That guy! He wanting to find alternative safer drugs instead of just not doing at all after his loved ones died ??!!!!!!! GOD IS WATCHING YOU! 🤦 ...whoever reading do not do drugs and alcohol. Be sober ✝️.
As a New Zealander, I can safely say the next health crisis in the country will be related to vaping. Pretty much every 13 year old at high school is full time addicted to vaping these days at nicotine doses 5 x that of standard cigarette. It's crazy.
When I pick my daughter up from intermediate all the kids are walking out and just flopping out their vapes like its nothing. I’m in Gizzy but I’m sure it’s the same across the country
I'm really tired of hearing about the war on drugs. It's a waste of time and money. You will never stop people from wanting to escape reality. As long as they are grown adults, let them have their recreational drugs. Provide education on whatever substances are available. They are only hurting themselves and it is really no one else's business but the person doing it. The only problem would be providing it to underage youths or operating machinery while high. Hey, sounds just like alcohol, huh. Imagine that.
Idk , I kinda agree but I don’t. I live in NYC and everywhere you are surrounded by people who are under the influence of hardcore drugs. They make things gross. They piss on the trains , have crazy freak out moments , pick random fights, and are overall unstable as hell. Maybe public intoxication should be a heavier and more well enforced fine.
@@ojsimpson9516 thats because drugs are illegal, and they have to resort to buying drugs from ppl who lace them with other sht, but yeah public intoxication should be the same as with alchohol
Kiwi here - before Kiwis learned to make meth they had worked out how to make morphine, and heroin (mostly monomethylmorphine, basically as good) from codeine, which was available in OTC meds at the time. This formula was originally devised here in WW2 just in case during the Japanese advance, another example of geography being destiny, and laid in a university library somewhere until some keen student unearthed it in the 1980s. Many of my friends were homebake heroin cooks, some moved to meth once codeine was restricted.
Kiwi here. This documentary is basically pretty good, but it makes a couple of mistakes. The first mistake is small - BZP never really functioned as a meth replacement. BZP was a socially acceptable drug that was used occasionally by the general population (kinda like the UK with E back in the day). Meth, on the other hand, was a socially UN-acceptable drug that was used heavily by a small part of the population. I did a lot of BZP back in the day, and so did everyone around me. I had mates who did a lot of meth. There wasn't a lot of cross over - the meth people mostly hung out with each other cos they didn't want to share their meth or get judged or spend their money on drugs that weren't meth. Matt might like to claim he was disrupting the meth market (while making millions for himself!) but I'm not convinced. The second mistake is bigger - conflating the 2000s wave of BZP/TMFPP (which was basically an ecstasy / 'tripstasy' replacement) with the 2010s wave of synthetic cannabinoids (aka 'sinnies'). The BZP wave did very little harm considering how big it was, but the sinnies wave caused serious problems. A lot of regular weed smokers shifted to sinnies, and a lot of people died. Sinnies were far more addictive and dangerous than either weed (which it replaced) or BZP/TMFPP (which it gets compared to). In a country with very very few overdose deaths, people were literally dying in the streets. Instead of allowing these mostly untested substances, the govt should have loosened cannabis law. In both the BZP wave and the sinnies wave, it wasn't really a shift from 'dangerous' drugs to 'safe' drugs - it was more of a shift from illegal drugs (coming from dealers) to legal drugs (coming from shops). The govt was fine with this loose policy framework during the BZP wave, but when the sinnies came along and caused real issues with addiction and death, that looseness came to an end. So all in all, a good doco. Interesting. But yeah, not a very nuanced take on the nature of these very different substances, their relative harms, and how those things fed into the govt policy.
I do think they could've talked to more experts, especially more representation in communities most harmed (e.g. Māori and Pacific communities), rather than just a British person (who may have good expertise! But lacks lived experience) and someone on the nightclub scene (again, expertise, knows a lot of people, and has had a huge impact, but still not so much lived experience as someone in a marginalised community turning to meth). Gangs would've also been interesting to talk to (gang =/= pushing meth and violence). Also thought it was interesting they didn't mention more recent events like the non-binding referendum around decriminalisation (which unfortunately people voted against by a small margin after significant fear campaigns from groups like Family First) & the decision to not decriminalise anyway. Same with NZ being first in the world (?) to allow drug testing at festivals. Know Your Stuff would've been good to talk to around statistics & knowing what's on the partying scene currently (not the same as the meth scene), or even Chlöe Swarbrick around what they're trying to do in terms of harm reduction. Could've been cool to boost efforts of people like Chlöe working in changing legislation.
ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS TO BLAME R...SM AND COLONIZA..ON, ask anyone from a marginalized community why they're doing it and they'll say it's because there's nothing else to do in this town and not a single person will say racism or colonization made them do it, its the gangs who are selling them the d..gs not raci.ts or Captian Cook, can you imagine the cops finding m3th on someone and their excuse is, sorry officer rac.sm made me do it, do really think that will hold up in court ? We need to adress the real reasons why people use it and not make excuses otherwise nothing will ever get fixed.
@@dinornis Chlöe would have been amazing on this. There's not many people who can speak better on the topic. Some of the experts will know more, but she's just a really good communicator. And she understands the health side, the ethics side, and the politics side to it
Vice is a critically important medium for the critically important issue of drug law reform and the only one that presents alternatives to the status quo.
Just me or has Vice conveniently looked over Bowden's involvement in synthetic cannabis development here?? My mistake just realised it doesnt align with the narrative of his party pills as the potential launch pad to global drug law reform. As you were.
Which department of vice do you work for?.... They started this by saying NZ is best know for LOTR.... imagine reducing a country to a film location. its 95% garbage
Psychedelics are just an exceptional mental health breakthrough. It's quite fascinating how effective they are against depression and anxiety. Saved my life.
Can you help with the reliable source I would really appreciate it. Many people talk about mushrooms and psychedelics but nobody talks about where to get them. Very hard to get a reliable source here in Australia. Really need!
Yes, dr.sporesss. I have the same experience with anxiety, depression, PTSD and addiction and Mushrooms definitely made a huge huge difference to why am clean today.
I wish they were readily available in my place. Microdosing was my next plan of care for my husband. He is 59 & has so many mental health issues plus probable CTE & a TBI that left him in a coma 8 days. It's too late now I had to get a TPO as he's 6'6 300+ pound homicidal maniac. He's constantly talking about killing someone. He's violent. Anyone reading this Familiar w/ BPD know if it is common for an obsession with violence.
There was a brief moment when we could buy those P.E.P pills here in the UK, I remember being told they were from NZ but this is fascinating to learn the story behind them. P.E.P pills were great, I know some casual drug users and they started using them instead of searching out mdma or coke every weekend. I truly believe if that market had been allowed to remain we would have seen a lot safer party/rave scene and stopped money going in to violent hands.
@@nathengrim5041 yes, they passed a law in 94 to make them illegal, didn't stop them though, the scene just got pushed back underground and more localised as you'd have lots of small rigs around the country doing parties at the weekend. Sometimes we'd start at a party in Devon and go from there to one in Wales the next day and just keep going until back to work on Monday. It's still kind of happening now, not sure how Covid has effected it but Teknival was still quite a big thing when I last noticed it and I know raves do happen, I'm just too old and boring to be involved any more.
Doesn't work like that in the real world. The crims just get hold of the ingredients elsewhere, (China), and make and sell their own version without quality control. Just got to follow the money when it comes to these kinds of things.
I remember PEP pills. We bought a load of them and sold them on out festival stall. They were great as long as you didn't drink. Couldn't believe thr NZ government made them.
As someone who grew up in a household whose dad was addicted to meth I strongly disagree that the dangers of meth is overstated. You would too if your dad‘s paranoia had him randomly pulling weapons on you.
Sorry that happened man. I’ve done meth on and off for the past 3 years along with heroin. Can’t imagine how much meth you would have to do to get that paranoid.
@@jsilva7005 uppers and downers.. Crazy mix.. I think it depends on the person and I feel it's more the lack of sleep and food that messes up a lot of the full on meth users not the meth itself..
We also have horrible alcohol abuse here in Aotearoa. My papa was one. This type of stuff makes you unrecognisable to your whanau. Thankfully when my dad went to prison and came back after 2 years, he stopped doing all drugs. Was completely sober and he wanted to help our whole whanau to stop doing drugs. Including the young ones. But, his 40 years of drinking and drugs caught up and he passed away from a heart disease 2 years ago. They said the pain of losing a loved one goes away with time but I still miss my beautiful papa ay😢now almost all my siblings have started smoking and drinking. Definitely a cycle which has been created in Aotearoa. It needs to stop. Heaps of our loved ones pass away too young. I'm never gonna go near that yuck stuff far
As someone who grew up in NZ then moved to Europe, the alcohol abuse in NZ is fairly light compared with much of the rest of the developed world. It needs to get better, but in the grand scheme of things, NZ is doing fairly well.
@@theobserver2309 Yes, Aotearoa, its in the national anthem, on the money and the passport. It's not brainwashing to accept that a country can have more than one name. Quite the opposite.
that meth though. scary times. it starts off being the best thing in the world. you are funnier, harder working, youve got ideas just busting out of your brain. it can do incredible things. THEN. it's hiding in your apartment peeking through the blinds. it's being on all fours raking through the carpet for that rock you know you dropped the night before. you sell everything. you are all of a sudden in the scrap market picking up anything that you can sell to get high. at the end I was sleeping in my truck in January in pa. I remember there would be ice on the INSIDE of my windshield because of my own perspiration. it the most evil , accessable drug on the market. incredibly cheap for what it does to you. sober from that 7 yrs. I moved 1200 miles because I was scared I was going to go to my spots. ruined a marriage a relationship with 3 beautiful grown now kids. I'm older so I guess wiser. looking back I'm just grateful to have my crap together and gained back what I recklessly have away.
It's so awful, I've never tried it but I know so many people who got hooked. You might not overdose but it seems like it takes your life in other ways...
@@rhoynedev same for most drugs people know but still take them. Luckily for us meth isn't such a big thing here in the UK although spice and the such is just as bad. People will always try and do what they wanna do
Kiwi here - Matt Bowden also introduced NZ to a legal high called "Ease". It lasted about a year before the Minstry of Health and government realised it was an MDMA analogue also known as Methylone or BK-MDMA. Other NZ "Companies" were selling Mephedrone and Methylone between 2006-2010 before the UK media blew up and sensationalized the dangers of them and thus became the new era of Party Pills and Synthetic Cannaboids. The NPS then quashed any potential legal high manufacturers in our country because in order to develop and test, you had to pay a flat fee of $1,000,000 NZ. So this is why no further legal highs have been manufactured and our population of drug users resort to underground gang driven Crystal Meth and Synthetics. There appears to be a war on harm reduction rather than a war on drugs in our country.
Psychedelics saved me from years of uncontrollable depression, anxiety, and illicit pills addiction. Imagine carving heavy chains for over a decade and then all of a sudden that burden is gone. Believe it or not, in a couple of years they'll be all over for treatment of mental health related issues.
yes, that's right, I researched and found out that shrooms are helpful in many ways but nobody talks about where to get them. Very hard to get a reliable source I can reach out to
they've helped me a lot as well I'm a war vet diagnosed with PTSD. A lot of issues spun out of control when I came home. This is something i looked up and tried after trying the roller coaster of antidepressants. Day and night difference
As an older Kiwi we have a shocking drug problem in NZ. 40 plus years ago it was just marijuana and alcohol. That was it. I knew only one person in my youth that tried anything harder and it was heroin from his Dutch cousins that were visiting. He tried it twice in several weeks until his friends said that they would do him some serious bodily harm if he did it again. He never did. We were all content at just a drink and a tote. Up North were I lived it was everywhere. I remember going to parties and there would be a bowl of it on the table. Help yourself. I stopped when I was 21 as it was not me and all my friends stopped by they time they were mid 20's. I am just extremely grateful the drugs now were not around when I was a teenager. Smoking marijuana did not seem to cause the problems and crime we see now. From my perspective it seems that so many people just want to escape reality or are bored and unhappy with life.
Those Dutch cousins of his were arseholes to give him herion. And in a country where that costs a fortune. Imagine if he'd become an addict. He'd have had no choice but to go the Sydney where it was much cheaper and either prostitute himself or become a drug mule, both of which were and are very dangerous in a place like Sydney.
