‘P’. It’s amazing one letter can strike so much fear into our communities. But it does and rightly so. ‘P’ (pure methamphetamine to anyone who doesn’t read the Herald) is a nasty nasty substance. It is incredibly addictive, utterly destructive to individuals, their families, their communities and fuels criminal activity among users and suppliers alike. It’s evil.
The Herald and John Key have noticed the fear ‘P’ arouses. Hence their “War-on-P” campaign culminating in Key’s announcement through the Herald on Tuesday that he is considering banning pseudoephedrine. I expect that wasn’t quite the first thing the scientific community was expecting Professor Peter Gluckman to get to work on but, hey, that’s what Key wants.
What I found bizarre about Key going after pseudoephedrine – a substance that brings relief to hundreds of thousands of responsible users – is that just a month ago Key was advocating the exact opposite position with regard to alcohol.
His exact words on Newstalk ZB were: “I think you’ve got to be very careful you don’t get in a situation where you simply whack up the price of booze and everybody gets affected because some, particularly young people, are going out on benders”.
So it’s OK to penalise pseudoephedrine users but not OK to penalise alcohol users. I don’t get it. Both are legal. Both are controlled to some extent. Both have benefits and dangers. Actually, if you think about it, pseudoephedrine helps boost productivity by helping people suffering a cold or the flu get back to work sooner. I don’t think anyone could claim alcohol makes you more productive.
I won’t try to argue that the physical and psychological effects of P as a substance aren’t far greater than those of alcohol. But as far as their respective impacts on our community and economy go, the two aren’t even in the same ballpark. All substance abuse in New Zealand is estimated to cost $6.3 billion each year. Over $5 billion of that is due to alcohol abuse. That leaves just $1.3 billion to all other substances – cannabis, amphetamines (including P), opiates, party pills, the lot.
The prevalence of amphetamine use in New Zealand peaked in 2001 at 5% of the population, but has since decreased to 3.4%. Crystalline methamphetamine peaked at the same time at 0.9%, but has remained relatively stable ever since.
Alcohol causes far more destruction, crime, work absenteeism and family violence than all other drugs. Yet for some reason it’s OK for politicians to go after P but we get incredibly uncomfortable when it comes to alcohol. Why?
The only reason I can think of is that there is no safe level of P use. But then there is no safe level of tobacco use either, and John Key’s in no rush to take the next logical step in tobacco control by banning powerwalls.
I like a drink as much as most people. But I’m prepared to admit that with the freedom to enjoy alcohol comes the responsibility to face up to its less palatable effects. When will the debate about drug and alcohol control start to sensibly reflect the real level of damage substance abuse does to our community and when will Key stop giving mixed messages?
“I don’t think anyone could claim alcohol makes you more productive”.
Millions of business people who have produced billions of dollars of deals over long lunches will disagree.
Kate you might be the exception that proves the rule. Lots of
millionsbillions have been destroyed over those long lunches and what follows as well.Trevor you are referring to lunhces obviously paid for by the taxpayer for civil servants. I referred to “business people”.
You should get out of Wellington more often.
Don’t think I’ve ever been to one of those civil servant lunches paid for by taxpayer – unless you count the state things which I gave up years ago. The gym or a walk was much better use of time.
Probably been to as many decent lunches in my life as you do every couple of months. Best prob the NYYC, food terrible, wine good, decisions brilliant – but obviously wasn’t that NYYC lunch.
I’ve read recently in the Herald that one of the main alternatives to pseudoephedrine, phenylephrine, is just as effective in relieving the symptoms of a cold, according to a pharmacist.
I’ve tried this alternative and find it to be of no use whatsover. Here is an article suggesting that it may be no more effective than a placebo in some cases: http://tinyurl.com/pdzmwm
Shane
You are correct. That is the alternative sold in HK and it’s as useless as Trevor Mallard after a long lunch.
Pseudo is the only decent drug on the market. I can’t source it in HK so when I am back in NZ I freely admit to visiting 5 or 6 pharmacies to stock up on a pack to bring back. Yes, I’m probably on a list of suspect people by now. Who cares Nanny state?
Stuffed if I am selling it to P manufacturers, it’s of far more use for the sniffles.
