Cheap ice imports put backyard drug labs out of business

Clandestine drug labs are vanishing as international crime syndicates flood the country with imported ice.

The AFP says the plummeting number of labs detected nat­ionally could be because of a ready supply of ice produced offshore. Picture: iStock

Clandestine drug labs are vanishing as international crime syndicates flood the country with imported ice to cash in on Aus­tralian demand.

Australian Federal Police acting manager for organised crime Krissy Barrett said the plummeting number of labs detected nat­ionally could be because of a ready supply of ice produced offshore.

“For a variety of reasons, it’s easier for them to import a finished product,” Commander Barrett told The Australian.

“You can get the finished product at a cheap rate and make a high profit rather than having to go through the logistics and the risk and everything else of manufacturing it here themselves.”

Laboratory detections have dropped for five consecutive years, with 463 in 2016-17 compared to 809 in 2011-12, a fall of 42 per cent, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission’s latest Illicit Drug Data Report shows. Almost one in every two labs detected in 2016-17 was addict-based, followed by small-scale labs (27.7 per cent), medium (20 per cent) and industrial scale (2.7 per cent).

Queensland had the highest number of detections, but has rec­orded a drop of 60 per cent in five years, from a peak of 379 in 2011-12 to 150 in 2016-17.

Detective Senior Sergeant Sasha Finney, from the Queensland drug squad, said the state had changed the way it classified drug labs, requiring sites to have a ­combination of chemicals and equipment. She confirmed a wider reduction in labs, saying people were increasingly sourcing drugs online via the dark web.

“Why fiddle around with the risks that are associated with making it — risks to your own health, risks of explosion, risks of muddling up the recipe and stuffing the process,” Sergeant Finney said.

“Why bother doing that when you can make one transaction on your computer and have it arrive at your door?”

Factories in countries such as China are producing ice for the Australian market with purity levels of around 80 per cent. The local equivalent was “as low as 10 to 15 per cent”, Sergeant Finney said.

In a recent major bust, the Australian Border Force and federal police found 490kg of methamphetamine worth an estimated $367.5 million concealed in car bonnets shipped to Sydney from Malaysia in November.

Yet significant seizures of precursor chemicals show local production is continuing.