I'm a Canadian, and my family immigrated here from New Zealand. I think legalizing recreational cannabis would be the best solution to the problems mentioned here. When you can order 100g of weed for $120, it's really difficult for drug dealers to retain customers while remaining profitable enough to carry on
Quality weed is much more expensive to cultivate properly than $120 / 100G. I'm not sure where you're getting those metrics from or the quality of the yield. The absolute cheapest I've seen good weed go for in the USA was around $2.20/G when buying 450G or more; and that was when weed prices plummeted recently. In Florida, where medical sales are legal but cultivation is not, there's caps on the amount you can buy per month with prices trending around $30-50 for 3.5G. Again, obviously more bulk will be cheaper but your average client is going to pay full retail.
The legal system works very well in Canada. I can buy blunts in a store in downtown Peace River in legal businesses, rather than in a street situation, where other products are available. Flower products and concentrates have vastly improved in legal shops in Alberta and Saskatchewan since legalisation in October 2018.
Those party pills were so fun, the comedown was horrible but a hangover from drinking too much is just as bad. It makes me sad to hear the cartels think NZ is an important market for them, and it's absolutely right the crime in NZ has increased massively, more shootings and ram raids and general madness ....dammit. we were so close to making a huge change...
That’s so bullsht about crime on the rise, that’s just on the news. You look at statistics for yourself , and just see it’s only on media. Scaremongering at its finest
It's SORT OF geographic. There's LOTS of stuff made by CHINESE in the pacific islands and then smuggled to New Zealand from there. Because of the nature and poverty and difficulty in ENFORCING laws in the MANY pacific islands and because their next land is New Zealand, it's more likely for drugs to be smuggled into New Zealand than other countries. Corrupt police on peanuts wages and the clan like structures in the pacific add greatly to the problem.
I used to take them every week back in 05,Wellington NZ they were the best. Grinners 6pk capsules $40,pop 2 with 6pk of beer and you party all night haha🤣don't know the story behind it but it was a sad day when they banned them
@@wolfgangvonuce9615 Grins gave me the worst headaches. For me Jax by London Underground were the best. I was a human test monkey. Bolts, Charge, Good stuff, Hummer to name a few. I remember waiting outside St James and the promo girls used to always hand them out for free
This is a strategic shift in thinking and replicates work completed in the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. The typical message had been one grounded in fear. When the message was shifted to empowerment messages, the intended behavior changes began to emerge. There is a ton of research to back this up and you seem to have found it intuitively. Good on you!
New Zealander here, this was really difficult to watch. Matt Bowden has caused so much damage. I wish you dug a little bit deeper into what this guy was all about. His arguments and ideas aren’t wrong but his motivation and the outcomes of his products are shown from an extremely bias angle here.
@@rdizzy1 "his motivation is irrelevant" False, his motivation is very relevant. The amount of companies that have caused great harm because people had that mindset is innumerable. Take the Tabacco industry, or the oil industry, how about big pharma which is entirely to blame for the opaeoid epidemic in the US. All of these developed because "their motivations were irrelevant"
I'd like to know more about this. I didn't like the whole "entrepreneurial" aspect and his talk of venture capitalists. Remember: cartels in their various forms are just businesses, and the model behind the illegal drug trade functions along lines of capitalism, from manufacture/production, export, wholesale, retail etc. Drug addiction is a public health issue and should be dealt with by socialised medical care. Recreational drug use should be treated in a similar way to how one of the most popular recreational drugs on the planet is treated: that of alcohol. But the huge profits, as well as the illegality, contribute to the immense violence associated with the drug trade at every level. Yet those $billions end up in banks all over the world, from the Cayman Islands, to London's Square Mile. We need a better model, which isn't based on violence and exploitation (i.e. capitalism). In other words, I'd like to know more about this guy as I'll bet that he was a seedy character and we should not be looking to drug entrepreneurs - no matter how groovy they may seem - to help us figure out how to end this ridiculous "war on drugs".
I am from Glasgow and spent 6 years in nz. I was there during the synthetic cannabis boom. After it was made illegal it went into the hands of an Asian family who made it themselves. The side effects were unbelievable and terrifying. It was an instant addiction (literally instant). The stories I have around it are insane. I was there when the gangs took it over after the first guy was caught.
Omg.. Thank God back in my day we had regular weed, the E was good no problems if you had money you took coke and H if you were broke. Simpler times. Never heard of killer pot. Crazy
New Zealander here. Those drugs weren't as safe as you're making out here. I had a lot of friends get really badly addicted to the synthetic weed they put out, some people even died. That stuff is lethal and they were selling it in corner stores to kids.
New Zealander here, I have to say there is a very high use rate among youth for cannabis, as to be expected, but the introduction of the synthetic cannabis had an incredibly negative affect in the last decade. I’ve also lost a couple mates to bath salts, which has become a common, cheaper to produce alternative, disguised as MDMA or ecstasy. From my point of view that has had the biggest impact on me in New Zealand having lived here all my life, but definitely seen my fair share of others using other stuff such as Meth. Interesting the perspective and points raised in this, and was unaware of the BZP drama as I was a 2000’s baby. Anyways, Stay safe !
Yes I totally agree. I posted this in the main comment section, but will fit here nicely too... >>>>The big problem is people in NZ can't easily get Ecstasy (MDMA). Worse the crime class for possession of Ecstasy wasn't worth the risk of importation. This made many people try the legal synthetics and backyard manufacturing of Meth. Had the government decriminalised Ecstasy none of that would have happened. As far as I'm aware the UK doesn't have as big a Meth issue as NZ does because Ecstasy is easily available in the UK, plus the harms from E are a lot lower than Meth. The animal testing of legal highs in NZ was one of the biggest hurdles as the public found out about the 'LD50' toxicity test that meant 50% of animals had to die from poisoning of each drug, to establish toxic dosing (as done on all new medicines ). The public didn't want animals dying for people to get high. A massive protest at parliament and a large petition helped sway the government to abandon that, and rightly so. Unfortunately no one bothered to use or lobby for a safe alternative to animal testing. Had that been done, we may actually now have safe legal highs. The answer will be when the drug safety authorities like the FDA accept non-animal toxicity testing, That will be the game changer!!!
That was the thing, once BZP was banned that’s when bath salts came in. BZP was fine so long as you didn’t exceed the dose, same as alcohol is fine so long as you did go to excess! It was a really social drug, it gave joy energy and you became very social and felt really connected to those around you. I took it for years anc never once had a bad experience on it or heard of anyone have a reaction or bad experience. Sure a few ended up in ED but the had either taken more than the recommended dose or mused it with too much alcohol or red bull, making their heart rate go trough the roof. It’s sad that it was banned as it was a safer alternative to any other drug put there
@@Trenscendent see I didn’t get a home town off it. If you didn’t drink too much and didn’t take higher doses and stay up all night you were fine. But people would stay up all night and get hammered drinking till 4sm on the stuff. So I don’t think it was the drug it was the late nights, dehydration and alcohol that made you feel like death the next day l
As an addict I get so tired of people pushing blame directly off on the other people for the choices they make to continue and or start using substances. Other people can be factors but at the end of the day your choices are your own and you are the one to blame. If you started taking these things by choice not if somebody else drugs you.
I'm a postal worker but not stupid enough to speak on behalf of all other postal workers. Everyone's journey to addiction is different. Some with trauma, some party, some social acceptance. Acting high and mighty on this isn't really going to solve anything
I agree (if you are over 18, as you are an adult then and have more appropriate thought processes). Everyone knows how addictive P is. They know if they take it just once there's a chance they'll be instantly addicted. And people knew that about heroin too, back in the day when that was a more common drug.
"starboy" is responsible for a lot of misery in this country , and the most insulting thing is he called it harm REDUCTION ffs........ and to be honest calling him a musician is being INCREDIBLY generous .
hes jus like any of cook or chemist cookin for profit...its about the key word profit....i was guilty myself of justifying what i was doin as sayin its a safe and pure alternative and cheap but i was jus lying to myself and everyone else....now i grow herb and caretake for ppl and can sleep at night knowing im fully doing no harm but neways i full heartily agree i learned about starboy along while ago and thought he was a con man then and still do...and yea his music if u wanna call it that is ridiculous....stay blessed my dude...
You'd think someone at big pharma, Johnson & Johnson etc., would have had this idea by now. All they need to do is create a number of safe recreational products, test them and then use their influence to change the laws.
Nah all drugs will lead to ruin sooner or later, and JnJ are smart enough not to waste money to sell something to people who will eventually be broke due to addiction. Something safe like weed or tobacco is better because it will hook you until the end of your life unlike these other drugs.
Probation Officer in small town New Zealand. I can confirm that when I do the WHO alcohol and drug questionnaire and get to 'have you used cocaine?' people who have used most other substances will say something along the lines of "no, you can't get that here". Or "no. Can you get it here?!" Meanwhile meth is everywhere.
Yeah, I can't imagine Charlie being very accessible outside the bigger cities due to scarity and price, where as P is just so much easier to produce and flood rural NZ with.
Its more common these days just poor quality and outrageously expensive. Trafficking gangs like the Comancheros from Aus have supposedly been moving into the market after realising the huge profits involved compared to Australia.
@@savannahm1223 The guy picked my partner at the time and I up in Wellington and once we were in his car, we were kind of at his mercy. He showed a very large bag of meth that he said he manufactured himself and offered us some. We declined. So, then he showed us that he had a gun under the seat. He took us completely off of the route we were taking, chased a cop at some point (she looked more scared than we were), and told us how his friend was dying at the hospital, but he would still bring him tweak. After a couple of hours of that at some point he got tired and needed to smoke more tweak and we just ditched as soon as the car wasn't moving anymore.
It reminds me of how a few years ago shops in Poland used to sell drugs for teens using unregulated substances. When law started to change then they started to sell them as collectables. They were known as "Dopalacze"
Kiwi here, I remember party pills when I was about 17/18. They never really hurt anybody. I did see people move on to meth later, and it's sad to think they might not have done that if party pills were legal.
Your memory is fairly poor if you think the party pills never hurt anyone. I was 25 and living with 2 nurses in Christchurch at the height, and they dealt with hospitalisations because of party pills every Fri, Sat and Sun.
Hamilton is a legend in the drugs community 🙌 The research and knowledge in his documentaries are amazing so he can handle the chem labs for a few mins...trust us lol.
If we legalized weed in new zealand I think that would be a huge step towards solving a few problems, we can use the taxes on the education and health sectors.
We just need it decriminalized but I don't think it will ever be 100% legal here in NZ. The government probably gaining far more money through drug busts than they would from taxing weed if it was legal
@@jackyjew8607 Your not seeing the bigger picture. Drug busting at least related to weed won't even come close to how much tax they'd collect. Decriminalization is the worst best option
They really made a shambles of it and when voted no they just dropped it because labour never cared lol we act so progressive yet we couldn't even at a minimum decriminalise it.... I know many functioning people using cannabis that are great humans and have raised great kids and contribute to society. We really really need to sort our meth issue out..... its generational now.
Meth crime rises when the weed market is flooded. The working class don't earn enough to cover the cost of living. Cant sell weed, they'll sell something else.
Fully disingenuous. It fucked people right up and the level of addiction was nothing like I've seen before. BZP wasn't a problem, which is what they mentioned mostly on here. Synthetic cannabinoids were a huge problem and caused a lot of harm.
@@smolgok384 why would they go through the efforts of making synthetic canabinoids when the plant is a WEED it grows in almost every environment, its all got to do with money. i live in canada and oz's went from 200-300 for AAAA grade to 100$ 2/3 of the price cut in half by legalizing it. its very easy to produce, unlike the synthetics they charge you substantially higher its a game of monopoly at the end of the day .
Its not that these things have become forgotten its more that these drugs have been tweaked so slightly in molecules that they are now entirely different drugs under a different name, example of this being “bath salts” in the UK changed 4/5 times before a ban was put across for majority of the chemical compontents used to create these synthetic drugs. Bath salts is still alive and well its probably just called shower spice or some daft crap now 😂
@@zR_Munro did you even read my comment? Like I said, the exact same thing happened with bath salts. What exactly ate you adding to my comment that wasn't already stated?
