11 Nov 2016

RNZ's top podcasts: Fashion, drugs, and NZ's Napoleon

3:42 pm on 11 November 2016

In the wake of Donald Trump's election to the US presidency, some people have talked about leaving America; others have joked about taking drugs to escape into an addled haze. Well, RNZ can help you with the latter. Kind of.

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Photo: RNZ

If you want to get your head around the drug issues facing New Zealand, two new podcasts this week will help. And you'll have something other than US politics to think and talk about.

Russell Brown's seven-part series From Zero is an in-depth and definitive look at this country's relationship with illicit drugs. In this week's first episode, he discusses our drug use through history. The title of the series comes from the fact that pre-European Māori were one of the world's few cultures that didn't use drugs for recreational purposes, while New Zealanders are now some of the world's biggest users. How did we get from there, to here?

A lot of recent debate has focused on meth houses - are they safe? Are we over-reacting to concerns about the chemicals left behind? And what do we know about how it's made and what the health effects are? Go inside a meth house and the science, with Katy Gosset and Alison Ballance in our new series on the everyday science that's all around us:

And if you need something uplifting, check out Lynda Chanwai-Earle's story of how a few migrant women from Afghanistan, Syria and Iran have been embraced by Wellington entrepreneurs and have started making and selling authentic dishes from their homelands from a pop-up restaurant in the CBD. It's food for healing as they deal with the awful reality of having left loved-ones behind.

Fashion podcast My Heels Are Killing Me wrestles with the issue of fast fashion. When, as Well Made Clothes founder Courtney Sanders says, "the fashion industry supply chain is so complex that it's basically impossible for a brand or a consumer to be absolutely perfect", how do you know what to buy?

And our top-rating podcast Black Sheep - taking a good look at some bad people from New Zealand's history - brings you our most controversial episode yet. This week William Ray discusses Hongi Hika. On one hand, one of New Zealand's greatest figures. On the other, the man more responsible than any other for the largest loss of life in our history - the Musket Wars. Is he New Zealand's Napoleon? How did he forge our past?

You can subscribe to these and many other RNZ podcasts on iTunes, Spotify, or on our Series & Podcasts page.