I think we need to be acting with a bit of caution here and not get caught up in the Meth Madness.
Yes, we have a major Meth problem but to suggest that we should be testing houses at the end of a tenancy is somewhat of an over kill and would only benefit the people who do the testing.
If we are not careful, we will be having property owners saying “this is just getting to hard “and getting out of the industry. You read a lot of regurgitated facts and figures put out by different parties, in fact the viceland video that was posted recently on a Facebook page was from 2013 and was highly emotive and I found it offensive in suggesting that PM’s were negligent and somehow complicit in a cover up. Parts of the video were just good old hype journalism taking some facts and massaging them. A lot has changed since 2013.
A couple of pertinent facts are that in Australia unless the contamination is above .5 micrograms per 100sq cm it is not considered to be a high-level contamination issue. You would not generally have this degree of contamination as a result of a person recreationally smoking Meth. The real contamination comes from the cooking of meth and there is a big trend away from cooking to dealing, brought about by the lack of core materials such as pseudoephedrine & ephedrine being readily available.
Today the trend is for the importation of the finished product as can be seen by the excellent work being carried out by both the state and federal police with recent drug busts of the finished product.
Police were finding a lot less meth labs in recent times, probably because it’s being imported directly
There is a distinct reduction in the number of labs from a high in 2011 – 12 of 809 to 2014 – 15 of 667. Early this year it was reported in New Zealand that “police were finding a lot less meth labs in recent times, probably because it’s being imported directly.
Plus, from a consumer point the imported Meth is of a much higher quality and as such is in greater demand than what is produced locally largely due to the quality of readily obtainable ingredients abroad.