Spice or K2 are Noids family, (synthetic cannabinoids) AND-BUTINACA, 4F-MDMB-2201 are the most known, but the chemical structure changes every 6 months or so lol What you guys are talking about Bath salts, are synthetic cathinones. Like Alpha-PVP, 4-CL-PVP or Euthylone but likewise this will have become maybe 5-CL-PVP in 6months 😆 the effects aren't that clean but they aren't as unpredictable as in early 2010 with the "zombies bath salt" The problem which lies here is that these drugs aren't tested at all before being on the legal market lol It can happens sometimes that the effects are way more intense than its cousins chemical. Happens aswell with Fentanyl, Same thing, carfentanyl is 2x more potential than Fentanyl Butylfentanyl 1.5 x more potent than Fentanyl, or 150 more than Morphine... Guessing game, users are literally guinea pigs
I used to take BZP, it was mostly a way of self medicating for adhd before I was diagnosed the legal high phenomena was terrible I lived near a shop that was selling them and you would have people queueing at 5am in full blown psychosis, people would get very aggressive and it was a really bad situation we would get clusters of people dying after consuming bad batches regularly they were a mix of chemicals from china and you never knew what you were going to get. Store owners made an obscene amount of money not carrying that they were hurting people and our community
@@user-bk3kv8sl9z Not necessarily the same thing, guns are mainly manufactured for self defense purposes. Intentionally selling heroin with fentanyl or intentionally adding fentanyl into heroin is definitely someone killing someone . If a gun dealer knew you were planning to kill someone and still sold you the gun they would be implicit. You know selling the heroin someone is going to shoot it up, implicit.
Cuz now a days ppl don't care about hurting other they want it they get it das how it is it's their choice to pick what type of substance they wanna take and buy nb forces yu to take anything they chose they buy whatever consequences comes wit it it ain't the dealers fault there just suppliers and the ones that are lookin to get paid only for the paycheck
those synthetic cannabinoids like spice or K2 are beyond dangerous.. I have a few acquaintances who have literally lost their mind (long term) smoking something 'harmless' from the head shop, or been rushed to the hospital.
BZP (cattle wormer) is/was gross though. A dirty grinding high that makes you feel like you’re stripped of all vitality on the comedown. It also makes your stomach growl as if it were stretching/tearing. I don’t know anyone who misses the BZP days. From memory Genesis was the first legal high Matt Bowden sold? After living abroad for 7 years, I’ve often wondered why NZ has such a poor quality of life, such high suicide rates and pervasive meth use…? There’s comparative safety, student loans, freedom to innovate, but most don’t make use of it. Many of the most successful people I know in NZ are not from NZ. I suspect colonialism in the last 200 years is a factor. A fairly recent collective trauma. In addition, the early immigrants were probably people (Irish, English, Scottish, Chinese) who were desperate lower class people with a poor quality of life in their country of origin. Why would an early settler come here if they had a good life elsewhere? In more modern times, education is undervalued by many leading to poor prospects. The welfare state potentially demotivates people? The smaller towns are boring with next to no opportunities, and even the bigger cities (in my view) are under stimulating after a few weeks. Many people work repetitive jobs (factory work, farming, service work) for low wages. Meth makes a boring monotonous life seem lively. Drugs are a poor person’s holiday, because a real holiday is unaffordable. Lastly, trauma and the lack of adequate mental health support is an issue. Waitlists are long and most people can only get 4 therapy sessions a year. To get support people need to be causing harm to themselves, or others, or their close kin need to die. At that point, rock bottom, people might get some help? Personally, I prefer to live in Australia, or Europe where the weather is better, people earn more and have a better quality of life etc All that being said, New Zealand is beautiful in parts, but it’s a slow pace of life. It’s suitable in some locations for middle class and above people who enjoy hiking, boating, fishing, BBQs, snow sports etc If that’s your idea of a good time, you’ll like N.Z and could create a good life here. If you’re driven, it’s easy to succeed, because competition is minimal.
I grew up in NZ and was pretty unaware of all this happening at a younger age. But now living overseas and going back to visit, its very clear how much worse drug use has made the country to live in. Mental health and gang violence is so bad now, and it is corroding the value of living there. The country needs some kind of drastic intervention on drugs with a long term social and economic positive effect.
That's not true New Zealand wide. Its merely pockets. Look at Auckland and the housing market! People are doing just fine I assure you of that. I agree with the Mental health aspect but Kiwis have always struggled with that, that's not new. Gangs, yes Hastings and other similar areas, not in larger cities like Auckland, they're fringe crowds.
Depends where you are here and what you compare it too.. Where I live it's safe as, I can take a stroll at 1am with no worries at all.. I think we have had 2 murders in the last 20 years..
@@thedappercook nah dude the housing market only effects the upper class, the rest of us get completely fucked. The gang violence is also very scary atm, there have been so many shootings and a few of the houses that burnt down have been mere streets away from where I live. The CDB is getting worse too, so many homeless and more by the day. Most are addicts with severe issues that need help.
New Zealander here, I remember the party pill era. We used it as teenagers when we couldn't get proper eckies on some weekends back in 2006. Dark Angel party pill was a favorite of ours in East Auckland.
I live in New Zealand, I have family and friends who have been addicted to or who have family who are addicted to meth. I'd say atleast 1/20 or 30 people you meet in NZ are currently on meth, have been on meth, or have known people who are on meth. It is way too common, and I strongly believe that the first step to moving past our meth problem is to legalize weed. Hear me out, I am a frequent user of pot, and the same places where I go to buy some bud are also the same places that sell meth. Now I strongly disagree with the notion that weed is a gateway drug, but it's illegal status actually makes it more of a gate way than if it was legal, since if I could just go to a store and legally purchase medicinal herb then I would never have to look at meth in the first place. Being a pot user here often means you'll be exposed to meth aswell whether you like it or not. So yes, I strongly believe reworking our backwards 18th century law system will help aid in decreases meth fatalities.
There is no such thing as medicinal herb. That's biased and very unscientific as it causes as much harm as it helps depending on the condition and person. Legalised herb is the term you should use.
There's always going to be a balance between allowing and providing people with the means to do what they want to do and putting restrictions on society for the betterment of all. Thank you Vice for trying to keep us on track!
Meth and weed are the most common drugs in my part of rural America simply because it can be made locally. It's common enough my coworkers have casually mentioned where they get it. New Zealand ain't exactly weird.
In Cincinnati, most common drugs I know of are opiates. fentanyl is easier to find on the street than weed. I'll see people with Indiana license plates, Kentucky plates, West Virginia plates here in the hood getting their shyt everyday. Ive been opiate dependant about ten years now. Won't touch other drugs, and dont like uppers even caffeine. Anyway yeah def opiates everywhere around here, mainly Fentanyl and other synthetic opiate powders or rocked form.
Matt Bowden sounds like a top bloke. Very sensible approach to the problem. Massive shame that this approach wasnt adopted more widely. Would have saved countless lives.
Angela Davis (1944-, Planet Earth)- “Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.”
It's really frustrating that we actually got so close to doing something that would have undercut the illegal market but the government lost it's nerve and now we have to deal with rampant violence from well-funded gangs as a result.
A friend and I had reason to visit NewZealand in 2006,& saw the legal scene Matt Bowden had spawned. You could literally decide the kind of buzz you wanted, & if you had a bad reaction - you could easily find 1 type of pill you could buy- that would deactivate whatever you'd bought,over the counter. Meanwhile - the war on drugs in Australia meant that people were overdosing, then overheating -rather than run the gauntlet of cops & sniffer dogs - outside of day long summer dance festivals
I am a New Zealander, and it was shocking how the Prime Minister of the time, John Key, made the Legal highs legal while keeping Marijuana (which has to be the safest drug) illegal.
From NZ myself, amongst most of friends and every party I've been to MDMA is really popular, the issue comes when it's not tested and your 'mate' says it is, that's how I ended up doing doing bath salts and getting psychosis for 3 days and not being able to sleep. Never done it since even though I have a test kit, don't think I ever will. If party pills had been legal I would have done those and never had the risk of dodgy gear.
The people in NZ are awesome. Do you live here, there's addiction and crime in every country all over the world. I think you're in a sad state of mind to have that opinion because a part from the few, NZers are beautiful, happy ,laid back ,humerous people. You can't beat Kiwis
@@trinaburns7845 having lived in NZ for many years I can tell you I now live in a country where the people are so much happier than kiwi's and the weather and lifestyle so much better too. NZ is quant but backwards particularly senior citizens the majority of whom appear to be sitting around waiting to suffle off this planet
im from nz and my granddad was friends with a big drug lord named Mr asia / terry clark they were from nz and transported a lot of drugs here crazy to see how much the drug scene has changed from back then and its way too easy for kids to get them. We need to get it under control
The outcry comes from the drugs being safer to cause a marginal increase in use as risk adverse people who wanted to get high now can. I think this is inevitable, but more than off set my the ease of getting off drugs when they are less addictive and legal to seek help with. The problem is the first stage comes first and the politicians are too weak to see the plans through.
I dont understand Why they make that documentation about new zealand. Most of the research Chemicals get produced in china and Sold in netherlands. They make it Sound like a new zealand thing but it's not
@i can't find a name All those foxes and possums eating her crop...or whatever little weed-predatory animals are down those parts. Little nug eating pigs or whatever.
I started doing drugs since my teenage, got addicted to heroin. Spent my whole life fighting heroin addiction. I suffered severe depression and mental disorder. Heroin addiction actually destroyed my life. Not until my wife recommended me to psilocybin mushrooms treatment. Psilocybin treatment saved my life honestly. 6 years totally clean. Never thought I would be saying this about mushrooms.
I find sobriety to be 1,000% easier than struggling with an addiction. I compare the drug trade to the slave trade. It's just profiting from people's suffering and chemical dependencies. Once a person runs out of their own money and stuff to steal, they go find other people's money and stuff to steal. It's not a victimless crime in the least bit.
Stealing is not a victimless crime, but drug use is. Arresting people for a crime the government thinks they are likely to commit in the future is not the way. By your logic being poor, oppressed and/or homeless should be a crime too since most people would steal before starving to death.
Its frigging weird how parts of America have softened their stance on weed mean while a more progressive country like New Zealand still hasn't gotten around to it.
Wow, as a kiwi this was fascinating, I’m of the younger generation so I had no idea this happened and I feel something like what there use to be would be super benefititial to so many communities
I enjoyed the bzp/tfmpp pills. Legit hallucinated on them. More than once. Music was a whole different level. The pills were balanced with other minerals your body needed / would use while high. You would kind of get used to a certain kind but there were so many to try you would just shift brands. RIP.
I remember the old BZP party pills circa 2004-2006. Still to this day the strongest most intense high of anything (legal or otherwise) I’ve ever experienced. Also BY FAR the worst comedown I’ve ever had…. Especially when you mixed it with alcohol & weed.
Yeah the comedown/hangover was horrific - there's no way BZP is less dangerous or harmful to your health than MDMA that's just ridiculous. And as others have said Bowden was just a self-interested capitalist, he never gave two shits about public health which is why he focused on introducing dangerous synthetic drugs into the market instead of lobbying for drug war reform, better funding for addiction and mental health services, harm reduction policies like drug testing and injection sites, etc. This was honestly a pretty bad and inaccurate documentary on other levels too. That criminologist they interview clearly doesn't know wtf she's talking about. Prescription opioids common in the NZ drug market? Besides tramadol being reasonably common NZ barely has an opiate scene at all. Psychedelics like LSD and shrooms are far more popular than opioids. If I were to guess I'd say that the most commonly used/abused illegal drugs in this country are: 1. Marijuana 2. Methamphetamine 3. MDMA 4. LSD 5. Magic Mushrooms In that order, although it'll vary depending across different parts of society, with meth use being far more prevalent among working class communities compared to the upper crust (despite what that dealer claims, most professionals look down on meth as a dirty, poor persons drug, even if they'll happily snort up lines of cocaine or drop molly on the weekends).
@@makhnovite idk about everything else youve said but i know matt bowden personally and he is very not capatilist, he goes on quite a lot about how capatilism sucks lol, it seems to me he didnt want to put a bandaid on the problem (drug testing sites, addiction funding etc) and wanted to try and fix it from the root which is changing the actual drugs we all take
I tell ya what, a lot of foreigners got a hell of a surprise when they bought some legal 'energy pills' and found out that they were a lot stronger than No Doz! BZP was one hell of a drug (with one hell of a comedown).
What's really is scary is that I was pregnant in 2011 when synthetic cannabis was around, I had stopped smoking weed once I had found out I was pregnant and was encouraged by health professionals to smoke synthetic instead as it was legal and i steuggled with HG thoughout my whole pregnancy. After smoking it once and experiencing the most intense paranoia and migraine of my life I never did again but it's scary to think what effects that could have had on my baby, as well as how many other mothers struggling with detoxing from d&a when pregnant were encouraged to use it.
Either you're making it legal or you're doing a hard crack down on gangs & dealers. This middle way is a mess - I can feel how NZ is becoming more and more unsafe and I fear gang crime will reach US levels in the future. This Government & Adern are the worst.
