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Speaker 1: Good news, even in this cost of living crisis, the

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Speaker 1: price of one commodity is actually coming down. The bad

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Speaker 1: news it's meth. According to the latest Drugs Trends survey,

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Speaker 1: the price of myth is continuing to sink like a

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Speaker 1: stone to what researchers are calling scary levels.

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Speaker 2: Now.

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Speaker 1: Professor Chris Wilkins from the Massive University New Zealand Drugs

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Speaker 1: Research Team is with us. Good evening, Chris, good even

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Speaker 1: supply increasing price coming down?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, So, as you said, we're looking at a forty

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Speaker 2: one percent decline in the price of a gram of myth,

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Speaker 2: and if we adjust that for inflation, it's actually a

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Speaker 2: fifty five percent decline. So, as you said, in a

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Speaker 2: cost of living crisis, when everything else going up, meth

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Speaker 2: is actually halved in the last since twenty seventeen.

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Speaker 1: Are the same people using it more or are new

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Speaker 1: people using it?

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Speaker 2: Well, again, we're our finding Center suggests it's actually, as

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Speaker 2: in any economic commodity, when the price has and you're

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Speaker 2: a current user of that product, you tend to use more.

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Speaker 2: And so we're finding a higher frequency of use rather

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Speaker 2: than an increase in what we call the prevalence of use,

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Speaker 2: which is the number of users. So it seems that

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Speaker 2: it's just current users are using war because the price.

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Speaker 1: Is cheaper, right, and MDMA and LSD use is going down,

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Speaker 1: Why are they all on more?

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Speaker 2: I mean yeah, New Zealand seas, I mean the meth situation.

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Speaker 2: Math consumption doubled in twenty fourteen and it stayed at

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Speaker 2: that level all through twenty and fifteen. In twenty twenty five,

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Speaker 2: so basically the meth amphetamine is dwarving all the other

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Speaker 2: drug trends. So we've seen emerging cocaine use and people

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Speaker 2: are reporting the availability has increased significantly, but the use

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Speaker 2: of that, the frequency use of cocaine is still fairly

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Speaker 2: low and the price is very high. Meanwhile, as you said,

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Speaker 2: LSD and MDMA are really plateaued, and that's kind of

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Speaker 2: interesting given that people are starting to think about or

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Speaker 2: talk about the therapy credit use of those drugs.

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Speaker 1: Chris, appreciate your time. Chris Wilkins with us Who's Messy

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Speaker 1: University of News one Drugs Research Team.

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Speaker 2: For more from Hither Duplessy Allen Drive.

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