![]() When he brings participants for scans, he says, “they could actually see something physically that was sitting in your brain or your heart – rather than hearsay,” he says. The Mātai meth recovery study, which has now been running for a year, is “a fresh approach”, he says, and offers something special to a community that typically gets little in the way of cutting-edge international health technology. Ngarimu says the community has been crying out for better resourcing – including residential rehab facilities – for years and help for addicts is chronically underfunded. ![]() We’re going into our second generation now.” “It kind of crept up on everybody, and just smashed everybody really. “It’s just destroyed so many of our people. “Meth arrived in Gisborne/Tairawhiti about 20 years ago, and its impact was immediately really noticeable,” says Tuta Ngarimu, a community worker and advocate. While methamphetamine use spans social class and race, wastewater testing indicates that its use is more common in areas with higher social deprivation – including some areas in Gisborne/Tairāwhiti. New Zealand’s Ministry of Health estimates methamphetamine costs more than $820m annually in social harm. Photograph: The AGE/Fairfax Media/Getty Images An opportunity to give backĪs well as the usual damage wrought by addiction, meth has strong links with organised crime, and fuels violence among those who use it: a 2020 study found weekly users were between two and five times more likely to be involved in violence than non-users. New Zealanders are some of the world’s biggest meth takers. Twenty more minutes.” He pauses for a moment. ![]() “I’d be smoking and you know, it breaks my heart because my son would knock – he’s eight years old – and he’d go: ‘Dad? Are you coming out?’ And I’d say: “Twenty more minutes, my boy. He would sit in the closet to smoke – away from fire alarms, which he was convinced contained hidden cameras. Seeing the effect on his family helped drive him to want to quit, Irwin says. “I’d say if I wasn’t on P back then, I would’ve made slightly different decisions at that moment,” he says. Irwin hacked at the man with a machete, cleaving into his hand and severing his thumb. The drug helped contribute to his part in that attack, on a man associated with a rival gang. He has dedicated most of a decade to selling and smoking it, with his longest break from use coming in the form of a seven-year prison stint for grievous bodily harm. “Meth is death,” he says – but recovery is also excruciatingly difficult. Irwin also hopes the research will help him stay abstinent. “If like me you’ve been smoking meth for years and years,” he says to camera, “this is the place to be.” He likes to post chatty, popular social media videos about his trips to the MRI. Now, he has found himself as an unexpected but eager face of a new pilot study in New Zealand that works with meth users to map the effects of the drug on their brains – and to trace signs of healing and rehabilitation in the brains of those that stop smoking. “We said to the crown, if you’re going to treat us like the enemy – which was Hitler at the time – we’re going to become the enemy,” he says. The gang – which is majority Māori – adopted them as a symbol of extreme transgression, rather than an affinity with Nazism, he says. And I was instantly trying to find ways: how can we make money to get more?” Within a few years, he would be smoking every day.Ĭhatty and gregarious, Irwin is also a confronting figure: a curly beard only partially covers the tattoos mapped over his face, including large swastikas, which are common among the Mongrel Mob gang. “I remember it was the next day, the sun had risen, I was still awake with the people at the table I’d been smoking with. The girlfriend didn’t last, but the drug was love at first puff, he says, and would become one of the defining relationships of his life. He was a teenager when he tried P for the first time – trying to impress a girl on New Year’s Eve, in his home town of Porirua, Wellington. In the backroom of Mātai research centre, Irwin thinks back to when it all started. Almost a third of middle-aged New Zealanders have tried the drug, a University of Otago study found in 2020. The country’s physical isolation – 4,000km from the nearest major ports – makes importing hard drugs challenging and costly, but meth can be manufactured relatively cheaply and easily, and is derived from available pharmaceuticals. New Zealanders are some of the world’s biggest meth takers: wastewater testing has placed it in the top four consumers worldwide.
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