One issue imo (of many issues) is NZ's stance on ADHD. ADHDers are more likely to abuse substances, *especially* people with undiagnosed and untreated ADHD. ADHD medications require a psychiatrist's prescription, which can be >$300 per visit if not on a public health system - where the public health system can involve months or even years on wait-lists, and also facing stigmatisation & misinformed views around ADHD being depressingly common. Any change in meds, either their type or dosage, requires a psychiatrist's prescription. Almost all other medications in NZ allow three-monthly scripts, where even if they need to be picked up from a pharmacy monthly, a GP doesn't need to be seen every month. ADHD meds require a GP's script every month, acting as yet another barrier. We don't have Adderall, and dexamphetamine is only available in short-release (so needs to be taken 3x daily). Vyvanse has been approved, but not all pharmacies provide it (though I haven't checked with mine for a few months - can't get a psych appointment anyway), and it's not subsidised. ADHD is only one of many neurodivergences (or mental health conditions) which lacks support in NZ leading to numerous barriers. There's so many other things, of course, like a lack of harm reduction legislation & criminalisation of drugs, which are incredibly important. ADHD is just one example of how some populations are feeling the need for accessing various substances in general due to the barriers imposed on our treatment options.
In the US most doctors require urine screenings every month or 2 now to get ADHD meds prescribed, testing you for like 12 different things, it's ridiculous.
Agreed, this is very true and one of the things I believe is causing a lot of strife in this country. Also a good reason our education has been falling behind for going on 3 decades.
They don't prescribed those drugs ANYWHERE near as much as they used to, mostly because they aren't very effective and there are better options available, those.dexis are going to turn you liver into Swiss cheese if you keep popping them 3 times a day my man...you need a real doctor not a speed supplying croaker....
Its always going to be a tricky situation and i suppose any government doesn't want to be seen as the one giving a green light to drugs, but that Matt guy had totally the right idea the data over the time he was selling his leagal high speaks for itself! Drugs need regulating properly. You will never stamp out drug use completely and making strict laws against these things just forces it underground where every outcome is even more dangerous
BZP was horrific, I don’t know anybody who would have taken it as a “substitute for meth” , that claim is just total bullshit. People took it as a substitute for MDMA which at the time was fairly difficult and expensive to get in New Zealand. And that’s exactly what it was - a poormans ecstasy. If you took enough of them, if felt pretty good at the time, but good Lord would you regret it the next day, especially if you also had been drinking alcohol (which most people usually did). The come down and hangover was like nothing I’ve ever experienced.. so bad it would make you swear off them for good... that is until about a year later when you thought to yourself ‘it can’t have been THAT bad, let’s give it another go..’ Rinse & repeat. Also Matt Bowden can talk up the positives all he likes, but the reality was that BZP normalised the idea of taking a pill on a night out in a country where that had not been commonplace before, so when BZP was banned people just moved on to actual ecstasy pills instead, and the MDMA market exploded and hasn’t looked back since.
Every week around 2008-2012 there were court news articles about how a property or violent crime was related to synthetics. People were going wild on the stuff queuing at 645am to go into the stores
I took BZP everyday for like a month and I had the worst depression when I stopped I struggled to not kill myself...I still don't feel right today from it. It was horrible
Always good to have an English person telling others how they live. NZ had a massive heroin culture in the early 70s when people could literally walk off container ships, thru the port and into the country. Ever heard of Mr Asia?
I don't think you understand the profound damage synthetic highs did to New Zealand. I knew about 10 people who used synthetic Marijuana in the early 2010's, all of them now have mental health problems and live rough, only one of them is employed now, 3 of them have schizophrenia.. Pretty much everyone I knew who just smoked pot at the same time is normal. Synthetic cannabis is not safer than the normal thing, and yes synthetic marijuana has caused many fatalities here - weed zero. The only thing the government did wrong with legal highs was not banning them soon enough. I hope they never come back under any drug class.
they don't have the luxury man, we have lots and lots of heroin here in s.e.asia but it's a red one , red powder, i used to do it a lot, but rightnow i'm on medicine, if i eat that medicine provide by the govt, even if i hhit heroin after i ate that medicine i can't get high for more than 1 week even if i hit constantly everyday,, i still can't get high, that medicine we took is crazy it inhibits every work of heroin, it think govt provide that medicine to addicts to reduce withdrawal symptoms cause withdrawal period is just so bad, many people took their own lives, i even try to took my life for more than 3 times, but i just don't have the courage to do so....
@@nakachinjah7240 Its a shame they don't. MDMA/MDA/MDEA are really the only mass appeal drugs that are worth using (LSD, mushrooms etc. are good but too strange for mass appeal). I'm quite sure a legal and pure version would be a very good solution for most locations of drug use. It's not perfect, but its a hell of a lot less addictive and abusable than heroin, meth, coke etc. Never met anyone who used MDMA every day, since reading on the web I know of people that have taken it for days and days and got messed up, but I think thats rare, or maybe cut with meth? Oh the commercial trials I would love to run with pharma grade MDMA!! Analyse usage patterns, outlook on life, social interaction, appetite etc. So you are taking Methadone or Buprenorphine? How do you feel on it?
MDMA is plentiful in NZ(at least in my area,) unfortunately meth gets pushed harder by gangs. I can't buy anything drug related in NZ without getting offered meth.
@@tazallordofpog5559 Crazy man! After 500mg I just don't enjoy it anymore and have to wait a week to use it again. Tried taking it the next day (same batch) a few times and it just does nothing to me at all. Lucky reaction I have really, as I would have had a fair few binges I'm sure.
Being someone who's seen firsthand what meth can do living in California it's been running rampant here for the last 40 years and there's nothing worse than watching family members be consumed by that and deteriorate to nothing owning nothing and become mentally insane because of the methamphetamine attacking their brain depriving them of sleep slowly causing them to have meth psychosis
WATCH NEXT ➡The Craziest Ways Cartels Traffic Drugs - th-cam.com/video/kSNYzTwyqaE/w-d-xo.html
That guy! He wanting to find alternative safer drugs instead of just not doing at all after his loved ones died ??!!!!!!! GOD IS WATCHING YOU! 🤦
...whoever reading do not do drugs and alcohol. Be sober ✝️.
Lazy old content
yea no we've seen whats happened in Portland, new York & California wen they legalized all drugs.
When you first described starboi it sounded like you asked ai to generate a supra douchey person
As a New Zealander, I can safely say the next health crisis in the country will be related to vaping. Pretty much every 13 year old at high school is full time addicted to vaping these days at nicotine doses 5 x that of standard cigarette. It's crazy.
It's been like that for a few years now, it hasn't just started
land of the long white cloud
@@kyles664 im from new zealand but nice
When I pick my daughter up from intermediate all the kids are walking out and just flopping out their vapes like its nothing. I’m in Gizzy but I’m sure it’s the same across the country
Same as here in Australia
I'm really tired of hearing about the war on drugs. It's a waste of time and money. You will never stop people from wanting to escape reality. As long as they are grown adults, let them have their recreational drugs. Provide education on whatever substances are available. They are only hurting themselves and it is really no one else's business but the person doing it. The only problem would be providing it to underage youths or operating machinery while high. Hey, sounds just like alcohol, huh. Imagine that.
War on addicted whites
Idk , I kinda agree but I don’t. I live in NYC and everywhere you are surrounded by people who are under the influence of hardcore drugs. They make things gross. They piss on the trains , have crazy freak out moments , pick random fights, and are overall unstable as hell. Maybe public intoxication should be a heavier and more well enforced fine.
@@ojsimpson9516 thats because drugs are illegal, and they have to resort to buying drugs from ppl who lace them with other sht, but yeah public intoxication should be the same as with alchohol
Jack Hoffman from Gold Rush operates heavy equipment while high on oxycontin.
I disagree, we have enough problems with drunk driving, fk imagine these lunatics on drugs, imagine the chaos they can cause, especially on the road.
Kiwi here - before Kiwis learned to make meth they had worked out how to make morphine, and heroin (mostly monomethylmorphine, basically as good) from codeine, which was available in OTC meds at the time. This formula was originally devised here in WW2 just in case during the Japanese advance, another example of geography being destiny, and laid in a university library somewhere until some keen student unearthed it in the 1980s. Many of my friends were homebake heroin cooks, some moved to meth once codeine was restricted.
dayum
Kiwi here. This documentary is basically pretty good, but it makes a couple of mistakes.
The first mistake is small - BZP never really functioned as a meth replacement. BZP was a socially acceptable drug that was used occasionally by the general population (kinda like the UK with E back in the day). Meth, on the other hand, was a socially UN-acceptable drug that was used heavily by a small part of the population. I did a lot of BZP back in the day, and so did everyone around me. I had mates who did a lot of meth. There wasn't a lot of cross over - the meth people mostly hung out with each other cos they didn't want to share their meth or get judged or spend their money on drugs that weren't meth. Matt might like to claim he was disrupting the meth market (while making millions for himself!) but I'm not convinced.
The second mistake is bigger - conflating the 2000s wave of BZP/TMFPP (which was basically an ecstasy / 'tripstasy' replacement) with the 2010s wave of synthetic cannabinoids (aka 'sinnies'). The BZP wave did very little harm considering how big it was, but the sinnies wave caused serious problems. A lot of regular weed smokers shifted to sinnies, and a lot of people died. Sinnies were far more addictive and dangerous than either weed (which it replaced) or BZP/TMFPP (which it gets compared to). In a country with very very few overdose deaths, people were literally dying in the streets. Instead of allowing these mostly untested substances, the govt should have loosened cannabis law.
In both the BZP wave and the sinnies wave, it wasn't really a shift from 'dangerous' drugs to 'safe' drugs - it was more of a shift from illegal drugs (coming from dealers) to legal drugs (coming from shops). The govt was fine with this loose policy framework during the BZP wave, but when the sinnies came along and caused real issues with addiction and death, that looseness came to an end.
So all in all, a good doco. Interesting. But yeah, not a very nuanced take on the nature of these very different substances, their relative harms, and how those things fed into the govt policy.
You’re just referencing your world. Not Nz scene at whole
Thanks for the insight
I do think they could've talked to more experts, especially more representation in communities most harmed (e.g. Māori and Pacific communities), rather than just a British person (who may have good expertise! But lacks lived experience) and someone on the nightclub scene (again, expertise, knows a lot of people, and has had a huge impact, but still not so much lived experience as someone in a marginalised community turning to meth). Gangs would've also been interesting to talk to (gang =/= pushing meth and violence).
Also thought it was interesting they didn't mention more recent events like the non-binding referendum around decriminalisation (which unfortunately people voted against by a small margin after significant fear campaigns from groups like Family First) & the decision to not decriminalise anyway.
Same with NZ being first in the world (?) to allow drug testing at festivals. Know Your Stuff would've been good to talk to around statistics & knowing what's on the partying scene currently (not the same as the meth scene), or even Chlöe Swarbrick around what they're trying to do in terms of harm reduction. Could've been cool to boost efforts of people like Chlöe working in changing legislation.
ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS TO BLAME R...SM AND COLONIZA..ON, ask anyone from a marginalized community why they're doing it and they'll say it's because there's nothing else to do in this town and not a single person will say racism or colonization made them do it, its the gangs who are selling them the d..gs not raci.ts or Captian Cook, can you imagine the cops finding m3th on someone and their excuse is, sorry officer rac.sm made me do it, do really think that will hold up in court ? We need to adress the real reasons why people use it and not make excuses otherwise nothing will ever get fixed.
@@dinornis Chlöe would have been amazing on this. There's not many people who can speak better on the topic. Some of the experts will know more, but she's just a really good communicator. And she understands the health side, the ethics side, and the politics side to it
Vice is a critically important medium for the critically important issue of drug law reform and the only one that presents alternatives to the status quo.
Nice 👍
Just me or has Vice conveniently looked over Bowden's involvement in synthetic cannabis development here??
My mistake just realised it doesnt align with the narrative of his party pills as the potential launch pad to global drug law reform. As you were.
they still do some good work. shame how biased they are at times though
Which department of vice do you work for?.... They started this by saying NZ is best know for LOTR.... imagine reducing a country to a film location. its 95% garbage
Why do people's comments keep getting wiped. Surprising really considering the Liberal stance Vice portrays. I really can't see it being YT
Psychedelics are just an exceptional mental health breakthrough. It's quite fascinating how effective they are against depression and anxiety. Saved my life.
