30 April 2016 – Author: Adele Redmond – Source: stuff.co.nz
The tell-tale signs of a meth lab never change.
Stained walls and door frames, trash overflowing with pill packets, blackened windows and CCTV-style security are usually evidence that an ordinary house harbours illegal secrets.
MethScreen’s Kevin says New Zealand’s most dangerous drug is often an invisible one.
Kevin and partner Tracey have been testing South Island homes for meth contamination for three years – “everything from a two-bedroom unit to a multimillion-dollar property,” Tracey said – but have noticed increased interest in their business over the past six months.
“When we started getting involved in the industry we might have had a test every two or three weeks. It was pretty reactive, someone might have had a suspicion about a tenant,” Kevin said.
“Now it’s becoming a lot more common. There seems to be an awareness where people consider as well as a building report having a meth test. Property owners are looking at a way to manage the meth problem and protect their tenants.”
They may have increased reason to worry.
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A recent Tenancy Tribunal decision ordered a Tuakau landlord to pay more than $7500 to his former tenants for unknowingly renting them a meth-contaminated house.
Under a new health and safety law landlords and property managers must also protect the health of contractors on a property if there’s a chance methamphetamine has been used or manufactured there.
It only takes a few months smoking meth, or “P”, for chemical particles that cause breathing problems, headaches and nausea to attach to dust and leach into walls and carpets.
“You just need one tenant who does that and that’s your life savings and retirement,” Tracey said.
Most of what she and Kevin see in Nelson is the result of meth use rather than its manufacture, which causes much lower levels of contamination.
In three months 44 per cent of Nelson properties they tested returned positive results.
Half of those needed “remediation”, or decontamination, the cost of which can range from $5000 to $35,000 for the homeowners.
Ministry of Health guidelines recommend 0.5 micrograms of methamphetamine or iodine residue per 100 centimetres squared as the baseline for contamination.
Kevin said Nelson houses have shown positive readings up to 100 mcg per 100sq cm.
“Ultimately every decontamination company is trying to get that number below 0.5. Sometimes I think it’s difficult to get to zero unless you strip out the whole house.”
Ray White Richmond rental properties manager Lyn McKenzie said the property company now offers meth testing to prospective landlords.
“The whole meth thing is on the increase, there’s no doubt about it, and especially with the new health and safety regulations we have to be very careful.”
Nelson police have said the drug is as widely available as cannabis in the region, and police statistics show 77 per cent of meth labs are found in residential properties.
Drug detection specialist Steve Williams said he fielded “a large increase” in enquiries about testing from those purchasing or renting out properties in Nelson over summer.
“It’s just remarkable how it’s grown over the last year,” he said.
“People are becoming increasingly aware of the dangers they may face purchasing a contaminated property, from both a health and financial point of view.
“Nelson’s a great place but there’s definitely a lot of meth around here. Our [meth use] figures are exactly the same as the national ones (about 1 per cent of the general population). Last year it was way less than what it is now.”
What’s more, today’s P labs are highly mobile, rarely in the cook’s own home and easy to conceal.
Methamphetamine can be made in a backpack.
Williams said what the public perceives as “a big technical laboratory with pipes and wires” is more often one plastic bottle containing a two-layered liquid – also known as the small-batch “Shake’n’Bake” method of production.
“That’s the Kiwi ingenuity. They [meth cooks] would maybe use a water distiller or a hot plate from The Warehouse.
“It’s not very often that people will turn their own house into a meth lab, they do it somewhere else.”
Photographer Glenn Bisdee rented out his home during a period overseas only to have it become “a house of disrepute”.
The house was never used as a lab to his knowledge, but Bisdee said a neighbour raised concerns that the new tenant never took out the rubbish.
“When we got in, all the lightbulbs had gone because they were being used as pipes.
“I knew he was a bad seed but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. What a mistake. It turned into an absolute balls-up.”
One landlord, who did not wish to be named, used a commercial kit to test one of her properties this week after a tip-off from another tenant.
When traces of methamphetamine were found on two walls, the landlord warned the tenants that they needed to clean up their act.
“It’s a very real danger. I have to keep onto it especially because it’s so fresh.
“My fear is, at the moment, the rental isn’t making money. It only takes one incident of manufacturing and you’re left with a lemon. That’s 15, 20 years of investment.”
She estimated replacing carpets and curtains would cost at least $10,000 but was remaining calm about the situation.
“I don’t think they [the tenants] realised at all what the outcome would be. They probably thought they weren’t manufacturing it so they would be fine.
“I think it really hit home to them what I had found and that basically they can’t do it because then they have got no home.”
‘WE LET THE TESTS DO THE TALKING’
Things aren’t always as bad as they seem.
One house taught Kevin and Tracey not to leap to conclusions.
The residential home had all the markers of problem property, Kevin said.
“It had staining on the walls, chemical burns on the carpet and skirting boards and a strange smell.
“The window was blacked out in only one room so it was looking like something was happening.”
But the landlord, who was “very afraid” of the possibility of contamination, need not have been concerned.
Much to everyone’s surprise, tests on the property came back negative.
After a bit more digging, Kevin and Tracey learned the tenant was running a home tanning salon.
“We don’t go into places now with any preconceived notions because people can get hysterical,” Kevin said.
“We let the tests do the talking.”
‘I THOUGHT IT WAS A MICKEY MOUSE DRUG’
Williams is too aware of the damage meth can cause from his years working for the National Clandestine Laboratory Response Team, New Zealand’s specialist P lab clean-up gang.
Coming to New Zealand from the U.K, he thought meth was “a Mickey Mouse drug”.
“I’ll tell you now that it’s the worst drug I have ever encountered.
The people who are making it are not trained chemists, they will make meth like they make a cake. They’re mixing these chemicals together in filthy conditions. I wouldn’t have a cup of tea with these people.”
In two years with the Auckland-based response team Williams uncovered more than 100 labs.
He remembers the worst clean up he ever attended at a large farm barn in Northland.
“When we walked in there we just stopped in our tracks. The whole barn was littered with chemicals, cook offs, it was just horrendous. It took us six full days to clean it out. We had to list the [contaminated] items as ‘bulk’ in the end. It was just astronomical.
Despite donning full-body protective gear Williams said he went home from the first day of cleaning with his face red “like the first day of a sunburn”.
“Everyone talked about how dangerous [meth] is, but that really brought it home to me. If that was my face, what was it doing to the inside of me?”
Although he was at the front line of the Police’s war on meth, Williams said ordinary New Zealanders got caught in the crossfire.
A family whose Coromandel bach became badly contaminated had no idea the man they rented it to was from a “major [criminal] organisation”.
“I remember seeing a picture of a little boy holding this big fish out and I thought this family doesn’t even know he’s been cooking P in here.
“That’s the danger of it. Sometimes we would go into a house and it was just like my house or your house.
“You wouldn’t know that there was a P lab there until you went into the garage, or looked in a cupboard.”
