Focus on Politics: Meth meltdown
The apologies have been coming in thick and fast over the last week after the Prime Minister's chief scientific advisor delivered a king hit to the country's meth testing industry. It's now clear hundreds of Housing New Zealand's tenants have been needlessly kicked out of their homes and blacklisted, while in the private sector landlords coughed up many millions of dollars to decontaminate their homes, because it was wrongly assumed that meth residue posed a risk to people's health. An entire testing industry has sprung up in New Zealand offering to test homes for traces of meth while the legal system and local government have punished those unfortunate enough to get caught up in what is nothing more than a groundless moral panic.