Can you help with the reliable source I would really appreciate it. Many people talk about mushrooms and psychedelics but nobody talks about where to get them. Very hard to get a reliable source here in Australia. Really need!
Yes, dr.sporesss. I have the same experience with anxiety, depression, PTSD and addiction and Mushrooms definitely made a huge huge difference to why am clean today.
I wish they were readily available in my place.
Microdosing was my next plan of care for my husband. He is 59 & has so many mental health issues plus probable CTE & a TBI that left him in a coma 8 days. It's too late now I had to get a TPO as he's 6'6 300+ pound homicidal maniac.
He's constantly talking about killing someone.
He's violent. Anyone reading this Familiar w/ BPD know if it is common for an obsession with violence.
Is he on instagram?
Yes he is. dr.sporesss
There was a brief moment when we could buy those P.E.P pills here in the UK, I remember being told they were from NZ but this is fascinating to learn the story behind them. P.E.P pills were great, I know some casual drug users and they started using them instead of searching out mdma or coke every weekend. I truly believe if that market had been allowed to remain we would have seen a lot safer party/rave scene and stopped money going in to violent hands.
Correct me if I'm wrong but weren't raves looked down on and borderline illegal over there at one point?
@@nathengrim5041 yes, they passed a law in 94 to make them illegal, didn't stop them though, the scene just got pushed back underground and more localised as you'd have lots of small rigs around the country doing parties at the weekend. Sometimes we'd start at a party in Devon and go from there to one in Wales the next day and just keep going until back to work on Monday.
It's still kind of happening now, not sure how Covid has effected it but Teknival was still quite a big thing when I last noticed it and I know raves do happen, I'm just too old and boring to be involved any more.
Doesn't work like that in the real world. The crims just get hold of the ingredients elsewhere, (China), and make and sell their own version without quality control. Just got to follow the money when it comes to these kinds of things.
Money will always be in violent hands. Thats how it got there to begin with
I remember PEP pills. We bought a load of them and sold them on out festival stall. They were great as long as you didn't drink. Couldn't believe thr NZ government made them.
As someone who grew up in a household whose dad was addicted to meth I strongly disagree that the dangers of meth is overstated. You would too if your dad‘s paranoia had him randomly pulling weapons on you.
Sorry that happened friend
Sorry that happened man. I’ve done meth on and off for the past 3 years along with heroin. Can’t imagine how much meth you would have to do to get that paranoid.
@@jsilva7005 Crazy to be this honest online but respectful too, have you got your use under control or are you reliant?
@@jsilva7005 uppers and downers.. Crazy mix.. I think it depends on the person and I feel it's more the lack of sleep and food that messes up a lot of the full on meth users not the meth itself..
@@jsilva7005 No sleep, when someone stays awake for days on it can cause hallucinations and delusions
We also have horrible alcohol abuse here in Aotearoa. My papa was one. This type of stuff makes you unrecognisable to your whanau. Thankfully when my dad went to prison and came back after 2 years, he stopped doing all drugs. Was completely sober and he wanted to help our whole whanau to stop doing drugs. Including the young ones. But, his 40 years of drinking and drugs caught up and he passed away from a heart disease 2 years ago. They said the pain of losing a loved one goes away with time but I still miss my beautiful papa ay😢now almost all my siblings have started smoking and drinking. Definitely a cycle which has been created in Aotearoa. It needs to stop. Heaps of our loved ones pass away too young. I'm never gonna go near that yuck stuff far
I feel so bad for you.
But you're a really smart kid for not doing that drugs!
Go study and make a success of your life.
Good for you. Stay strong and be a good example for your relatives.
As someone who grew up in NZ then moved to Europe, the alcohol abuse in NZ is fairly light compared with much of the rest of the developed world.
It needs to get better, but in the grand scheme of things, NZ is doing fairly well.
Aotearoa? You've been brainwashed. The name of the country is New Zealand. Stop the woke hype.
@@theobserver2309 Yes, Aotearoa, its in the national anthem, on the money and the passport. It's not brainwashing to accept that a country can have more than one name. Quite the opposite.
that meth though. scary times. it starts off being the best thing in the world. you are funnier, harder working, youve got ideas just busting out of your brain. it can do incredible things. THEN. it's hiding in your apartment peeking through the blinds. it's being on all fours raking through the carpet for that rock you know you dropped the night before. you sell everything. you are all of a sudden in the scrap market picking up anything that you can sell to get high. at the end I was sleeping in my truck in January in pa. I remember there would be ice on the INSIDE of my windshield because of my own perspiration. it the most evil , accessable drug on the market. incredibly cheap for what it does to you. sober from that 7 yrs. I moved 1200 miles because I was scared I was going to go to my spots. ruined a marriage a relationship with 3 beautiful grown now kids. I'm older so I guess wiser. looking back I'm just grateful to have my crap together and gained back what I recklessly have away.
Glad you made it. Most don't.
It's so awful, I've never tried it but I know so many people who got hooked. You might not overdose but it seems like it takes your life in other ways...
Your 100% spot on. I was on meth for 6 years straight, had to leave NZ to get away from it, been clean for over 5 years now 😁
I'm in the UK so maybe a cultural difference, but doesn't everyone know this about meth before they take it?
@@rhoynedev same for most drugs people know but still take them. Luckily for us meth isn't such a big thing here in the UK although spice and the such is just as bad. People will always try and do what they wanna do
Kiwi here - Matt Bowden also introduced NZ to a legal high called "Ease". It lasted about a year before the Minstry of Health and government realised it was an MDMA analogue also known as Methylone or BK-MDMA. Other NZ "Companies" were selling Mephedrone and Methylone between 2006-2010 before the UK media blew up and sensationalized the dangers of them and thus became the new era of Party Pills and Synthetic Cannaboids. The NPS then quashed any potential legal high manufacturers in our country because in order to develop and test, you had to pay a flat fee of $1,000,000 NZ. So this is why no further legal highs have been manufactured and our population of drug users resort to underground gang driven Crystal Meth and Synthetics. There appears to be a war on harm reduction rather than a war on drugs in our country.
@JD LOOM agreed
Kiwi here too. I agree; 'a war on harm reduction'.
Bro I remember those. Did you ever get the drops? You'd just snort the drops and you'd get high asf hella fast 😂
@@nonethy-9914 in New Zealand? there were only pressed pills and caps.
@@twangology yup New Zealand. Got mine in Hastings when I was roughly 16.
Psychedelics saved me from years of uncontrollable depression, anxiety, and illicit pills addiction. Imagine carving heavy chains for over a decade and then all of a sudden that burden is gone. Believe it or not, in a couple of years they'll be all over for treatment of mental health related issues.
yes, that's right, I researched and found out that shrooms are helpful in many ways but nobody talks about where to get them. Very hard to get a reliable source I can reach out to
Sporeville... Is pretty commendable and a very intelligent mycologist. He saved my life honestly
they've helped me a lot as well I'm a war vet diagnosed with PTSD. A lot of issues spun out of control when I came home. This is something i looked up and tried after trying the roller coaster of antidepressants. Day and night difference
How do I reach out to him? Is he on Instagram
Yes, he is, Sporeville.
Hamilton without a mask, hovering over a table of powder was the best part of this video
I didn't even realise but you're so right lmao
私は日本人だが、このようなVICEチャンネルのような独立性が担保されている動画はとてつもなく貴重だと思う。
As an older Kiwi we have a shocking drug problem in NZ. 40 plus years ago it was just marijuana and alcohol. That was it. I knew only one person in my youth that tried anything harder and it was heroin from his Dutch cousins that were visiting. He tried it twice in several weeks until his friends said that they would do him some serious bodily harm if he did it again. He never did. We were all content at just a drink and a tote. Up North were I lived it was everywhere. I remember going to parties and there would be a bowl of it on the table. Help yourself. I stopped when I was 21 as it was not me and all my friends stopped by they time they were mid 20's.
I am just extremely grateful the drugs now were not around when I was a teenager. Smoking marijuana did not seem to cause the problems and crime we see now.
From my perspective it seems that so many people just want to escape reality or are bored and unhappy with life.
We've always had shocking drug problem in nz We've got more drunks per head than any other country kiwis love piss and the ABs
Peter this may come as a shock to you but our country is tame with drugs compared to most. Although its getting worse.
@@donatedflea Yeah, everyone does coke in Europe and in all of the Americas.
Those Dutch cousins of his were arseholes to give him herion. And in a country where that costs a fortune. Imagine if he'd become an addict. He'd have had no choice but to go the Sydney where it was much cheaper and either prostitute himself or become a drug mule, both of which were and are very dangerous in a place like Sydney.
You forgot the Speed and LSD..
I'm a Canadian, and my family immigrated here from New Zealand. I think legalizing recreational cannabis would be the best solution to the problems mentioned here. When you can order 100g of weed for $120, it's really difficult for drug dealers to retain customers while remaining profitable enough to carry on
Quality weed is much more expensive to cultivate properly than $120 / 100G. I'm not sure where you're getting those metrics from or the quality of the yield. The absolute cheapest I've seen good weed go for in the USA was around $2.20/G when buying 450G or more; and that was when weed prices plummeted recently. In Florida, where medical sales are legal but cultivation is not, there's caps on the amount you can buy per month with prices trending around $30-50 for 3.5G. Again, obviously more bulk will be cheaper but your average client is going to pay full retail.
The legal system works very well in Canada. I can buy blunts in a store in downtown Peace River in legal businesses, rather than in a street situation, where other products are available. Flower products and concentrates have vastly improved in legal shops in Alberta and Saskatchewan since legalisation in October 2018.
@@Jack-bn6rc upper mids for 30 oz some fire for 42 oz 60 for tops where I'm at
Piss of you don't know. Weeds nofing now legalizing it won't do a thing. If cartels are interested in nz. Too late. Meth the issue
@@Jack-bn6rc Eastern Canada still has a booming grey market, cheapest I've seen with regularity is $1.71 USD/g on an ounce.
Most honest comment section I've seen in a while. So much POVs and stories.
Agreed
Those party pills were so fun, the comedown was horrible but a hangover from drinking too much is just as bad. It makes me sad to hear the cartels think NZ is an important market for them, and it's absolutely right the crime in NZ has increased massively, more shootings and ram raids and general madness ....dammit. we were so close to making a huge change...
That's happening everywhere in the world though not just here
That’s so bullsht about crime on the rise, that’s just on the news. You look at statistics for yourself , and just see it’s only on media. Scaremongering at its finest
I ate grams of 1000mg edible gets me high my average was 2500mg.🍄🖕💯
It's SORT OF geographic. There's LOTS of stuff made by CHINESE in the pacific islands and then smuggled to New Zealand from there. Because of the nature and poverty and difficulty in ENFORCING laws in the MANY pacific islands and because their next land is New Zealand, it's more likely for drugs to be smuggled into New Zealand than other countries. Corrupt police on peanuts wages and the clan like structures in the pacific add greatly to the problem.
I was in NZ in 07 and saw those “party pills” being advertised everywhere there. It is interesting to know the story behind that.
I used to take them every week back in 05,Wellington NZ they were the best. Grinners 6pk capsules $40,pop 2 with 6pk of beer and you party all night haha🤣don't know the story behind it but it was a sad day when they banned them
@@wolfgangvonuce9615 Grins gave me the worst headaches. For me Jax by London Underground were the best. I was a human test monkey. Bolts, Charge, Good stuff, Hummer to name a few. I remember waiting outside St James and the promo girls used to always hand them out for free
@@wolfgangvonuce9615 ⁰pppp
I wøöd go hard! on the Charge pills and have a Great! time at the HardHouse gigs in the mid 2000s in Wellys 🤪
@@wolfgangvonuce9615 Funny enough, synthetic Marijuana is what caused the ban on all synthetic drugs in NZ.
This is a strategic shift in thinking and replicates work completed in the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. The typical message had been one grounded in fear. When the message was shifted to empowerment messages, the intended behavior changes began to emerge. There is a ton of research to back this up and you seem to have found it intuitively. Good on you!
New Zealander here, this was really difficult to watch. Matt Bowden has caused so much damage. I wish you dug a little bit deeper into what this guy was all about. His arguments and ideas aren’t wrong but his motivation and the outcomes of his products are shown from an extremely bias angle here.
Could you explain further? Sincerely curious
His motivation is irrelevant, and for the outcomes, all that matters is better than what the current outcomes are. Even if they are only 10% better.
There was BZP deaths in the UK when they was legal and bought from head shops, so they are not as safe as people make them out to be.