Of note is that Dubai is the easiest place to buy the drug in large quantities I have found. Again, when I am passing through I pick up as much as I can as everywhere else governments have banned it for no good reason than to protect losers who think that it’s cool to do “P”.
Personally I think we should legalise “P” and put a drug in it that kills people faster.
Cactus Kate.
As a public servant I have to say, there has been no occasion where I was offered a lunch at the taxpayers’ expense which involved booze. I’m struggling to think of an occasion where I was offered a lunch which involved a free lunch.
No, can’t think of it.
I do get tired of reading comments that indicate that public servants get anything from the taxpayer in the way of perquisites. Our role is to serve the public of New Zealand, and provide politically neutral support to whatever government is in power. Every public servant I know is dedicated to filling that role, for not much remuneration, let alone perks. For us, job satisfaction is very important, in my case, I get satisfaction from delivering quality service to the public.
Seriously, if you are going to attack a grouping of people to attack based on your preconcieved ideas at least get some basic facts right. Trevor isn’t a public servant, he is a politician. I’m sure he become a politician for philosophical reasons, not for a chance at free feeds, and I wouldn’t bet cash he would get many of those.
Not to get further off topic in what is a surprisingly sensible post, but it’s impossible to go past this last comment from the chap self-identifying as a public “servant”: “I do get tired of reading comments that indicate that public servants get anything from the taxpayer in the way of perquisites.”
Perquisites? What gets my goat is what so called public “servants” get from the taxpayer the way of salaries.
If delivering quality service to taxpayers is really what motivates you, then might I suggest the best service you could deliver would be your resignation.
The 99.9% of people who aren’t nutjob libertarians might somewhat disagree with you Peter.
I’m sorry you don’t feel you have received good service from public servants Peter.
The public servants I know do provide quality service to the taxpayer. If we all resigned, the state would collapse.
If that is your aim, I understand that the Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement, which is an anarchist organisation working towards a classless, stateless society, is recruiting right now.
Come on Peter, time to back up your beliefs by leaving statist-centric sites like ‘Red Alert’, and cross over to anarchist-communism at awsm.org.nz
Become an enabler of Revolution, Feel the Freedom!
Personally, I prefer the system we have.
Has anyone investigated whether raw ephedra or Ma Huang are suitable for drug manufacture? If a lot of refining is required to turn them into P, maybe they’d be safer than refined psuedoephedrine.
given the option of talking about this intelligently or going for the partisan hackery of “if Key said it, it must be wrong” Labour opts for hackery.
pseudoephedrine sold in chemists is the source of 70% of the pseudoephedrine used to make P.
Neither alcoholic drinks or tobacco are purchased as precursors for more dangerous drugs and are not sold by chemists.
Morphine-containing medications are controlled for exactly the same reason one might want to control the sale of medications containing pseudoephedrine.
feel free to advocate banning alcohol but the argument “why do we ban pseudoephedrine when we don’t ban alcohol” is hardly coherent.
“feel free to advocate banning alcohol but the argument “why do we ban pseudoephedrine when we don’t ban alcohol” is hardly coherent.”
Not what I’m saying. My point is that we need a coherent strategy for dealing with drug (including alcohol) issues and that what Key has said so far is far from it.
I’m also saying that the political response is skewed towards tackling a substance that, destructive as it is, causes a relatively small proportion of the overall damage caused by substance abuse.
I do want intelligent debate around this issue, which has been missing in the media hype which Key is feeding off and it is important to point that out.
Great post Iain. Very similar points to what went through my head as I heard it on the radio yesterday.
The point I always reach when thinking about this issue is that, in many cases, USE of drugs and substances should be upto the individual and generally can be safe for themselves and others. Generally most trouble and harm is caused by the ABUSE of drugs and substances (especially true for alcohol).
As you say, I don’t think a knee jerk ban does much help without a wider discussion and consistent strategy. A strategy needs several other aspects such as education, as well as control of drugs where risk of abuse is too high.
What gets me is that no-one talks about Speed any longer. It’s all P this and Meth that. Whatever happened to good old fashioned Speed?
Back in the early 90′s, you could get a decent kick off a line or two of speed up the nostrils. Throughout the decade, it was increasingly cut with glucose powder and what not. Quality control pretty much went out the window.
