The price of meth

ACT has proposed lifting the de-facto ban on the only cold medicine that seems to work - pseudoephedrine.

It's about freaking time.

National and Labour both expressed openness to the idea of rescheduling it. So that's good. 

This week's column over in Newsroom ($ today, ungates tomorrow if you pull the /pro from the URL) goes through a bit of the history on this one. 

It's a weird one. When Key's National-led government set the ban, they put evaluation frameworks around it. It was part of a meth action plan. They had indicators on purity, price, availability. The set of policies was meant to reduce use and availability. Use did ultimately decline, but not because of anything obvious on the supply side. The ban on cold medicine had only a minor effect on availability, price and purity - the supply indicators. And you kinda have to squint to even see those. Over the longer term, price dropped and availability increased. 

And rather than ditch the restrictions, the government shifted from six-monthly progress reports on its action plan to an annual report, to no reports. 

The supply side policy had failed. The ban on cold medicine worked only until suppliers figured out how to get methamphetamine into the country properly. Meth suppliers had been importing cold tablets, in bulk, before pseudoephedrine was made prescription-only. They continued to import cold tablets after the policy change. But finished methamphetamine was being imported at levels never before seen – or at least was being seized in unprecedented quantities. Rather than abandon the policy, the government abandoned the reports. The October 2015 annual report was the final report in the series.

Things didn’t improve after those reports ended. Other reports continued. By 2017/18, the national median price of methamphetamine had dropped to $500 per gram, with record low prices in Auckland, Waikato, and Wellington. Prices increased with total border closures to control Covid, but normalised soon after. One News reported in June that meth cost $400 a gram.

On average, the price of everything is 38 percent higher than it was in 2009. But the price of methamphetamine has dropped by more than 40 percent, despite none of us having reasonable access to cold medicines. If meth were in the CPI, the Reserve Bank’s job would be easier.

The official reports rather clearly establish that the ban on effective access to cold medicine had at most a small temporary effect on the supply of meth. It was obvious, rather quickly, that the ban was not helping. But the ban remained in place.

That is a terrible failure, albeit on a smallish margin. The government had set all of the evaluation frameworks needed for justifying a change in course, should one prove warranted. But it did not see fit to do so when the data came in. It stuck with the bad policy.

I like the idea of meth being in the CPI. 

But I even more like the idea of regular reviews of regulation to wipe out ones that impose cost while having no discernable benefit. 

Oh - FWIW - there are some conflicting sources on the price of meth in 2020. A Parliamentary snapshot had it having doubled to over $1000/gram; the regular survey had it fall. Perhaps there was a limited-time period in which price went through the roof? I covered my bases by saying prices increased with border closures and normalised soon after. 

But just look at this. Despite inflation over the period, meth dropped from over $700/gram to about $400/gram. 

I suppose a prohibitionist might claim that the price would be even lower if it were easier to access home cooking supplies, but really? It's imported at scale as finished product. It seems a bit like worrying that legalising the sale of car parts will lead to people building their own utes to get around the tax on utes. 

Update: the official reports, when they were tracking things, were here. There was one (1) annual report produced after the shift to annual reporting.