I headed up to Hokianga for the last official weekend of summer - take a load off, relax, a few swims, not even think about anything newsy - well, you can't be doing that now, can you? Not in Trump land.
The meeting with Ukraine President Vladimir Zelensky was an unmitigated disaster for the Ukrainian president, who walked out of the meeting after being berated for not being grateful enough for the military aid and financial support the US has given Ukraine in its three-year war with Russia. Zelensky went to the White House to sign a minerals for arms deal - he left with nothing and his political future looks uncertain.
Major European leaders have promised their support for Zelinsky and Ukraine, but how that translates to cold, hard cash and missiles remains to be seen. However much you might find the bombastic posturing of Fox News's Jesse Watters, this is America's economy, this is America's world - like it or not, it's pretty much true.
Whatever the European leaders decide as regards Ukraine, they know and they have stated publicly that the USA will be needed to act as security and however poorly the meeting went, Ukraine needs America, and America does not need Ukraine. And Donald Trump has said if you want gillions of dollars in military support and financial aid, we're not doing it for goodness and for freedom and democracy and because we will act as the world's policeman and police an invader that is wrong , we'll do it for money. We're done, we're done with doing it for ideals. You want our help, then you have to give us something back.
I suppose this is all done nicely, nicely underneath the surface in the past. Countries always want something for their aid. The US wanted aid for coming to Britain's assistance during World War 2, and we're going to give it for nothing, but it's always done behind closed doors and nicely. Here it was played out in all its inglorious reality before a watching world. It’s the way the world has always been, but we've just never seen it. So not over yet, is it?
So that happened. And and then the story about meth. There was the most heartbreaking interview with the survivor of a dreadful - I don't even want to say an accident. It wasn't an accident. When you've got a meth affected driver who has ploughed into a group of motorcyclists who are enjoying an early morning ride, having a great weekend, they're going into town for breakfast and a driver on the wrong side of the road plows into them. Meth affected, killing three. And changing life as he knows it for the survivor - it's not an accident.
Meth doesn't just affect the person who's taking. We all know that. Kids are growing up in violence and poverty because every spare scent is being spent on meth. It's leaving people dead and injured, which you might say is God's little pruning fork, but really it has massive impacts on our health system and on our police. Families torn apart because bright young things become addicts who steal from their families, lie to them, manipulate them, do anything they possibly can to get their hands on the drug. And it's been around for years now. You can't say, oh, I didn't realise - I didn't understand that it would be that it would be so addictive, that it would cause so much harm. Everybody knows. And yet still they use it.
People who have escaped its clutches know just how evil and insidious this drug. And yet still people are using, and they're using in greater numbers and in greater quantities than ever before. On the Mike Hosking Breakfast, Massey university drug researcher Chris Wilkins says the increase in meth use as a supply side effect.
"So essentially, there's been a massive increase in industrial size production of methamphetamine traditionally from Southeast Asia, but now increasingly from other parts of the world like South America and Mexico. So you know the seizures have increased 10 times in the last three or five years. So this is really supply. Very cheap meth that can be easily manufactured at low price, and we're just getting swamped in meth, essentially, I think this is a real wake up call because and it's partly a technological driven thing that we've now got synthetic drugs like meth that can be produced on large scale at a very low price. But also there's other changes in the market, like a digital market, you know, encrypted messaging apps, darknet and social media are being used now in a drug market that’s very different from what we might remember as a teenager. So you know, these are all things to keep her aware of."
That was Chris Wilkins talking to Mike Hosking this morning. So the only real way to reduce the harm of this drug is to reduce demand, because they will keep flooding it. I've interviewed people before about the supply chain and how easy it is to get drugs into this country coming down through the Pacific. Easy peasy. If they lose a bit on the way through, that's factored in by the drug manufacturers and the drug suppliers accountants - you bring in 100,000 kilos, you lose 20,000, you're still going to make a massive profit.
So the only real way is to reduce demand, rehabilitate addicts and stop people taking it in the first place.
There are schemes, there are programmes that are working, they haven't been rolled out throughout the country. Labour promised to. Shock me. National promised too - don't know where they're at with that and I would really, really like to find out.
Where you do have proven drug programmes that engage with the community, where it's treated as a as a health issue, that gets people off this insidious drug once and for all, we need to roll them out as a matter of urgency. I think there was a 34% success rate for a programme in the Far North we've talked about before. This is an actual anonymised data from police and health.
Because the only way to stop the harm that drugs are causing to innocent people is to reduce the desire for it, and I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Take your Radio, Podcasts and Music with you
