptions of precursors coming into the country, you say they tried something in August that was very effective and they’ve mobilised 40 staff on to this.

JOHN KEY That’s right, so 40 dedicated Customs Officers with new intelligence devices, new techniques of looking at things, obviously I can't spell those out for obvious reasons, but in the two week trial they took 13 million dollars worth of P of street value off the street, now 13 million dollars no longer there, the price went up. It speaks for itself if we do that 52 weeks of the year.

PAUL Mind you do we see when we notice that in the budget you removed from Border Control 3.57 million dollars?

JOHN KEY Yeah, well I mean we're putting a lot of money into this now – 22 million dollars into detox and into rehab, we're giving those resources to Customs, I mean we're expected every government department to actually look for ways to have savings, and I don’t think that should be mixed up with a message of getting tough on drugs.

PAUL Another thing, you asked whether there should be greater use by the courts of diversion of addicts who are found with the drugs and the paraphernalia on them, whether there should be greater diversion by the Police and the courts of addicts into treatment first before it's decided whether there should be a conviction, is that what you mean?

JOHN KEY That’s right, and one of the reasons why the Police don’t do that at the moment, and even the courts are reluctant is there's such a lack of beds and services that are available for detox, one in two people we estimate looking for detox services or rehabilitation services can't get them, so even if the courts or the Police say let's clean this person up, they can't actually do that.

PAUL There's nowhere for them to go. So let me move to this other major part of the initiative. You found 22 million dollars for treatment, for detox beds and rehab, now what you'll do for detox you'll create 20 beds for detoxification, you claim that'll make a detox bed readily available for another 2,700 additional people over three years. How long is that going to mean for each person in detox?

JOHN KEY It'll vary, so some will be a very short session, it might be two or three days, others might be a month, and it will depend on the clinical advice we got. I mean what we've seen from the work the Sir Peter Gluckman did and the drugs task force did, it depends on the clinician, sometimes they think it actually makes sense to have someone there for a month, other times they think three or four days is enough, get them back into the community, back around their loved ones, and then having another form of counselling and mentoring and report.

PAUL Will this be lock down beds by the way?

JOHN KEY Yes it can be, actually when you sign the release form to force yourself to go into the detox programme yes it can be.

PAUL Righto, and just a quick last word on making it easier for families to cope with family members, loved ones, who have been crazy and have gone insane on this drug and haven't slept for weeks around the house. You talked about Alcoholism and Drug Addiction Act of 1966, is it outdated? What do you suggest we do?

JOHN KEY Yes it's totally outdated, and if you have a loved one where you want to get them committed, ultimately it's a very costly and difficult process to go through and we're not gonna look – if we're gonna just try and solve the problem solely with the person who's got the addiction we are deluding ourselves we're going to make progress, it's actually going to be the one nearest to them that will have the ability to do that. Now if we change the Act then civil commitment, basically getting someone committed civilly through the court process will be much quicker and much cheaper.

PAUL Very quickly, how do we know in a year whether this is working?

JOHN KEY Well actually in one sense, the price of P will be much more expensive, because it'll be taking supply off the market.

PAUL Which might drive up the intensity of the crime?

JOHN KEY Well what it will do though is it's supply and demand, I mean ultimately that’s been the problem with P, I mean one of the reasons we didn’t have as big an addiction around cocaine and heroin was it was more expensive, harder to get, and couldn’t manufacture it.

PAUL I thank you very much for your time and your commitment.

ENDS

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