@@rdizzy1 "his motivation is irrelevant" False, his motivation is very relevant. The amount of companies that have caused great harm because people had that mindset is innumerable. Take the Tabacco industry, or the oil industry, how about big pharma which is entirely to blame for the opaeoid epidemic in the US. All of these developed because "their motivations were irrelevant"
I'd like to know more about this. I didn't like the whole "entrepreneurial" aspect and his talk of venture capitalists. Remember: cartels in their various forms are just businesses, and the model behind the illegal drug trade functions along lines of capitalism, from manufacture/production, export, wholesale, retail etc. Drug addiction is a public health issue and should be dealt with by socialised medical care. Recreational drug use should be treated in a similar way to how one of the most popular recreational drugs on the planet is treated: that of alcohol.
But the huge profits, as well as the illegality, contribute to the immense violence associated with the drug trade at every level. Yet those $billions end up in banks all over the world, from the Cayman Islands, to London's Square Mile. We need a better model, which isn't based on violence and exploitation (i.e. capitalism).
In other words, I'd like to know more about this guy as I'll bet that he was a seedy character and we should not be looking to drug entrepreneurs - no matter how groovy they may seem - to help us figure out how to end this ridiculous "war on drugs".
I am from Glasgow and spent 6 years in nz. I was there during the synthetic cannabis boom. After it was made illegal it went into the hands of an Asian family who made it themselves. The side effects were unbelievable and terrifying. It was an instant addiction (literally instant). The stories I have around it are insane. I was there when the gangs took it over after the first guy was caught.
Omg.. Thank God back in my day we had regular weed, the E was good no problems if you had money you took coke and H if you were broke. Simpler times. Never heard of killer pot. Crazy
@@aa.4639 there is all of that in nz
@@jack-he7fv I feel sorry for the next generations. This crap is crazy.
I didn't find it addicting I smoked it once and was disgusted by the taste. Went back to weed.
@@SmokensStockMarketBasket you probably haven't tried this particular spice. There's alot of diffrent legal highs. Some alot worse than others.
New Zealander here.
Those drugs weren't as safe as you're making out here. I had a lot of friends get really badly addicted to the synthetic weed they put out, some people even died. That stuff is lethal and they were selling it in corner stores to kids.
Agreed. This was an insanely one sided video. This whole episode was terrible for NZ.
New Zealander here, I have to say there is a very high use rate among youth for cannabis, as to be expected, but the introduction of the synthetic cannabis had an incredibly negative affect in the last decade. I’ve also lost a couple mates to bath salts, which has become a common, cheaper to produce alternative, disguised as MDMA or ecstasy. From my point of view that has had the biggest impact on me in New Zealand having lived here all my life, but definitely seen my fair share of others using other stuff such as Meth. Interesting the perspective and points raised in this, and was unaware of the BZP drama as I was a 2000’s baby. Anyways, Stay safe !
Bk-mdma (analog of MDMA) used to be as legal as bzp was. Both came with one hell of a comedown.
Kiwi here too- so much synthetic cannabis is destroying lives, everyone I know knows someone that’s been affected by it
Yes I totally agree. I posted this in the main comment section, but will fit here nicely too...
>>>>The big problem is people in NZ can't easily get Ecstasy (MDMA). Worse the crime class for possession of Ecstasy wasn't worth the risk of importation. This made many people try the legal synthetics and backyard manufacturing of Meth.
Had the government decriminalised Ecstasy none of that would have happened. As far as I'm aware the UK doesn't have as big a Meth issue as NZ does because Ecstasy is easily available in the UK, plus the harms from E are a lot lower than Meth.
The animal testing of legal highs in NZ was one of the biggest hurdles as the public found out about the 'LD50' toxicity test that meant 50% of animals had to die from poisoning of each drug, to establish toxic dosing (as done on all new medicines ). The public didn't want animals dying for people to get high. A massive protest at parliament and a large petition helped sway the government to abandon that, and rightly so.
Unfortunately no one bothered to use or lobby for a safe alternative to animal testing. Had that been done, we may actually now have safe legal highs. The answer will be when the drug safety authorities like the FDA accept non-animal toxicity testing, That will be the game changer!!!
That was the thing, once BZP was banned that’s when bath salts came in. BZP was fine so long as you didn’t exceed the dose, same as alcohol is fine so long as you did go to excess! It was a really social drug, it gave joy energy and you became very social and felt really connected to those around you. I took it for years anc never once had a bad experience on it or heard of anyone have a reaction or bad experience. Sure a few ended up in ED but the had either taken more than the recommended dose or mused it with too much alcohol or red bull, making their heart rate go trough the roof. It’s sad that it was banned as it was a safer alternative to any other drug put there
@@Trenscendent see I didn’t get a home town off it. If you didn’t drink too much and didn’t take higher doses and stay up all night you were fine. But people would stay up all night and get hammered drinking till 4sm on the stuff. So I don’t think it was the drug it was the late nights, dehydration and alcohol that made you feel like death the next day l
As an addict I get so tired of people pushing blame directly off on the other people for the choices they make to continue and or start using substances. Other people can be factors but at the end of the day your choices are your own and you are the one to blame. If you started taking these things by choice not if somebody else drugs you.
Yep! When you mention personal responsibility people are shocked
I'm also an addict.
The "OMG addicts blame everyone but themselves" thing exists far more in agenda driven media than I've ever seen it in reality.
I'm a postal worker but not stupid enough to speak on behalf of all other postal workers. Everyone's journey to addiction is different. Some with trauma, some party, some social acceptance. Acting high and mighty on this isn't really going to solve anything
I agree (if you are over 18, as you are an adult then and have more appropriate thought processes). Everyone knows how addictive P is. They know if they take it just once there's a chance they'll be instantly addicted. And people knew that about heroin too, back in the day when that was a more common drug.
Exactly, it was my own fault i gave up and started taking. Clean for 2 years now.
BZP was a blast ! I was a Canadian living in Christchurch in the early 2000’s and I was blown away by the “herbal highs” and NOS balloon bars!
"starboy" is responsible for a lot of misery in this country , and the most insulting thing is he called it harm REDUCTION ffs........ and to be honest calling him a musician is being INCREDIBLY generous .
Can you elaborate? I'd never heard of him before this video. I thought some of his points were well made
hes jus like any of cook or chemist cookin for profit...its about the key word profit....i was guilty myself of justifying what i was doin as sayin its a safe and pure alternative and cheap but i was jus lying to myself and everyone else....now i grow herb and caretake for ppl and can sleep at night knowing im fully doing no harm but neways i full heartily agree i learned about starboy along while ago and thought he was a con man then and still do...and yea his music if u wanna call it that is ridiculous....stay blessed my dude...
@@Quantum973 trust me it doesn't take.much digging to find some pretty unscrupulous behavior in this man's history
@@jeremyb7955 is it because of the synthetic cannabanoids that make him so unpopular? I'm trying to do my homework. Thanks :)
@@Quantum973 youll find more if you search Matt Bowden New Zealand...
You'd think someone at big pharma, Johnson & Johnson etc., would have had this idea by now. All they need to do is create a number of safe recreational products, test them and then use their influence to change the laws.
they're conservatives asf
@@elusiveeyewear8655 yup lol
@@elusiveeyewear8655 with erection problems. Why you think they invented Viagra. 🤣
Nah all drugs will lead to ruin sooner or later, and JnJ are smart enough not to waste money to sell something to people who will eventually be broke due to addiction. Something safe like weed or tobacco is better because it will hook you until the end of your life unlike these other drugs.
@@syasyaishavingfun i think your oppinion is biased by the media, all drugs can be used responsibly, only responsible use never makes it in the news
Probation Officer in small town New Zealand. I can confirm that when I do the WHO alcohol and drug questionnaire and get to 'have you used cocaine?' people who have used most other substances will say something along the lines of "no, you can't get that here". Or "no. Can you get it here?!" Meanwhile meth is everywhere.
Yeah, I can't imagine Charlie being very accessible outside the bigger cities due to scarity and price, where as P is just so much easier to produce and flood rural NZ with.
Its more common these days just poor quality and outrageously expensive. Trafficking gangs like the Comancheros from Aus have supposedly been moving into the market after realising the huge profits involved compared to Australia.
You know that it‘s an American documentary when they say that New Zealand is most famous for Lord of the Rings
One of the scarier experiences of my life was when I was picked up by a tweaker while hitchhiking in NZ.
Ummmm story time!!
@I Post Cringe wisconsin and Michigan tweakers are no joke
@@matthewostrowski9667 Are they very aggressive?
@@savannahm1223 The guy picked my partner at the time and I up in Wellington and once we were in his car, we were kind of at his mercy. He showed a very large bag of meth that he said he manufactured himself and offered us some. We declined. So, then he showed us that he had a gun under the seat. He took us completely off of the route we were taking, chased a cop at some point (she looked more scared than we were), and told us how his friend was dying at the hospital, but he would still bring him tweak. After a couple of hours of that at some point he got tired and needed to smoke more tweak and we just ditched as soon as the car wasn't moving anymore.
What was that like
Great content dude. Keep up the good work
It reminds me of how a few years ago shops in Poland used to sell drugs for teens using unregulated substances. When law started to change then they started to sell them as collectables. They were known as "Dopalacze"
Kiwi here, I remember party pills when I was about 17/18. They never really hurt anybody. I did see people move on to meth later, and it's sad to think they might not have done that if party pills were legal.
yeah the worst I remember was people having a big night with alcohol too, and not sleeping til lunchtime the next day(Dunedin)
@@Michael-lg4wz dunedin is your answer haha
Your memory is fairly poor if you think the party pills never hurt anyone. I was 25 and living with 2 nurses in Christchurch at the height, and they dealt with hospitalisations because of party pills every Fri, Sat and Sun.
I know someone who ground down all their teeth and had to spend thousands of dollars on caps after taking BZP at 17.
Excelent work, as always! congratulations.
4:58 No way in heck you'll catch me in that room raw dogging the air 🤣
For a short period I’m sure it’s fine
@@HateHater2205 former meth cook here, its not
Imagine if you sneezed
@@da_poopoo_dealer3152 yeah ok Walter white
It is flour, just reenactment for the show.
Hamilton: ‘just doing my usual’
Hazmat suit: ‘he is gonna feel this one’ *continuously stirs chemicals
Kiwi Nan here. My Dad was an Alcoholic…We have a devastating alcohol abuse issue here too…let’s not be brushing that under that carpet!
4:57 the chemist is wearing mask mixing these “dangerous” chemicals but the vice reporter isn’t, interesting.
All day every day vs 10 mins.
That’s Hamilton Morris I think he can take it
Hamilton is a legend in the drugs community 🙌 The research and knowledge in his documentaries are amazing so he can handle the chem labs for a few mins...trust us lol.
@@danh9503 bro you get high just by touching it😂
real men dont need no mask.
If we legalized weed in new zealand I think that would be a huge step towards solving a few problems, we can use the taxes on the education and health sectors.
We just need it decriminalized but I don't think it will ever be 100% legal here in NZ. The government probably gaining far more money through drug busts than they would from taxing weed if it was legal
@@jackyjew8607 Your not seeing the bigger picture. Drug busting at least related to weed won't even come close to how much tax they'd collect.
Decriminalization is the worst best option
They really made a shambles of it and when voted no they just dropped it because labour never cared lol we act so progressive yet we couldn't even at a minimum decriminalise it....
I know many functioning people using cannabis that are great humans and have raised great kids and contribute to society.
We really really need to sort our meth issue out..... its generational now.
Christianity rules the government
that’s retrograde
Meth crime rises when the weed market is flooded. The working class don't earn enough to cover the cost of living. Cant sell weed, they'll sell something else.
It's the algorithm that truly has my back dragging this on the feed.
3:33 side effects may include acute psychosis, renal toxicity and seizures, but at least there were no _lasting_ injuries, right?
Star Boy is way over confident about his drugs having no record of overdose or physical harm.
Fully disingenuous. It fucked people right up and the level of addiction was nothing like I've seen before.
BZP wasn't a problem, which is what they mentioned mostly on here. Synthetic cannabinoids were a huge problem and caused a lot of harm.
@@smolgok384 why would they go through the efforts of making synthetic canabinoids when the plant is a WEED it grows in almost every environment, its all got to do with money. i live in canada and oz's went from 200-300 for AAAA grade to 100$ 2/3 of the price cut in half by legalizing it. its very easy to produce, unlike the synthetics they charge you substantially higher its a game of monopoly at the end of the day .