In order to circumvent this little rort, a new more powerful standard was introduced; methamphetamine. Harder to cut and pass off. We swapped quality control for upping the dosage and it’s all gone wrong since then.
Their are very legitimate uses for Speed. Cramming for medical exams, relieving sinus congestion, performing double shifts in the factories, partaking in electoral campaigns, truck driving, and of course for the fun of it.
And look at the cost structure of “P”. Codral, for example, costs three quarters of bugger to make at the pharm level. It retails for about $12 at the chemists. Pharm shoppers are a rarity now as so much pours in from China (where we don’t have extradition treaties in place so that’ll never end). But what used to happen is that pack of Codral would be bought for $100 for the cook, who would make about one gram, which sold for $100 a point.
If you can’t think up a regulatory framework that can make a dollar off legalisation, or at least pay for the alleged harms, you need a new abacus.
What I would like to know is just how much pseudoephedrine it takes to produce even a hit of P? How many doses of pseudoephedrine would one need to buy in order to produce enough P for personal comsumption, much less to produce on the scale required to sell? I wonder how much of these cold medications are being sold for nefarious purposes to begin with.
I don’t believe removing the sale of pseudoephedrine from the market will have any real effect at all on the sale and distribution of P and I, as a person who finds the alternatives to pseudoephedrine far less effective, am quite angry at this proposed ban.
[...] Iain Lees-Galloway posted on this early in the life of Red Alert. « A decade old bill II [...]
Will De Cleene, in NZ, speed IS meth cut with glucose.
The most common street term for P is crack, which confuses a lot of youth to smoke/snort/take meth without even knowing, as in America crack is speed, cocaine or crystal cocaine.
Most of the similar looking powder form drugs are meth nowadays.
The War On P movement should be ‘cracking’ (he he) down on keeping the ingredients unavailable to those who manufacture meth as it has now contaminated drugs with less stigma and less media attention such as pills which usually contain MDMA, and kids are much more likely to try these in their school years unaware of the P content.
Slightly off topic but still on the subject, that whole ‘laced’ marijuana rumor is a load of shit as well, crystal meth can be sprayed, sprinkled, whatever, onto marijuana but they second the little stoners light their doobie the meth is burned directly, evaporated and would be near impossible to inhale, it would just exit with the smoke out the end like a cigarette and all residue flushed away to the ash tray.
Anyway, P users don’t waste their time trying to hook dope heads, math is much more expensive then the price of marijuana! P users wouldn’t hesitate to fish through their carpet picking up what they think are p crystals and smoking them let alone sprinkling them on a tinny to sell to some kid.
Cut off the ingredients, cut off the problem.
Go buy some other cough medicine
HARDEN Warning obscene. Holiday next time Trevor UP.
Pseudo ephedrine is playing a role in keeping P on the streets, so get rid of it.
I had to get some pseudoephridrine recently after spending a lot of money and having nothing else work. I could’ve choked to death, but I chose to take it. I was sick for weeks.
Worked a charm. 
It was my understanding that most P ingredients come from imports and only a tiny amount come from people getting stuff from chemists.
As for alcohol, clamping down on it will only drive people to make their own. Sometimes people have to sort themselves out rather than have heavy handed laws.
It’s not the booze, it’s the drinkers!
I might add that alcohol can have medicinal effects as well.
I am really sick with the flu and have tried to get some codral original tablets as the new type doesn’t work for me. I spend 2hrs while very sick driving around 12 chemists and wasn’t able to get any.
I am very annoyed and very sick. I am a responsible person being punished. I am happy to give id and others measures but this is crazy.
Pissed off , Tim
how many people died over the past two weeks from alcohol related issues?yeah a few!
how many people died over the past two weeks from p related issues,none
get over yourselves,alcohol is the nastiest poison ever ingested by man period!
You cant even put them in the same category. and i agree with the first comment by Kate, it does not increase productivity. yes alcohol is a problem, but within all of society. but when its when the rich and wealthy(like you) take P, it effect our economy. and how about you focus on your own party’s worldveiws and how you will combat the battle on P and stop wining about what John key has said. focus on your own ways of combating the problem of P. We do not want to hear your bitching.