Media Council Complaints - Update Two

On December 19th the first person tested positive under the new roadside drug testing regime. The NZ Police press release on this issue, statements by the Director of road policing, Superintendent Steve Greally, and two articles from the NZ Herald and 1News incorrectly stated that the driver was under the influence of methamphetamine and that he tested "positive for methamphetamine" despite the cited evidence being incapable of showing this.

These false claims give the idea that this roadside testing regime is accurate and that it will be successful at reducing drug driving contrary to the evidence. As such, these falsehoods are not merely inaccurate reporting, but also borderline propaganda. We have been fighting these false claims through formal complaints. If you have not seen the post on our initial complaints, this can be found here and our update here.

Since making our initial complaints against the NZ Police press release and the two media articles, we have received further evidence, direct from NZ Police in support of our claims. This response to our OIA request below (Figure 1) shows clearly that the roadside drug tests cannot differentiate between MDMA and methamphetamine and thus, a driver cannot "test positive for methamphetamine" from a single roadside test. The NZ Police press release, and both news articles state that no other testing was completed and thus, this official information directly contradicts the statements made on this matter by NZ Police, One News, and NZ Herald.

In addition to the above information, we have also received the lab analysis results highlighting the (in)effectiveness of the DrugWipe 3S roadside tests (figure two). Essentially this assessment analysed 10 oral fluid samples containing drug contents above the drug cut off threshold (to work out how often samples that should be positive, give a false negative result) and 10 samples below the threshold (to work out how often samples that should be negative, give a false positive result). We can see from these results that of the ten negative samples for methamphetamine, two were positive, representing a false positive rate of 20%. In the case of THC (cannabis) and MDMA, this was 1 false positive or 10%.

Figure two: Excerpt from Independent Forensic Consulting (IFC) report on the 'Assessment of the Pathtech Roadside Drug Testing Device'

From these numbers we can use statistics to calculate the 'positive predictive value' (PPV) which is essentially a way of determining what the chance is that someone who tested positive for a drug, actually had the drug present above the selected threshold. Based on the above numbers we can calculate the PPV for each drug and then use this to determine the chance that a person was not actually over the legal threshold:

For methamphetamine, there is a 17.3% chance that someone who tests positive did not have levels of drugs in their system above the threshold.

For MDMA and THC (cannabis) there is a 9.1% chance that someone who tests positive did not have levels of drugs in their system above the threshold.

There were no false positives recorded for cocaine. These false positives are all based on thresholds determined by the government that do not accurately reflect driver impairment and even if a person returns a positive result showing that they are above the determined threshold, this still may occur days after consumption and does not indicate that the person is under the influence or is impaired.

Additionally, the testing of these devices did not investigate whether false positives may occur when no drugs are present as has occurred previously in Australia (ABC, 2024) and also did not investigate cross reactivity - this is when other substances present in a persons body can trigger a false positive result. As such, these lab results are likely an underestimate of the true false positive rate likely to occur out in the community.

So anyway, back to our Media Council complaints...

We have now received a response from the Media Council who believed that the two articles complained about were accurate and not misleading. Their response is below:

In summary, the Media Council determined that it was okay for the articles to use the word 'meth' as it is an abbreviation of both methamphetamine and MDMA. Not once has the author of this article, nor any of their colleagues working in harm reduction, or the broader AoD sector ever heard of people referring to MDMA as "meth". These are two distinctly different drugs with different cultures of use, distinct pharmacology, distinct effects on driving ability, and also, significant differences in terms of the levels of stigma associated with them. Besides this point, as shown in figure 1 above, both articles explicitly state the term "methamphetamine" rather than just "meth". As shown above, these statements are completely contradictory to information provided by NZ Police.

SSDP clearly disagrees with the findings of the Media Council in this instance. We will continue to keep an eye on all future reporting from these agencies on roadside drug testing to make sure that the efficacy of these devices is not falsely overstated and that all claims are accurate.

In addition to our complaints to the Media Council, we have been informed that our complaint to the Independent Police Conduct Authority about this issue did not "meet their threshold for investigation". The IPCA has now been passed this directly to the NZ Police Integrity and Conduct Department and we are awaiting their response.