Explainer: How and why methamphetamine is flooding New Zealand

Explainer - Methamphetamine is taking a massive toll on Aotearoa, from the cities to the regions. It's wrecking lives and destroying communities as usage continues to rise.But where is it all coming from?The meth industry is a tangled web that stretches around the world, reaching from Mexico to Canada and from Myanmar to Argentina.Increasingly, New Zealand is right at the centre of the spider's web.The Government has pledged a crackdown on meth with a no-nonsense new public campaign, and police are working overtime to tackle the problem at its many sources."Over the last few years, organised crime groups have increasingly targeted New Zealand with illegal drugs - primarily methamphetamine and also cocaine," said Customs and Associate Police Minister Casey Costello."These criminal groups are determined to make money and don't care how they do it or the harm it causes, but we have shown that we can make an impact against meth and the Government continues to do more to fight it on a number of fronts," she said.While it hit a particularly massive peak in 2024, meth use is still steadily escalating, said Massey University professor Chris Wilkins, leader of the drug research team at SHORE & Whariki Research Centre."This is pretty incredible and should be alarming a lot of people," he said.Police Detective Superintendent Greg Williams, director of the National Organised Crime Group.RNZ / Samuel RillstoneWhy it's so much worseNew Zealand and Australia have for some time been considered a "cash cow" for the global drug market - paying some of the world's highest prices for methamphetamine."We are the golden nugget," said Police Detective Superintendent Greg Williams, director of the National Organised Crime Group.Methamphetamine smuggling is "a rapidly evolving ecosystem that is occurring across the world that's kind of got us where we are now," he said.Williams dates the start of New Zealand's surging meth epidemic back to 2017, when how meth was made and distributed started to change dramatically.The latest round of police wastewater drug testing found methamphetamine use averaged about 33.3kg per week during the second quarter of 2026. It was far higher than MDMA and cocaine use also captured in the survey."Exceptionally high use" in April of this year raised the overall average, police said, which equated to an estimated weekly social harm cost of $34.9 million.Wilkins works with the New Zealand Drug Trends Survey which anonymously surveys people online to provide a snapshot of drug use here. Meth use reported in the survey has steadily risen since 2018."In the back end of 2024, the amount of methamphetamine consumed in New Zealand doubled within three months, and it stayed at that elevated levels all the way through 2025, and in 2026, the last few wastewater treatment testings has shown, it's increased again."That's not a change that you would usually say came about through a change in demand," but instead is down to supply route change and the price of meth lowering a bit."It does seem to be that suddenly we've got this new route of supply and that's doubled the consumption."Meth is still extremely costly here compared to the rest of the world, but it has gone down a bit from its peak - which actually encourages more use."A point of meth (about 0.1 grams) can now sell for $55," Wilkins said. "That puts it down from about $100 or more less than five years ago."The drug survey showed the price of a gram of meth has dropped from $563 in 2017 to $334 in 2025. In comparison, a gram of meth in America appears to run between NZ$40 to $140 a gram varying widely by area, according to drug enforcement agencies and addiction treatment centres."There's a reason why the price is high here," Wilkins said. "It's because geographically it's hard to get to, it's a very small market."Just how much meth is coming into the country, anyway?Methamphetamine seizure data from Customs shows a steady sharp rise in seizures both onshore and offshore since 2017, with a dramatic leap in 2024, which saw 2877.4kg of meth seized onshore and 2303.1kg seized offshore."What remains clear is that transnational, serious and organised crime groups continue to view New Zealand as a high-value market, and that is reflected in what we've seized, which has trended upwards over the past decade," said New Zealand Customs investigations manager Dominic Adams.The figures may fluctuate but the overall trend is worrying."Seizure volumes can vary from year to year because a small number of large interceptions can significantly influence annual totals," Adams said.Costello said that New Zealand is making a dent in the traffic."There's been real success in this area, with 3.6 tonnes of meth bound for New Zealand seized offshore in the last two years, along with 5.5 tonnes at the border. Across the start of this year, 14 tonnes of cocaine was intercepted in the Pacific."It's all also tied in with an equally dramatic rise in cocaine use and smuggling into New Zealand, which comes from many of the same sources, as RNZ has previously reported on.Where is it all coming from?"For a long time, most