Frith Palmer steps up to speak. The mic stand is slightly too high so she tilts it as low as it can go and starts in a strong, determined voice.

"We've got that scourge, the P scourge running rampant. Unfortunately P, alcohol, gambling… These poor kids, they go home and there's no food. They go home, there's a punch up.”

Heads nod and a chorus of “Kia ora” rises up in the Flaxmere Community Centre, encouraging her on.

The small crowd is here lamenting the rise of unruly, unsupervised children, after a group of teenagers were arrested following the killing of local man Kelly Donner, 40.

Frith, a mother of three, moves closer to the mic as the rain beats on the roof of the hall.

"They go home and mum and dad have been on the old glass barbeque all bloody day. What have they got? Nothing.

"So they're all gathering. That's their new family. Oh, they feel mighty. But it takes one person to break them.

"If we band together, these kids, they're going to have someone. We could all take a piece of these kids and give them mana.

"Like hell am I going to let these kids run us, and run our generation out of what we love. This is our home."

Read about how schools are grappling with the rise of 'P babies'





The last of the white crystals stubbornly cling to the sides of the plastic bag. ESR scientist Aimee Lloyd pokes a little metal spatula in and starts scraping. The silver bracelets on her right wrist clink together as she coaxes them out.

“They’re sticking because they’re damp,” she says. “It’s the solvents left over from the manufacturing process.”

This is a small hitch as ESR drug technicians’ problems go. The scientists, who analyse substances for police and Customs, are up against meth smugglers’ increasingly innovative concealment methods. In recent years, they’ve had to figure out how to separate meth from the highly-flammable fluid of lava lamps and the liquid within dishwashing detergent containers so they can confirm the substance is P.

Aimee weighs the crystals – just under a gram – then carries them across the laboratory. She picks up a dropper with gloved hands and squeezes drops of a reagent into a dish.

“If it’s meth it will give an orange colour,” she says.

She lowers a crystal into the liquid. It’s like blood hitting water; rusty tentacles spread from the middle of the dish toward the edges.

Aimee looks at it. “If it’s strongly positive it goes red.”

Read more about how increasingly inventive meth smuggling is testing ESR





The prison van stops and Allan* steps out.

He looks up at the large brick house then knocks on the door.

He is dressed in the worn, blue shirt and poorly-fitting trackpants he was arrested in more than two years ago and clutches a handful of papers.

One of the Moana House counsellors hurries to the door and opens it, smiling.

“Is this the right place?” Allan asks.

Moana House is a live-in Dunedin rehab facility for male offenders. Three-quarters of the men are referred for meth problems and many of them are dumped on the doorstep with nothing.

Inside the strains of a Fijian hymn and the smell of chop suey permeate the house.

Programme director Claire Aitken looks over at Allan.

"That man has turned up in what he's wearing and that's it.

“There is a huge increase in people presenting with methamphetamine issues and generally it has been more destructive than anything else they had been using before.”

Claire heads back to her office to type another email. The house has a waiting list 142 people long and no funding past June.

“Chasing money is one of the biggest things we do,” Claire says.

“God, if I could just get on with the [rehabilitation] work it would be fantastic.”

Allan sits on a leather couch, picks up a ukulele and starts to strum.

Click here to read about Moana House’s funding crisis.





Dr Simon Rowley sits under the bright artificial lights of a sparse Auckland Hospital meeting room finishing a story: “We asked her why she wasn’t intending to breastfeed and she said because there was a P lab in her basement at home and she didn’t want to risk contamination.”

The consultant neonatal paediatrician settles forward in his chair.

That was an unusual case, he says. Mothers who use meth – usually along with other drugs and alcohol - rarely disclose their drug use.

Dr Rowley cares for one or two babies exposed to meth, usually in-utero, each month.

In some ways it would be better if he cared for more – babies often don’t start showing signs of meth’s impact until days or weeks after they’re born. By then, they’ve long since left the safety of the hospital and missed their early shot at help.

“I suspect we would see less than 10 percent [of babies exposed to meth],” Dr Rowley says.

He gets up and heads for the newborn intensive care unit. The lights are dim but cuddly cartoon animals brighten the muted walls: a tiger, a deer cuddled up with her fawn.

Click. A picture of a police officer walking through a decontamination shower. Click. Chemicals spraying up a wall. Click. Detective Sergeant Rhys Wilson hits the mouse’s left button again and up pops another scene the police national clandestine laboratory team have visited.

This time the shot shows a white bench covered in glass beakers.

“This is probably one of the more organised or professional scenes that I’ve seen from a cook,” he says.

“You can see he’s got all his lighting set up. He’s got shelves to hold all the individual equipment. [This is] someone who probably takes pride in their work, in their product.”

He smiles at his own grudging admiration, then his face falls.

“This was in the garage of a family home, with children living in the house.”

As team supervisor for the North Island, he’s seen some surprising sights – a lab set up in a cave in the countryside, an old milking shed fitted with a false floor to hide hundreds of litres of chemicals – but still, nothing shocks him more than finding children in labs.

“Sometimes one or both parents are using the garage of the family home to make the drug with no thought given to the harm that they’re doing to their children that are living there. Being exposed to that contamination, to those toxic chemicals.”

His hand moves on the mouse. Click.

A shaky video of a camper van appears, a garden hose connecting it to tank water, a hot plate lying on the passenger seat, chemicals stored in soft drink bottles.

“Obviously once the cook has finished using this vehicle in this way, he’s more than likely going to clear it out and try and sell it for money, so the poor person that ends up subsequently buying this has obviously no idea of what it’s been used for and what sort of contamination is in it.”

Read more about contaminated camper vans