New Zealand: Drug gangs said to be exploiting Pacific

International criminal gangs exploiting New Zealand and Australia's growing hunger for amphetamines are believed to be using unpatrolled Pacific Islands as drug manufacturing hubs.

New Zealand and Australia have the highest numbers of amphetamine users per capita in the developed world.

Australian Federal Justice Minister Chris Ellison told an Australian newspaper yesterday that authorities needed to concentrate their efforts on combating the use of amphetamines and shutting down their manufacture in the South Pacific.

"I am very, very concerned about the increase in amphetamines production on a very large scale in the South Pacific," Ellison told The Sunday Age.

"Because it is such a vast area, with many small nations and thousands of small islands, it is just an ideal place for transnational criminal syndicates to operate and base their drugs operations."

Highly professional, wealthy organised crime gangs were using the Pacific for the manufacture, storage and transport of amphetamines. Some laboratories could produce up to 100kg of amphetamines a week, Ellison said.

Two years ago New Zealand police helped bust a billion-dollar methamphetamine lab in Fiji capable of producing 1000kg of the drug in a fortnight.

Police seized drugs and chemicals with a street value of $F1 billion ($NZ870m) bound for New Zealand, Australian and European markets.

New Zealand Customs drug investigations manager Simon Williamson said yesterday the Fiji bust was an example of the potential for drug manufacture in the South Pacific.

"It does send a strong sign that international crime drug producers and manufactures are looking to operate out of the South Pacific," Williamson said.

"That was clearly being set up to produce methamphetamine in substantial quantities and New Zealand was to be a destination for some of that."

However, he did not believe manufacturing in the Pacific Island was a bad as Ellison suggested.

Williamson said the Fiji bust had been the only superlab found in the Pacific, although smaller labs had been found in the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia.

New Zealand police and law enforcement was already focusing some attention on drug production in the Pacific islands.

Williamson said Customs was seeing increases in both the seizure of amphetamines at borders and their precursors. To date this year, 109kg of crystal methamphetamine had be seized at New Zealand borders, a 10-fold increase from the whole of 2005.

Earlier this year, a New South Wales police report said New Zealand was being used as a hub for trafficking "ice" – a purer form of amphetamine similar to pure methamphetamine – from Asia into Australia.

Last month Australian law expert Dr Andreas Schloenhardt said New Zealand had one of the highest methamphetamine production rates per capita in the world.

Schloenhardt, who was speaking at an International Criminal Law Conference in Canterbury said "extraordinarily" high methamphetamine usage in New Zealand and Australia was creating a shift in making drugs domestically.

New Zealand's Ministerial Committee on Drugs chairman and Associate Health Minister Jim Anderton said most amphetamines came from China, but if there was some Pacific Island involvement he would be very concerned about it given the close proximity of the islands.

"We're concerned about the manufacture of methamphetamines anywhere – here in New Zealand or overseas," Anderton said yesterday.

He said police and Customs efforts in New Zealand had impacted on the production of amphetamines domestically, which might mean producers were looking elsewhere.

"There's some sense that the production of methamphetamines in New Zealand has peaked and it's set to fall away."

New Zealand Drug Foundation chief executive Ross Bell said Australia's focus on the Pacific Islands had revealed greater production there. Bell said demand for amphetamines drove supply and until resources were spent on addressing the problems of drug use in New Zealand, there would always be supply coming from somewhere.

Newshawk: http://www.napnt.org/
Pubdate: Mon, 11 Sept 2006
Source: Stuff (New Zealand - Web)
Reporter: Janine Bennetts
Website: http://www.stuff.co.nz