Man... a whole lot of info I didn't know about my own country. Thanks Brother.
Same thing happened in Florida with bath salts. I love how people just magically forgot about bath salt zombies
Its not that these things have become forgotten its more that these drugs have been tweaked so slightly in molecules that they are now entirely different drugs under a different name, example of this being “bath salts” in the UK changed 4/5 times before a ban was put across for majority of the chemical compontents used to create these synthetic drugs. Bath salts is still alive and well its probably just called shower spice or some daft crap now 😂
@@zR_Munro did you even read my comment? Like I said, the exact same thing happened with bath salts. What exactly ate you adding to my comment that wasn't already stated?
that was K2 no?
@@milkpilled no. K2 was fake weed known as spice.
Spice or K2 are Noids family, (synthetic cannabinoids) AND-BUTINACA, 4F-MDMB-2201 are the most known, but the chemical structure changes every 6 months or so lol
What you guys are talking about Bath salts, are synthetic cathinones. Like Alpha-PVP, 4-CL-PVP or Euthylone but likewise this will have become maybe 5-CL-PVP in 6months 😆
the effects aren't that clean but they aren't as unpredictable as in early 2010 with the "zombies bath salt"
The problem which lies here is that these drugs aren't tested at all before being on the legal market lol
It can happens sometimes that the effects are way more intense than its cousins chemical.
Happens aswell with Fentanyl,
Same thing, carfentanyl is 2x more potential than Fentanyl
Butylfentanyl 1.5 x more potent than Fentanyl, or 150 more than Morphine...
Guessing game, users are literally guinea pigs
I used to take BZP, it was mostly a way of self medicating for adhd before I was diagnosed the legal high phenomena was terrible I lived near a shop that was selling them and you would have people queueing at 5am in full blown psychosis, people would get very aggressive and it was a really bad situation we would get clusters of people dying after consuming bad batches regularly they were a mix of chemicals from china and you never knew what you were going to get. Store owners made an obscene amount of money not carrying that they were hurting people and our community
@jess Louise not bzps legal highs
Saying drugs or drug dealers kill people is like saying guns or gun dealers kill people.
@jess Louise 中国产的混合毒品被店主倒卖，然后博主好像出现健康问题
@@user-bk3kv8sl9z Not necessarily the same thing, guns are mainly manufactured for self defense purposes. Intentionally selling heroin with fentanyl or intentionally adding fentanyl into heroin is definitely someone killing someone . If a gun dealer knew you were planning to kill someone and still sold you the gun they would be implicit. You know selling the heroin someone is going to shoot it up, implicit.
Cuz now a days ppl don't care about hurting other they want it they get it das how it is it's their choice to pick what type of substance they wanna take and buy nb forces yu to take anything they chose they buy whatever consequences comes wit it it ain't the dealers fault there just suppliers and the ones that are lookin to get paid only for the paycheck
those synthetic cannabinoids like spice or K2 are beyond dangerous.. I have a few acquaintances who have literally lost their mind (long term) smoking something 'harmless' from the head shop, or been rushed to the hospital.
BZP (cattle wormer) is/was gross though. A dirty grinding high that makes you feel like you’re stripped of all vitality on the comedown. It also makes your stomach growl as if it were stretching/tearing. I don’t know anyone who misses the BZP days. From memory Genesis was the first legal high Matt Bowden sold?
After living abroad for 7 years, I’ve often wondered why NZ has such a poor quality of life, such high suicide rates and pervasive meth use…? There’s comparative safety, student loans, freedom to innovate, but most don’t make use of it. Many of the most successful people I know in NZ are not from NZ.
I suspect colonialism in the last 200 years is a factor. A fairly recent collective trauma. In addition, the early immigrants were probably people (Irish, English, Scottish, Chinese) who were desperate lower class people with a poor quality of life in their country of origin. Why would an early settler come here if they had a good life elsewhere?
In more modern times, education is undervalued by many leading to poor prospects. The welfare state potentially demotivates people? The smaller towns are boring with next to no opportunities, and even the bigger cities (in my view) are under stimulating after a few weeks.
Many people work repetitive jobs (factory work, farming, service work) for low wages. Meth makes a boring monotonous life seem lively. Drugs are a poor person’s holiday, because a real holiday is unaffordable.
Lastly, trauma and the lack of adequate mental health support is an issue. Waitlists are long and most people can only get 4 therapy sessions a year. To get support people need to be causing harm to themselves, or others, or their close kin need to die. At that point, rock bottom, people might get some help?
Personally, I prefer to live in Australia, or Europe where the weather is better, people earn more and have a better quality of life etc
All that being said, New Zealand is beautiful in parts, but it’s a slow pace of life. It’s suitable in some locations for middle class and above people who enjoy hiking, boating, fishing, BBQs, snow sports etc If that’s your idea of a good time, you’ll like N.Z and could create a good life here. If you’re driven, it’s easy to succeed, because competition is minimal.
I remember finding my step daughter in a street doorway freaking out on the 'cow wormer'. She said it was the worst drug she ever took!
You're talking bollocks
@@unelectedbureaucrat2003 Actually you are
One of the most accurate things Ive ever read about NZ, very well said!
You have no idea because you just left. People are amazing here and there's underground fun obviously didn't include you sorry
Let’s keep going w the cannabis legalisation effort everyone !
Aw bollocks lad that shite fucks your head up too
Until we change the government that won’t happen
As someone from New Zealand I didn’t actually realise how big the drug problem was here
I grew up in NZ and was pretty unaware of all this happening at a younger age. But now living overseas and going back to visit, its very clear how much worse drug use has made the country to live in. Mental health and gang violence is so bad now, and it is corroding the value of living there. The country needs some kind of drastic intervention on drugs with a long term social and economic positive effect.
That's not true New Zealand wide. Its merely pockets. Look at Auckland and the housing market! People are doing just fine I assure you of that. I agree with the Mental health aspect but Kiwis have always struggled with that, that's not new. Gangs, yes Hastings and other similar areas, not in larger cities like Auckland, they're fringe crowds.
Depends where you are here and what you compare it too.. Where I live it's safe as, I can take a stroll at 1am with no worries at all.. I think we have had 2 murders in the last 20 years..
I think mental health here sucks regardless of drugs. I know a bunch of people, myself included, who struggle with mental health and don’t use drugs.
@@thedappercook nah dude the housing market only effects the upper class, the rest of us get completely fucked. The gang violence is also very scary atm, there have been so many shootings and a few of the houses that burnt down have been mere streets away from where I live. The CDB is getting worse too, so many homeless and more by the day. Most are addicts with severe issues that need help.
@@Sk0die which city do you live in and which suburb?
New Zealander here, I remember the party pill era. We used it as teenagers when we couldn't get proper eckies on some weekends back in 2006. Dark Angel party pill was a favorite of ours in East Auckland.
Did they actually get you high like mdma or anything or just say really buzzed like coke ?
what are eckies?
@@jesskcanada ecstacy/MDMA
@@dillondurry4428 They absolutely got you high.
Dark angels !!!! We're defintly my go to haha. Good old days
I live in New Zealand, I have family and friends who have been addicted to or who have family who are addicted to meth. I'd say atleast 1/20 or 30 people you meet in NZ are currently on meth, have been on meth, or have known people who are on meth. It is way too common, and I strongly believe that the first step to moving past our meth problem is to legalize weed. Hear me out, I am a frequent user of pot, and the same places where I go to buy some bud are also the same places that sell meth. Now I strongly disagree with the notion that weed is a gateway drug, but it's illegal status actually makes it more of a gate way than if it was legal, since if I could just go to a store and legally purchase medicinal herb then I would never have to look at meth in the first place. Being a pot user here often means you'll be exposed to meth aswell whether you like it or not. So yes, I strongly believe reworking our backwards 18th century law system will help aid in decreases meth fatalities.
👆👆👋🍄💊🔌💚🍃..
There is no such thing as medicinal herb. That's biased and very unscientific as it causes as much harm as it helps depending on the condition and person. Legalised herb is the term you should use.
@@RMT192 it is a herb thats used for medicinal uses though
There's always going to be a balance between allowing and providing people with the means to do what they want to do and putting restrictions on society for the betterment of all. Thank you Vice for trying to keep us on track!
☝️ checkout that handle, he's sure plug 🍄🍫💊🔌💚💚
Meth and weed are the most common drugs in my part of rural America simply because it can be made locally. It's common enough my coworkers have casually mentioned where they get it. New Zealand ain't exactly weird.
Weed is not made.
@@higheyes8347 Bruh. Made means grown obviously ffs...
@@ekay4495 i think he means man made lol
@@-kryon1c- ah duhhh, wtf really. Thought he meant SHARK or Giraffe made.
In Cincinnati, most common drugs I know of are opiates. fentanyl is easier to find on the street than weed. I'll see people with Indiana license plates, Kentucky plates, West Virginia plates here in the hood getting their shyt everyday. Ive been opiate dependant about ten years now. Won't touch other drugs, and dont like uppers even caffeine. Anyway yeah def opiates everywhere around here, mainly Fentanyl and other synthetic opiate powders or rocked form.
Matt Bowden sounds like a top bloke. Very sensible approach to the problem. Massive shame that this approach wasnt adopted more widely. Would have saved countless lives.
Without going into detail, there's a lot about Matt Bowden, little of it good, that's been missed here.
Angela Davis (1944-, Planet Earth)-
“Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.”
You’ve got better at this mini documentary thing, 10x better than the first i watched
...
@@lockysmith426 ?
The part where the worker is wearing a respirator and gloved but some random guy from Vice is just chilling with no PPE.
The worker probably doesn't want to be recognised
Inhalation of it in small doses while they prep probably doesn't affect. But the worker inhales a large amount over time
You blow my mind with your great journalism. The ending was like, "yeah!"
I remember after they banned all the pills synthetic weed was put on shelves being sold to children at stores.... and that was crazy.
Zombie drug I remember adults passing out at playgrounds coz they couldn't handle. Now I'm that adult😁🤭
It's really frustrating that we actually got so close to doing something that would have undercut the illegal market but the government lost it's nerve and now we have to deal with rampant violence from well-funded gangs as a result.
When you knew the most quiet kid in the class is hiding the biggest secret 😆😆
Yep
Whats the secret
NZ
@@broncotrolly people be traping in school wit pistol
@@babysniper10 report them
This is 100% correct for Australia as well re meth. It’s a drug that transcends class, education, culture.
What a sad story, so close to taking the inteligent approach, then back to the never ending cycle of fighting an unwinnable war.
A friend and I had reason to visit NewZealand in 2006,& saw the legal scene Matt Bowden had spawned. You could literally decide the kind of buzz you wanted, & if you had a bad reaction - you could easily find 1 type of pill you could buy- that would deactivate whatever you'd bought,over the counter. Meanwhile - the war on drugs in Australia meant that people were overdosing, then overheating -rather than run the gauntlet of cops & sniffer dogs - outside of day long summer dance festivals
2:04 "As a simple chemical, the dangers of meth are often overstated"
Wait.... say that again?
Yeah that's complete bullshit
it means that the dangers of the drug come mostly from biopsychosocial factors, not toxicity
I am a New Zealander, and it was shocking how the Prime Minister of the time, John Key, made the Legal highs legal while keeping Marijuana (which has to be the safest drug) illegal.
From NZ myself, amongst most of friends and every party I've been to MDMA is really popular, the issue comes when it's not tested and your 'mate' says it is, that's how I ended up doing doing bath salts and getting psychosis for 3 days and not being able to sleep. Never done it since even though I have a test kit, don't think I ever will. If party pills had been legal I would have done those and never had the risk of dodgy gear.
Finally someone showing how NZ really is. It’s a beautiful country but the people make it sad.
The people in NZ are awesome. Do you live here, there's addiction and crime in every country all over the world. I think you're in a sad state of mind to have that opinion because a part from the few, NZers are beautiful, happy ,laid back ,humerous people. You can't beat Kiwis
@@trinaburns7845 having lived in NZ for many years I can tell you I now live in a country where the people are so much happier than kiwi's and the weather and lifestyle so much better too. NZ is quant but backwards particularly senior citizens the majority of whom appear to be sitting around waiting to suffle off this planet
@@rogerwilco4736which country would that be?
im from nz and my granddad was friends with a big drug lord named Mr asia / terry clark they were from nz and transported a lot of drugs here crazy to see how much the drug scene has changed from back then and its way too easy for kids to get them. We need to get it under control
The outcry comes from the drugs being safer to cause a marginal increase in use as risk adverse people who wanted to get high now can. I think this is inevitable, but more than off set my the ease of getting off drugs when they are less addictive and legal to seek help with. The problem is the first stage comes first and the politicians are too weak to see the plans through.
