Tonight ` the legacy of NZ's P epidemic. The whole report, there was only one sentence to read ` 'this house is uninhabitable.' Could your home be contaminated with P? It is just a giant let-down. I feel like I've let our children down. P is for problem, but does it also stand for paranoia? People's dirty little habit. It is not OK! But how do you make sense of meth's messy clean-up business? I don't think we need to hit the panic button yet. It certainly isn't a leaky-house syndrome. Copyright Able 2016 Welcome to the show ` a show all about the ugly legacy of P or methamphetamine. There are things that you need to know if you are buying, selling or renting a home. But first, a quick tutorial on P, a highly addictive drug that's infiltrated the poor and posh suburbs of NZ. Methamphetamine, or P, is one of the more common forms of illicit drugs in NZ. What scares me from what I've seen out there is that it destroys heaps of lives. Kirk Hardy knows. As a former drug detective who now runs his own testing business, he's witnessed the damage P can cause. There is a huge demand and supply of this drug out there. So people are using it and making it and the places they're doing that in are becoming extremely dangerous. That's because the chemicals used to make the drug are highly toxic. There was a case down in Hawke's Bay where a house was basically demolished. It's just so toxic. What we'd like to know is are we safe in our own homes? How many are affected and how do you know? How does this affect you? Housing NZ has tested 1266 of its properties. 918 tested positive for meth. But P addicts don't just smoke in Housing NZ homes; they do it in rental and private homes too. Mark has caught up with a young couple who borrowed a pile of money to buy their dream home and then discovered, after talking to the neighbours, that dream home was contaminated. SOMBRE MUSIC I can't go in there. I get really heavy lungs and just feel sick for quite a few hours every time I go upstairs. Early this year, Emma and Kiel Moore-Jones bought a new family home in Waikanae. Someone else might want to live in it, but I'm not gonna live in there with my children. But to keep up with the Moore-Jones', you need to dress appropriately when you pay them a visit,... Better to be safe than sorry. ...because the house they were going to bring their two girls up in is contaminated. One line come up there. Yeah, so that means there's meth in the house. Kiel's a builder. This house was going to be the blank canvas for their grand design. So we were pretty much going to put a lot of money into it, work on it, tidy it up, live in it for 10 years. But the day after settlement,... ...we started unpacking, and our neighbours came over and asked us if we'd done a test on the house. The people who lived in this close-knit community suspected the previous owner had a meth problem. It was about to become their problem. We instantly looked up the internet and looked up a testing kit. So we drove up to Levin at 10 in the night to get a testing kit and then came back, tested it and, you know, just sat there with our mouths open, gutted. If real estate agents are aware of meth contamination in a house they're selling, they're legally obliged to disclose. But Harcourts, who sold this house, say they had no idea P was smoked here. They offered Emma and Kiel $5000 as a goodwill gesture on the condition that they remove any social media comments they'd made about the house. They don't care. The` They don't care. They take their money and move on with their life. Where` What have we done wrong, you know? We have bought a house that we can't live in, whereas they've sold it to us. And just when they thought things couldn't get any worse, along came the meth testing and clean-up industry. So there used to be a couch right there. This is where we're guessing they sat here and smoked, as this whole area, the window frame, is where our higher levels are at. How high is it here? 9.2 That's almost 20 times the level considered safe by the Ministry of Health. Sounds scary, but that's just one test. Emma and Kiel have had their house meth-tested three times by three different contractors, and they've had three different results ranging from very high to very low. We just want to know what to do. We wanna know, like` You know, they say there's a safe level, but is that actually a safe level? Like, long term` can it have long-term effects on your health? And any level is scary when you have young children. This was going to be turning into the family rumpus room. Can you imagine your children up here now? No. It's pretty much, you know, suicidal to put them up here. No. No way. Advice on the clean-up from different companies has ranged from washing down the walls with soap and water to pulling out all the Gib and relining the house, which could cost tens of thousands. Kiel's already ripped out a couple of sheets. It'll be turned into a garage and storage, really. You don't know who to trust. I definitely believe there are companies out there that are taking advantage of people in vulnerable situations, people mucking around with people's lives. It's not fair. You just need straight answers. For six months now, the Moore-Jones' have been paying a mortgage on a house they can't live in. Their possessions are in storage. They're relying on the kindness of strangers and family. It's just a giant let-down, you know. It's like, I feel like we've let our children down. (SNIFFS) It's hard. People need to know, because if we've been hit, how