of the meth appeared to be coming from Southeast Asia, manufactured in what they called the Golden Triangle near the Thai border and Myanmar," Wilkins said.These days, most of the methamphetamine that comes into New Zealand can be traced back to Mexican drug cartels and is being shipped through places like the United States and the Pacific Islands to conceal it."The bulk of meth coming to New Zealand is coming from the Sinaloa and the CJNG (Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación) cartels," Williams said.But that meth can take a winding path through multiple countries to end up here as part of a cat-and-mouse game to avoid capture. The cartels have spread across Europe and Africa as they extend their reach, Williams said."There is no single fixed pathway," Adams said. "Organised crime groups regularly change their routes and methods in response to law enforcement activity.Data released to RNZ by Customs as shown in the graphic above shows a variety of countries have been swapping places as the biggest seizures for meth coming into New Zealand.The United States often leads the tally from 2020-2026, but the UK, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and Thailand are all major players.And in 2023-2024, Canada, of all places, saw a major surge in meth coming to New Zealand.Canadian police have even been deployed here to aid in the battle."Unfortunately, it has come to the point where Canada has become a bit of a transhipment point to foreign markets, including New Zealand and Australia," Royal Canadian Mounted Police liaison officer Staff Sergeant Scott Barlow told RNZ recently.Methamphetamine seized by New Zealand Customs.Supplied / NZ CustomsBorder control is a "profiling strategy", Wilkins said."If you're trying to conceal your shipment you want to pick routes where there's heavy traffic and also it's a low risk source country."The Pacific has become one of the front lines in the meth epidemic, with Fiji particularly badly affected by a massive rise in meth use and an HIV epidemic linked to it."You can ship your raw methamphetamine to the Pacific Islands where the concealment strategy can be used and then you go from there," Wilkins said."The Pacific's geography, scale and position on international routes make it attractive to organised criminal groups looking to move illicit drugs between source countries and high-value destination markets such as New Zealand and Australia," Adams from Customs said."What's happening in the islands is a tragedy," Williams said."The reality is that because Australia and New Zealand are big financial targets, then a lot of the way to get here is through those islands."Rather than attributing this to one cartel or country, or a single supply route, Customs' assessment is that a range of transnational criminal networks are exploiting global trade and travel pathways, including through the wider Pacific region," Adams said.Watchers of Breaking Bad know that meth can be made in highly dangerous home labs as well as massive "super labs". But the enormous flow of overseas meth has dramatically cut down its production here, Wilkins said."It's been a decade or even more, probably, when we had really high levels of domestic production, and that production was very small scale compared to what we're talking about with Mexican drug cartels and the syndicates in Asia."The scale of super labs means "you can literally take a factory and start making meth", Wilkins said.The drug cartels also realise that it's far cheaper to make in bulk and to smuggle the finished product into the country."Well, if you're going into all that trouble of smuggling in pseudoephedrine, then you might as well just smuggle in the meth and save the step," Wilkins said.An aerial view shows an abandoned clandestine methamphetamine laboratory in Nigeria during an police operation on July 29, 2026. The cooking cauldrons and vats of chemicals were left behind in the abandoned shed, hidden in a Nigerian forest - remnants of a multimillion-dollar transnational meth operation.TOYIN ADEDOKUN / AFPWhere and how is our meth getting made?Unlike, say, cocaine or marijuana, methamphetamine is a man-made chemical stew.It's created using a base of ephedrine or pseudoephredrine, which is still tightly controlled in New Zealand. Those "precursor" chemicals are mostly scheduled - controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975.But what's happening these days is that the meth manufacturing process has been further fragmented with the flow of "precursor precursor" chemicals that can be used to make the precursors that eventually turn into the drug.Transnational crime groups and drug producers began to use organic chemists around 2017, Williams said."And those organic chemists are like chefs."The organic chemist says look, if you take this chemical and this chemical which are currently legal, add them together, you get what's called a precursor precursor. What it did is it energised the whole production worldwide, right?"That "endless supply of cheap chemicals" is totally legal and "really hard" to go after, Williams said."Where we've evolved now is that the scheduled regimes are still