☝️ checkout that handle, he's sure plug 🍄🍫💊🔌💚..
Damn i didn't think new Zealand gets down like this!
I guess the saying every hoods the same is true!
I dont understand Why they make that documentation about new zealand. Most of the research Chemicals get produced in china and Sold in netherlands. They make it Sound like a new zealand thing but it's not
@i can't find a name All those foxes and possums eating her crop...or whatever little weed-predatory animals are down those parts. Little nug eating pigs or whatever.
@@werbeplakat4318
Did you watch the documentary?????? If you did, it would explain everything you just asked
You finally got it? Stay out the streets it's not meant for you
@@werbeplakat4318 wild how you managed to completely miss the main storyline lol.
I started doing drugs since my teenage, got addicted to heroin. Spent my whole life fighting heroin addiction. I suffered severe depression and mental disorder. Heroin addiction actually destroyed my life. Not until my wife recommended me to psilocybin mushrooms treatment. Psilocybin treatment saved my life honestly. 6 years totally clean. Never thought I would be saying this about mushrooms.
I find sobriety to be 1,000% easier than struggling with an addiction. I compare the drug trade to the slave trade. It's just profiting from people's suffering and chemical dependencies.
Once a person runs out of their own money and stuff to steal, they go find other people's money and stuff to steal. It's not a victimless crime in the least bit.
I could be wrong, but given your flippant and useless comment I'm assuming you've never had to deal with an addiction. Have a nice life.
Stealing is not a victimless crime, but drug use is. Arresting people for a crime the government thinks they are likely to commit in the future is not the way. By your logic being poor, oppressed and/or homeless should be a crime too since most people would steal before starving to death.
Its frigging weird how parts of America have softened their stance on weed mean while a more progressive country like New Zealand still hasn't gotten around to it.
The US elites are trying their best to keep the population calm while their monetary supply is devalued via inflation/ continued money printing
"a more progressive country like New Zealand"... What are you smoking. NZ is the most backward country in the West. It's actually a 2nd World country.
I love that ending "I'd like to congratulate drugs, on winning the war on drugs" I hope there's a party to celebrate the victory!
Wow, as a kiwi this was fascinating, I’m of the younger generation so I had no idea this happened and I feel something like what there use to be would be super benefititial to so many communities
Bro got it right, it was a wild time, but before that it was just alcohol, and it was somuchfuckingworse.
#gethighordietrying
fellow young kiwi. this doco is very plastic. but still not the worst.
@@threefoureight3208 My names James as well and I am also from New Zealand.... Feels good don't it?
@@HemiKortene420 looks like hemi to me mate.
my names not even james. bahahaha
I enjoyed the bzp/tfmpp pills. Legit hallucinated on them. More than once. Music was a whole different level. The pills were balanced with other minerals your body needed / would use while high. You would kind of get used to a certain kind but there were so many to try you would just shift brands. RIP.
There were a bunch of people getting unwell on BZP. Emergency Departments were full of them.
I remember the old BZP party pills circa 2004-2006. Still to this day the strongest most intense high of anything (legal or otherwise) I’ve ever experienced.
Also BY FAR the worst comedown I’ve ever had…. Especially when you mixed it with alcohol & weed.
Yeah the comedown/hangover was horrific - there's no way BZP is less dangerous or harmful to your health than MDMA that's just ridiculous. And as others have said Bowden was just a self-interested capitalist, he never gave two shits about public health which is why he focused on introducing dangerous synthetic drugs into the market instead of lobbying for drug war reform, better funding for addiction and mental health services, harm reduction policies like drug testing and injection sites, etc.
This was honestly a pretty bad and inaccurate documentary on other levels too. That criminologist they interview clearly doesn't know wtf she's talking about.
Prescription opioids common in the NZ drug market? Besides tramadol being reasonably common NZ barely has an opiate scene at all. Psychedelics like LSD and shrooms are far more popular than opioids.
If I were to guess I'd say that the most commonly used/abused illegal drugs in this country are:
1. Marijuana
2. Methamphetamine
3. MDMA
4. LSD
5. Magic Mushrooms
In that order, although it'll vary depending across different parts of society, with meth use being far more prevalent among working class communities compared to the upper crust (despite what that dealer claims, most professionals look down on meth as a dirty, poor persons drug, even if they'll happily snort up lines of cocaine or drop molly on the weekends).
@@makhnovite idk about everything else youve said but i know matt bowden personally and he is very not capatilist, he goes on quite a lot about how capatilism sucks lol, it seems to me he didnt want to put a bandaid on the problem (drug testing sites, addiction funding etc) and wanted to try and fix it from the root which is changing the actual drugs we all take
I tell ya what, a lot of foreigners got a hell of a surprise when they bought some legal 'energy pills' and found out that they were a lot stronger than No Doz! BZP was one hell of a drug (with one hell of a comedown).
Worst come down ever! Freaking ever!!! Hiding under the bed sheets with crippling anxiety.
Yep, remember BZP being easy to buy online in the UK, did what it said on the tin but had a hangover from hell though.
Thank you for the video.
What's really is scary is that I was pregnant in 2011 when synthetic cannabis was around, I had stopped smoking weed once I had found out I was pregnant and was encouraged by health professionals to smoke synthetic instead as it was legal and i steuggled with HG thoughout my whole pregnancy. After smoking it once and experiencing the most intense paranoia and migraine of my life I never did again but it's scary to think what effects that could have had on my baby, as well as how many other mothers struggling with detoxing from d&a when pregnant were encouraged to use it.
Either you're making it legal or you're doing a hard crack down on gangs & dealers. This middle way is a mess - I can feel how NZ is becoming more and more unsafe and I fear gang crime will reach US levels in the future. This Government & Adern are the worst.
Trying to stop drugs is a mess and So is anyone that thinks government is the answer.
Nah just legalise drugs like Portugal
Hands-down, my favorite piece by Vice. I guess I just really like this story. Good guy wins kind of deal. Well, I hope we win.
Gotta love drugs! Never say no to drugs kids, they're expensive!!
One issue imo (of many issues) is NZ's stance on ADHD. ADHDers are more likely to abuse substances, *especially* people with undiagnosed and untreated ADHD.
ADHD medications require a psychiatrist's prescription, which can be >$300 per visit if not on a public health system - where the public health system can involve months or even years on wait-lists, and also facing stigmatisation & misinformed views around ADHD being depressingly common. Any change in meds, either their type or dosage, requires a psychiatrist's prescription.
Almost all other medications in NZ allow three-monthly scripts, where even if they need to be picked up from a pharmacy monthly, a GP doesn't need to be seen every month. ADHD meds require a GP's script every month, acting as yet another barrier.
We don't have Adderall, and dexamphetamine is only available in short-release (so needs to be taken 3x daily). Vyvanse has been approved, but not all pharmacies provide it (though I haven't checked with mine for a few months - can't get a psych appointment anyway), and it's not subsidised.
ADHD is only one of many neurodivergences (or mental health conditions) which lacks support in NZ leading to numerous barriers.
There's so many other things, of course, like a lack of harm reduction legislation & criminalisation of drugs, which are incredibly important. ADHD is just one example of how some populations are feeling the need for accessing various substances in general due to the barriers imposed on our treatment options.
In the US most doctors require urine screenings every month or 2 now to get ADHD meds prescribed, testing you for like 12 different things, it's ridiculous.
You defo wrote this after taking your meds lmfao
Agreed, this is very true and one of the things I believe is causing a lot of strife in this country. Also a good reason our education has been falling behind for going on 3 decades.
I was thinking this too!
They don't prescribed those drugs ANYWHERE near as much as they used to, mostly because they aren't very effective and there are better options available, those.dexis are going to turn you liver into Swiss cheese if you keep popping them 3 times a day my man...you need a real doctor not a speed supplying croaker....
Its always going to be a tricky situation and i suppose any government doesn't want to be seen as the one giving a green light to drugs, but that Matt guy had totally the right idea the data over the time he was selling his leagal high speaks for itself! Drugs need regulating properly. You will never stamp out drug use completely and making strict laws against these things just forces it underground where every outcome is even more dangerous
Quality control and regulation to avoid deaths 👏🏼
BZP was horrific, I don’t know anybody who would have taken it as a “substitute for meth” , that claim is just total bullshit. People took it as a substitute for MDMA which at the time was fairly difficult and expensive to get in New Zealand. And that’s exactly what it was - a poormans ecstasy. If you took enough of them, if felt pretty good at the time, but good Lord would you regret it the next day, especially if you also had been drinking alcohol (which most people usually did). The come down and hangover was like nothing I’ve ever experienced.. so bad it would make you swear off them for good... that is until about a year later when you thought to yourself ‘it can’t have been THAT bad, let’s give it another go..’
Rinse & repeat.
Also Matt Bowden can talk up the positives all he likes, but the reality was that BZP normalised the idea of taking a pill on a night out in a country where that had not been commonplace before, so when BZP was banned people just moved on to actual ecstasy pills instead, and the MDMA market exploded and hasn’t looked back since.
Every week around 2008-2012 there were court news articles about how a property or violent crime was related to synthetics. People were going wild on the stuff queuing at 645am to go into the stores
I remember taking BZP.
This breaks my heart ❤️ we were so close to changing the world with our drug policy. What a massive missed opportunity.
I took BZP everyday for like a month and I had the worst depression when I stopped I struggled to not kill myself...I still don't feel right today from it. It was horrible
Always good to have an English person telling others how they live.
NZ had a massive heroin culture in the early 70s when people could literally walk off container ships, thru the port and into the country.
Ever heard of Mr Asia?
I don't think you understand the profound damage synthetic highs did to New Zealand. I knew about 10 people who used synthetic Marijuana in the early 2010's, all of them now have mental health problems and live rough, only one of them is employed now, 3 of them have schizophrenia.. Pretty much everyone I knew who just smoked pot at the same time is normal. Synthetic cannabis is not safer than the normal thing, and yes synthetic marijuana has caused many fatalities here - weed zero. The only thing the government did wrong with legal highs was not banning them soon enough. I hope they never come back under any drug class.
I found BZP an awful experience, anxiety and stomach ache. Give me MDMA over that any day.
they don't have the luxury man, we have lots and lots of heroin here in s.e.asia but it's a red one , red powder, i used to do it a lot, but rightnow i'm on medicine, if i eat that medicine provide by the govt, even if i hhit heroin after i ate that medicine i can't get high for more than 1 week even if i hit constantly everyday,, i still can't get high, that medicine we took is crazy it inhibits every work of heroin,
it think govt provide that medicine to addicts to reduce withdrawal symptoms cause withdrawal period is just so bad, many people took their own lives, i even try to took my life for more than 3 times, but i just don't have the courage to do so....
@@nakachinjah7240 Its a shame they don't. MDMA/MDA/MDEA are really the only mass appeal drugs that are worth using (LSD, mushrooms etc. are good but too strange for mass appeal). I'm quite sure a legal and pure version would be a very good solution for most locations of drug use. It's not perfect, but its a hell of a lot less addictive and abusable than heroin, meth, coke etc. Never met anyone who used MDMA every day, since reading on the web I know of people that have taken it for days and days and got messed up, but I think thats rare, or maybe cut with meth? Oh the commercial trials I would love to run with pharma grade MDMA!! Analyse usage patterns, outlook on life, social interaction, appetite etc.
So you are taking Methadone or Buprenorphine? How do you feel on it?
@@virtual-adam I knew a guy to binge on MDMA every day for 5 months and do hollands like they were inhaler
MDMA is plentiful in NZ(at least in my area,) unfortunately meth gets pushed harder by gangs. I can't buy anything drug related in NZ without getting offered meth.
@@tazallordofpog5559 Crazy man! After 500mg I just don't enjoy it anymore and have to wait a week to use it again. Tried taking it the next day (same batch) a few times and it just does nothing to me at all. Lucky reaction I have really, as I would have had a fair few binges I'm sure.
Being someone who's seen firsthand what meth can do living in California it's been running rampant here for the last 40 years and there's nothing worse than watching family members be consumed by that and deteriorate to nothing owning nothing and become mentally insane because of the methamphetamine attacking their brain depriving them of sleep slowly causing them to have meth psychosis
BZP and rest of piperazines were shitty in effects, with huge bodyload, vomiting, overheating etc
Great alternative for mdma and speed lol
like drinking wayy to much coffee is how I remember it