Tim Walker’s Ice

After recently intercepting the biggest haul of methamphetamine in New Zealand history Customs officials are impressed with their efforts.

Customs minister Nicky Wagner shares similar sentiments of success, with total drug seizures over the last six months reportedly being worth up to $246 million on New Zealand streets.

Grand as this total surely is and wonderful as it must be for the friends and families of those lives otherwise ruined by drugs – particularly methamphetamine – equally phenomenal I think is the level of ingenuity shown by these drug traffickers; it is truly amazing to see the lengths to which these people will go to ensure their substances gain entry to the country.

From packing meth precursor into a bicycle frame to filling the handle of a hairbrush with finished product, it is obvious to me that the people behind this illicit trickery are wasted in the drug trade. With such brilliant imagination and clear determination instead of wasting their time packing drugs into the frames of kids’ toys, these guys need to be putting that creativity to work making and developing kids’ toys.

It’s no secret to me that drug takers are an imaginative people; when I was first shown a homemade bucket bong and was given the explanation of how and moreover why it was effective, I was genuinely amazed. On top of imagination these people had included knowledge of physics, chemistry and, perhaps less impressively, plumbing.

There is a whole breed of people out there who have fallen victim to the lifestyle promised by the sale of illicit substances – corrupted by the ease of drug production, seduced by the allure of drug money – but think if these fine minds had been put to work in some other industry, some other capacity, think how productive those lives might have been.

More to the point, wouldn’t the world be a sweeter place?

 

 

Article by Tim Walker

Edited by Moth Ampher Tymine

Photography by Gene E Ust

 

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