operating, but the ability to obtain these legal chemicals almost makes that redundant in some ways."That meth can be made in Mexico, Asia and all around the world in super labs, and then sent on to here. The scale of the super labs keeps costs lower, meaning more profits for the makers.New Zealand is working with many other countries to hit the ever-shifting supply chain, particularly now that "precursor precursors" are such a big target."There's a whole lot of work understanding how those chemicals are being shipped across the world and trying to work with those big cargo companies about how this is being shipped and how this could be disrupted," Williams said.Countries like China and India are taking steps to tackle the flow of ingredients into their countries, but it's a long and difficult road."It's a bit like a game where a clown bounces up and you hit it on the head and another one pops up here," Williams said.An official stands in front of a pile of seized methamphetamine during a destruction ceremony to mark the United Nations' "International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking" in Yangon, Myanmar on 26 June 2026.SAI AUNG MAIN / AFPWhy the battlefield is constantly changingThe cartels know how to subvert financial systems, chemical systems and technology and are as agile as any corporation."The scale is incredible, right?" Williams said. "You get to a situation some of these groups that are so huge, they're actually taking on governments."Individual agencies are doing a great job - we're stopping record amounts of drugs - but organised crime is sophisticated, well-networked and constantly looking for vulnerabilities in our system," Costello said.Globalisation and technology mean the war on drugs moves faster and requires quicker adaptation. Innovations that appear in one country can spread around the globe within days."Everything is instant now," Williams said.The battle against meth is no longer a battle against just New Zealand criminals, Williams said, and it requires cooperation across nations."When I joined the police in 1980, all our bad guys lived in New Zealand, right?""Over at least well over 50 percent of the people offending against New Zealand operate outside of New Zealand. So you know, that drives us to create those real meaningful international partnerships."What are we doing about it?The Government has been battling meth on many fronts and launching new plans to combat it. "We know that meth is a scourge on society," Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has said.Costello has been described as the unofficial "Minister of Organised Crime" and has responsibility for a new Chief Executive Board on Transnational, Serious and Organised Crime, or TSOC.It "has been created to ensure we do everything we can to strengthen our response to organised crime and drive a more coordinated response", she said."Essentially, we need better organised government to fight organised crime, and the board will help deliver that."Associate Police Minister Casey Costello.RNZ"We've got to do something about organised crime and we've got to start getting more serious about that strategy," Wilkins said. "That's something that Casey Costello is in a really good place to start."And of course, one of the biggest tactics is to go after the money."My team's now running really complex major drug investigations but also really complex money laundering investigations as well," Williams said.Drug seizures and busts are part of the strategy, but not all of it, Williams said. Enforcement is going after supply lines, communications, and often using military resources around the world.The drug smugglers can infiltrate local systems and police and prisons."They set themselves up in countries that have weak governance because they see themselves protected there."What you're seeing is the world waking up, across the world in terms of what this impact is and the need to actually collectively work together," Williams said.There's also a need to tackle the broader social issues driving meth consumption, the experts said."Drug use is seen as a way out" for many people, Wilkins aid."They're not going to go to a holiday in Fiji, they're not going to buy that new car or the new house, so it's a kind of an instant fix of trying to deal with those underlying problems."All we can do is keep trying to go out to communities, and we're working really closely across Māoridom as well as they're getting hammered with it too," Williams said."We know we need to stop supply, strengthen domestic enforcement, and work at a community level to reduce demand to be successful and we continue to invest more in all these areas," Costello said.Williams has been waging the war against methamphetamine for nearly a decade as the director of the National Organised Crime Group."Collectively we're still batting pretty well across the world with what we're doing but the reality is we just can't take our foot off the throat for a minute to protect this country, and that's kind of where we're all driven."We are driven to protect our country, you know, and get that message out."Read other stories in RNZ's Meth Toll series: