If you felt like O-Week hit harder this year, it wasn't just the hangxiety talking. We felt the same, so we’ve done it again; we hit up the Police to analyse everyone’s piss, and fuck you had a good O-Week! There was a dramatic surge in MDMA consumption across Dunedin during February – but who's surprised.
Using the powers of the Official Information Act (OIA), the police legally had to hand over piss data to Critic Te Ārohi. Technically we didn’t get a breakdown of your wees (which probably would have told you to drink more water), we just got a couple of graphs about the wastewater. But boy did these graphs show some interesting trends. Let’s just say many students were “gearing up” to prepare for a semester of hard work.
At the Tahuna treatment plant, which receives wastewater from North Dunedin, the Central City, the Peninsula and Port Chalmers, MDMA levels were up from 234mg/day per 1000 people in January, to a whopping 954mg in February. That's a quadrupling in just one month and easily out paces last year's 71% increase. If only Castle was 400% more on too. Lindsay, a postgrad student (self-proclaiming they don’t know a lot about drugs) said that it’s “not a shock” but reckoned that drug trends are “probably changing”.
The Green Island plant that services suburbs west of the city also got a bit rowdy in Feb, jumping from 378mg to 698mg, making the whole of Dunedin ground-zero for what Critic can only assume was an onslaught of sweaty, gum-filled, and DnB-fueled partying.
Methamphetamine consumption also crept up, especially in Tahuna, rising 25% to 326 mg/day. Green Island remained Dunedin's ‘methed up capital’, topping out at 588mg, suggesting more Dunedinites are running on fumes than one might expect. Cocaine made smaller, but still noticeable, moves. Tahuna went up from 34mg to 44mg, while Green Island nearly doubled, from 14mg to 27mg. While not quite the new Ponsonby, there's definitely more powder in Dunedin’s pipes than last year.
Third-year quantity surveying student Adam was unsurprised at the rise of drug use in Feb. “People just wanna have a good time,” he shrugged. When asked about the rise of meth and coke he suggested that it was “probably just MD[MA] cut with meth and stuff […] People are just selling what they can sell.” With coke on the rise too, he said, “Coke here is not as expensive as it used to be. At the same time, I reckon the people doing coke are living off daddy’s money.”
While local wastewater data suggests rising drug usage, national drug checking data from KnowYourStuffNZ paints a more complex picture. Across Aotearoa, meth was detected in some unexpected places, like powders presumed to be cocaine, MDMA, or amphetamines (like Ritalin), highlighting the importance of getting your shit tested before you roll up your $5 note.
The most disturbing trend that KnowYourStuffNZ noted was that synthetic cannabinoids, including AB-MDMSBA, were found in white powers thought to be benzos. In short, meth is back. Or maybe it never left. Either way, it is showing up more, in more places, and not always where you'd expect. Dunedin's wastewater proves we’re using more of it and national drug-checking suggests we might not be doing it on purpose. So test your gear and avoid the risk of being an accidental meth-head.
Graphic by Molly Smith-Soppet and NZ Police.