many other families, investment properties ` everything can get hit with, you know, people's dirty little habit. It's not OK. It's not OK. Man, what an absolute nightmare. Just awful. After the break, we try and make sense of the messy business of cleaning up. Meth has fuelled the rise of a lucrative testing industry. There's been meth present in the property, and you should be concerned. But how much is too much? Because they've got kids as well, I would have no hesitation whatsoever in ripping the Gib out up there. But does P also stand for 'paranoia and profiteering'? < What's the risk that people are going to be exploited in this situation? It's high. 1 Welcome back. So, what to do? You've borrowed a fortune, and your dream home has turned into a P-contaminated nightmare. Once meth has been manufactured or smoked in a house, the chemical residue can seep into carpets, curtains, furniture and gib. But how much does it take to contaminate a house? The Ministry of Health set safety guidelines six years ago. They apply to properties where methamphetamine, or P, is known to have been manufactured. There's a hell of a lot of chemicals in there that are really dangerous to the human body. A contaminated property is safe to live in once it has been thoroughly cleaned and retesting shows there's less than 0.5 micrograms of meth per 10cm2. If you smoke up to 2g of methamphetamine, and that's quite easily done from a heavy user perspective, in a matter of no time, then you will give readings above the Ministry of Health guidelines. The guidelines are not law, but they're the only measurement available. If you get your home tested and the readings come back higher than 0.5 micrograms, what happens next really depends on who you talk to. The clean might be minimal. It might be a clean of the walls, a repaint, steam clean the carpet, something like that. It doesn't necessarily mean because it's positive, you've got to demolish the house or rip the walls to pieces. Increasing concern has given rise to a booming meth-testing and clean-up industry. It's largely unregulated, wide open to misunderstandings and open to exploitation. Garth takes us back to Emma and Kiel's contaminated home to try and make head and tails of some very confusing findings. It's a diagnosis anyone would dread. There's been meth present in the property, and you should be concerned. Because they've got kids as well, I would have no hesitation whatsoever in ripping the gib out up there. Meth-related behaviour, Garth, is the best way of describing it. Each of those three opinions is backed by a test from an accredited laboratory. The same lab did all three, in fact, yet each yielded different numbers. Two different results for two swabs in the same place. 2.7 on the window frame. Got a reading up there of 9.6, I think, from memory, it was. This very young industry is growing fast. There are no regulations and lots of different interpretations. < What's the risk that people are going to be exploited in this situation? It's high. One of Miles Stratford's contractors did this follow-up test after Emma and Keil had used their DIY kits. The results showed tiny amounts of methamphetamine, close to the level at which detection is impossible. It's not a trace amount. It's a confirmed amount. < It's a confirmed amount? It's a confirmed amount of meth use, definitely. It's an amount below the guideline level set by the Ministry of Health, and there's something else you need to know. the guidelines are for meth-lab clean-up, but this probably wasn't a meth lab? The indications based on those numbers are that it's use-related behaviour. Now,the guidelines are specifically for meth lab clean-up, but they have become the de facto guideline for any meth-related behaviour. To give you some idea of how small the current clean-up guide for methamphetamine is in absolute terms, consider this. Here's some ordinary table salt. Take one grain. Let's cut that one grain into a thousand pieces then dissolve that 1/1000th of a grain of salt into a drop of water. Spread the water over this much wall and let it dry. Any more than that much meth triggers the clean-up guideline. That's if it's in a P lab, which is a toxic hellhole of other hazardous and long-lasting chemical residues. Methamphetime is like a marker for all the other chemicals that might be present that you haven't tested for which could occur in manufacturing but wouldn't occur in smoking. So if you can clean down to that level for methamphetamine, you're fairly confident you've dealt with all the others. Nick Kim is one of the experts who peer-reviewed the guidelines before they were set. He says they weren't intended to cover situations where P had only been smoked and not made. It's a bit of a jump. At the time they were written, that potential use just wasn't even imagined. But even if we're talking about smoking, isn't that 0.5 figure still relevant? Meth is meth right? If the concentrations coming back are below about 10 or 20 micrograms per 100cm2, I'd say tha likelihood is someone has smoked it. Where you have a meth lab, you get up tp thousands. 