New Zealand - Article: 2006 was a bumper year for the drug trade (NZ)

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Drug hauls signal a new chapter

The Dominion Post
6 January 2007

2006 was a bumper year for the drug trade, with the crooks getting smarter, and authorities having to move fast to keep ahead. Emily Watt reports.

IT CAME wrapped in plastic and hidden at the bottom of tins of apple-green paint: 95 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine and 150kg of pseudoephedrine - the largest drug bust to date in New Zealand.
Worth $135 million, the haul was enough for over four million "hits" - enough for every man, woman and child in the country.
The May bust - codenamed Operation Major - was the result of months of police and customs work, involving international cooperation with Chinese and Hong Kong police.
Police seized guns, $60,000 cash, and fake passports, and six were arrested: two New Zealanders, three Chinese and a Hong Kong national.

It was, in many ways, the beginning of a new chapter for New Zealand police and customs officers in the war on drugs.
The methamphetamine market, set up and dominated by local gangs, was being taken over by international syndicates.
"It has really illustrated to us just how influential Asian crime gangs are," said Les Maxwell, analyst at the police national drug intelligence bureau. "We knew they were increasing in influence, but the termination of that particular investigation really opened our eyes up."

It has been a bumper year for police and customs battling the drug trade. Methamphetamine seizures were more than twice total seizures for the previous four years, and seizures of pseudoephedrine (used to manufacture methamphetamine), cocaine, and GBL/fantasy were also at record highs.
While earlier research and data had indicated the methamphetamine market may be stabilising, Operation Major proved the battle was far from over.
"The trends at the moment really stagger us just how big the market is out there," Mr Maxwell said. "Things are moving so quickly now in the illicit drug scene. It just happens so quickly."

Cannabis remains the most popular drug in New Zealand, with 15 per cent of New Zealanders estimated to use it.

Cocaine seizures spiked this year and GBL (known as fantasy) seizures also more than quadrupled, after a large haul of 200 litres was found in Northland.

Police also noticed lsd, hugely popular in the 1990s, has begun to make a comeback, with more than twice the number of tickets seized than last year.

Mr Maxwell said enforcement agencies had disrupted some major international ecstasy rings. But although ecstasy seizures have dropped, police believe the market has stayed steady, but that importers are getting more clever at bringing it in.

The record hauls are largely due to a small number of landmark investigations, and NDIB analyst Warren Richards said new trends suggest crooks are now bringing in larger quantities of the drugs, rather than more frequent smaller imports.
The battlegrounds are also shifting with the explosion of Asian crime gangs into a market previously dominated by local motorcycle and ethnic-based gangs.
"I don't want to underplay the outlaw motorcycle gangs and ethnic gangs, but (Asian gangs) are emerging and emerging very aggressively," Mr Maxwell said. Small domestic methamphetamine labs, known in America as "Mom and Pop" labs, traditionally run by ethnic gangs, are now being set up by Asians.
Overseas in countries such as Canada and Fiji, they have set up huge industrial-sized labs, and authorities are on the lookout for the same trends here.

The reasons why P - pure methamphetamine - is so popular, and devastating, in New Zealand are manifold.
It is hugely lucrative: sold at $800 to $1000 per gram on the street, it fetches a price nearly double what it would in Australia.
It is also much more pure than that sold overseas: between 60 to 80 per cent purity, compared with only 30 per cent often found across the Tasman. Mr Maxwell said this makes it more dangerous, more addictive, and more likely to contribute to serious offending.

The NDIB does not know what proportion of drugs are intercepted. Mr Maxwell said if they stopped 20 per cent the pseudoephedrine entering the country, which might be optimistic, it would mean half a tonne of methamphetamine was being sold on the streets of New Zealand.
Work continues around the country to halt the demand of drugs, and ameliorate their social costs, but from a customs and police point of view, nurturing international crime-fighting relationships will be the key to combating drugs. The Asian gangs remain the foe of the future, with well-established networks that have been operating in other countries for years.

"The last three to four years have been pretty busy. We're able to conduct busts internationally and I think that's a key aspect and that's got to be the way we go in the future.
"If we can stop it coming in, we can stop all those things that happen as a consequence of it coming in," Mr Maxwell said.


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