16000 micrograms per... (CHUCKLES) That's a real health-risk level, you know? He's a toxicologist, and this is his bread and butter. Guidelines are set substantially below the level where you'd expect a health effect, so a long way down. In his expert opinion... You'd have to be about 20 times higher than the meth clean-up guideline before you hit the lowest plausible point at which you might expect or could get a health effect in a toddler who's crawling around all the time. 20 times the limit. That's 10 micrograms per 100cm2. A 1/50 of a grain of salt instead of a 1/1000 and less than anything measured at Emma and Kiel's so far. I'd be perfectly happy for my children to be in a house with anything up to about 12 micrograms per 100cm2. No problem at all. Which is fine for him to say. Most are sticking with the only guideline they have set by the Ministry of Health six years ago. For example, if a territorial authority gets involved with the property, they're looking at numbers, not what the cause of those numbers is. So if it exceeds that 0.5 microgram in a 100cm2, then regardless of whether it's use or manufacture, that would typically trigger them to take action. < Is that a sound decision? (SIGHS) Under the circumstances, it's the best that everyone has to, uh` to work with. But they're applying the guidelines according to their experiences out on the job. So what to do about your problem depends a lot on who you ask. I've been involved in decontaminations on close to 1000 properties now over the four years. I can successfully save walls with readings of up to 7. Anything over 7, I don't hesitate. We will pull the walls. NZ Sampling and Decontamination found the highest levels of methamphetamine of anyone ` 9.2 micrograms on a windowsill upstairs. Pulling out the walls, re-gibbing and a chemical clean will cost thousands. The level in that kitchen from the other company that did the sampling was exceeding 2. The MOH guidelines say anything over 1. We need to look at throwing the stove away. There is the possibility the stove has been used to, uh, heat the chemical up. We've looked through all 168 pages of the guideline and can find no such specific advice about stoves. And the highest level anyone has found downstairs so far ` .05 ` is 10 times below the guideline level, a 1/10,000 of a grain of salt in our example. Yeah, it's going up. That's what they found even using sophisticated equipment like this super-sensitive chemical sniffer. Basically, it measures anything volatile, so you have things like petrol. You have oils, greases, Blu-Tack ` I found that gives off something ` um, alcohol, so you have to be very careful about how you use it. She uses it to give an indication of where to start looking for hotspots then does the same swab test as the others. Nobody is doing anything wrong exactly, because when it comes to P-testing, there are no standards for who can do it or how it's done. The training ` I mean, what did` what did it involve? > For the, um` Certification. > For the certification? Yeah it was actually a Skype course. Done with a company I used to be involved with, I can show you how to do a surface swab and say, 'Well, now you're trained', cos that's pretty much all we got. (CHUCKLES) At the end of the day, in the absence of standards of some formalised approach people can go through, the risk is that we are perceived as beating up on the issue, which can be seen as self-serving. That's not the attitude we bring to what we do and how we do it, but that's the perception that people can have. Does that mean that there's, like, a whole industry ripping people off? I think that's for you to assess. (LAUGHS) I don't think in their own minds that's what they're thinking at all. They're in good faith making use of a guideline document. They're probably doing the best job they can in the circumstances. I can see why this has been so confusing for Kiel and why he and Emma want to be very cautious now. What are you guys gonna do? Oh, we're definitely gonna get it cleaned. That's the only way we're can ensure that it's, you know, liveable for us. So how long's that going to take? Uh, we were hoping to do it in the next few months or so. So come spring, she'll be a different house? Yeah. Oh, yeah, definitely. She'll look better than this, that's for sure. No wonder people are confused. Totally. We want to give a speical shoutout to NZ Safety, who gave us all the gear to keep our team safe. A conservative estimate suggests meth was used in more than 7000 homes last year. So if you're sitting there thinking, 'I'm all right, Jack. I don't own a home. This doesn't affect me,' well, you might want to keep watching. Yes, because tennants are just as much at risk as homeowners. It's a renter's nightmare. The whole report, there was only one sentence that you needed to read ` and it was, 'This house is uninhabitable.' She lost her home and nearly everything she owned. It was $22,000 to decontaminate all of my belongings. And that wasn't even guaranteed. Two almost identical fridge-freezers, so what's the difference? The Smiths chose a fridge-freezer that's Energy Star qualified. That means it uses up to 40% less energy. Next time you need a new appliance, look for one displaying the Energy Star. Welcome back. Deciphering P tests can be a confusing business. But there are some simple steps you can take to protect yourself from buying or renting a house used to manufacture meth. Priority one ` talk to the neighbours then have a... ...really good look around the property. Look for the indicators. Is there wires coming out of the eaves of the property where there were security cameras? Is there high fences? Is there signs of the windows being blacked out or ventilation systems being put into wardrobes, stuff like that. Looking for visible stains in the property, whether it's carpet burns, lino burns or ceiling or wall staining, excessive rubbish, burn pits around the property. Because for every ounce of methamphetamines produced, there's 5 ounces of toxic waste, and that's got to go somewhere, and it usually goes into the garden area. P contamination can happen in any community, but Kirk says you need to be extra vigilant in some cases. I don't think we need to hit the panic button yet. It's certainly not a leaky-home syndrome. I think we just need to look at it and say, right, is it isolated to a certain area, which it probably is, which is the rental market. So, what are the pitfalls for tenants? Well, you might want to take a good, hard look at your tenancy agreement. This one was given to one of our colleagues in Auckland, and it clearly addresses the use of meth ` After spotting that clause, our colleague decided to get the property tested before she moved in. Surprise, surprise, it came back positive. So had she not got it tested and just moved in, she would have been liable for a massive clean-up bill the day she moved out. The risk to tenants is very real. Here's Mark with a case in example. There are 500,000 rental homes in NZ. And if you think renters are not at risk of P contamination, then think again. Did you ever think this would happen to you? Oh! (LAUGHS) No, no. I'm so far from drug. I mean, I'm a primary schoolteacher by profession. Don't let the accent fool you. Kadon Captain comes from California, but she's now a naturalised Kiwi. A solo mum with two kids who back in January last year rented a four-bedroomed house on Auckland's Whangaparaoa Peninsula. So, that's the house there? Yeah, the brick one, yeah. The house was in great condition. I mean, it was beautiful. Nice stainless-steel kitchen, brand-new, beautiful, soft carpet, really nice, um, curtains and newly painted. How you doing? All good! > It was owned by this man, Brett Bogue, a real estate agent, but was being let out by his mother and sister. Two months after she moved in... I looked online and googled the owner's name, and then every newspaper in the country, all the way to Otago, had an article about him. Brett Bogue had been jailed for nine years with no chance of parole for large-scale methamphetamine dealing. I just freaked out. Brett Bogue was a P addict. Kadon's kids were living in his house. Was it contaminated? A first test showed meth was present. A second, more comprehensive test found levels 25 times higher than the safety limit. The whole report, there was only one sentenced that you needed to read, and it was, 'This house is uninhabitable.' Kadon soon moved out. As soon as I found out, I stopped paying rent, cos I thought that was my right, but it isn't your right to stop paying rent. You have to continue paying rent until you're allowed to not pay rent. And things were about to get even messier. Kadon took the landlord to the Tenancy Tribunal for failing to provide a house that was in a clean and liveable state. But at the same time, the landlord was taking her to the Tribunal over rent arrears. I pretty much lived out of my car, staying at friends' places for, like, four to six weeks. And during that time, I couldn't find a rental property to save my life, because my name was in the Tenancy hearing, and Tribunal. Any property management company that went and did their normal tenancy checks would see it, and it would just` it would be a red flag. Kadon won at the Tenancy Tribunal. She never went back to the house, and almost all her possessions were destroyed because of meth contamination. The quote was $22,000 to decontaminate all of my belongings, and that wasn't even guaranteed. Now, my insurance was going to help and pay for that, but in the end, it's kind of like, why would I want anything that's been in there? So here's a top from someone who's been through the ringer. Unless it's absolutely brand-new, no one has ever lived in it, you should test it and get it lab-tested. Because there's a final sting in this tale. After I finally could get a rental place under my own name again, I, of course, tested a property that I got approved for, and it came back positive. And imagine that. What is the likelihood that you could possibly come across two homes that could be contaminated? If it's that common, or that happens, it's` there's just no point in risking it. What's really concerning is landlords are under no obligation to tell you if a house is contaminated. However, if you ask, they have to tell you the truth. We think there needs to be much clearer guidelines, and we're not alone. We just got this in from the Ministry of Health in response to our programme tonight. They tell us their guideline was designed just for P-lab clean-ups and in their words ` They're about to get together with other government agencies to review that guideline, but it could take a year. In the meantime, the best advice is to ask questions ` lots of them. So that's the show, but we will be on Facebook for the next half hour to answer your questions. Our programme is all about your problems, your thoughts, so please do contact us. Coming up next week ` There's trouble brewing in the deep south. We've been too trusting. It's been the most stressful time of their lives. Southern Hospitality is abused by a builder. Bit of a mess at the moment. It is, yes. They gave him their retirement savings and got stuck with an unfinished, leaking mess. It's just straight-out untruthful, not telling us. To make matters worse, they've been told their building guarantee is no good either. If they don't come to the party, I don't know what will happen. What do we do now? That's next week. Goodnight.