Everyone seems to agree that our drug laws are no longer fit for purpose. So what are we doing about it?

The final episode of Russell Brown's drugs podcast From Zero begins in New York, at the United Nations' first big drug policy meeting in 18 years.

"If you started a war on cancer, would you bomb the people with cancer?"

Since 1961, the drug laws of most countries in the world have been governed by the UN drug conventions. But there was a mood for change.

The UN General Assembly Special Session on drugs - UNGASS 2016 - was brought forward two years at the request of Latin American leaders seeking new solutions to the drug wars ravaging their countries, taking in "all available options, including regulatory or market measures".

A string of UN agencies, led by the UNDP under Helen Clark, sent submissions declaring current drug laws incompatible with UN positions on human rights and development.

Kofi Annan - who as Secretary-General during the last UNGASS had looked forward to celebrating "a drug-free world" by 2008 - sent an essay calling for the legalisation of all drugs and describing the idea of a drug-free world as "an illusion".

So what changed?

In the end, relatively little even though most countries, including New Zealand, were in favour of reform. Russell Brown looks at why that was and how the success of UNGASS might lie in its failure - which effectively dispelled the idea of a global consensus on drug policy.

Watch Tuari Potiki UNGASS 2016 address here

Watch clips RNZ From Zero clips here:

• Sharda Sekaran
• Eugene Jarecki
• Sanho Tree

He meets the advocates in New York and interviews the two New Zealanders who addressed the General Assembly - Drug Foundation chair Tuari Potiki and Associate Health Minister Peter Dunne - and asks why New Zealand's own conversation about updating our 40 year-old drug law is so stymied.

Watch Hon. Peter Dunne UNGASS2016 address here

He laments the government's dismissal of the Law Commission's through review of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 as a critical missed opportunity. And he concludes:

There are risks in reform, always. But there may be greater risks in continuing to do what we do now.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Politicians and police agree that drug-checking at music festivals is probably a good idea. So why is it still illegal?

Episode six looks at why it's so hard to do the right thing, when the right thing is keeping young people alive.

"You're seeing the praying mantis that rules the world, but you have the strength of ten men."

It seems likely that at this summer's music festivals, on both sides of the Tasman, there will be drug-checking to let people know what they're taking and whether it's dangerous. Senior politicians, doctors and police officers have told us it's a good idea.

It's also illegal.

People have taken drugs at music festivals for as long as there have been music festivals. But in the last 15 years, things have changed. As policing has made the principal recreational drugs more difficult to manufacture, hundreds of new drugs have emerged. All of them are less well understood than the old drugs - some of them are markedly more dangerous.

Wellingtonian Wendy Allison has been quietly carrying out drug-checking for the past eight years, initially for friends. A night in 2014 when people around her lapsed into "eight to 10 hour psychotic breaks" after taking what they believed to be MDMA (Ecstasy) was a turning point.

She began offering the service in a more organised way and recording her results - and they were alarming. Fewer than 20 per cent of the pills or powders tested were what the owner believed they'd bought. But half of the people who were told they didn't have what they thought chose not to take the drugs at all.

"I don't know of any other intervention that actually does that."

"In terms of reducing potential harm, that's immediately half of the people taken out of harm's way."

David Caldicott, Emergency Consultant at the Calvary Hospital in Canberra, has seen similar results in the years he has been coordinating drug-checking at events and nightclubs in Australia. But he faces a challenge this summer, as the New South Wales government threatens to prosecute doctors who take part in a trial of drug-checking at larger festivals.

Emergency medicine specialists are on the frontline of the problem. Dr Paul Quigley of the Wellington Hospital emergency department explains to us the chaos he's seeing with drugs like 25i-NBOMe, which has largely supplanted the safer-but-harder-to-manufacture LSD in New Zealand…

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A lot of money is being made from selling illegal drugs in this country. Who's making it, who's taking all the risk and what are the factors that decide what drugs YOU might be taking?

In the fifth episode of From Zero we examine the business of drugs in New Zealand: how are illicit drugs made and sold? Why are poorer communities targeted? Who takes the risks? Who makes the money?

"You can't buy a tinny (of cannabis) but you can get an ounce of P on tick."

From 1920 to 1933, the USA conducted a real-life experiment in the economics of illicit drug markets, when it banned the production, importation, transportation and sale of alcohol.

In a new century, we continue to see the lessons of prohibition at play and tremendous profits being realised - for a few.

Prime Minister John Key dissects the drug market in blunt business terms and explains why selling P is such an attractive prospect for criminals.

"Australia and New Zealand have the highest price for methamphetamine in the developed world."

Disturbingly, it seems methamphetamine might be displacing marijuana as the social drug of choice in some New Zealand communities. Whangarei lawyer Kelly Ellis says this change is hitting our poorer towns the hardest and changing the nature of them.

"Whangarei - the town where you can't buy a tinny, but you can get an ounce of P on tick."

While big money can be made in the short term, researcher Matt Black argues that drug dealing dreams generally don't work out.

"I've never really known anyone to sustain a long term profit from it. It always seems to catch up with people one way or another."

A senior police detective, a small-time cannabis dealer and an expert on the legal weed market all chip in on the business that just won't go away.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

We look at where New Zealand is at now with a drug that is rarely out of the headlines: methamphetamine, or P. Are we seeing a new epidemic of use? If so, why? And is the current situation so acute that it's driving a real change in the approach of the police and other agencies?

We discover that a little over 1 percent of New Zealanders use methamphetamine, around half the number when "P" was at its peak. But people on the front lines say the official statistics are missing something, that there is a new meth epidemic and a desperate need to treat a growing number of meth addicts - a need there aren't the resources to meet.

"It's getting bad out there".

In this episode, we look at what methamphetamine is, where it came from and why it's so addictive.

We talk to a recovering meth addict who was using three grams a day, overburdened treatment providers and a police officer who offered meth users help with their problem rather than arrest.

We also hear from Liz and Dennis Makalio of Porirua, who are trying to offer their community the kind of support they say the system isn't delivering.

Watch the RNZ video New Zealand "P" Pull here

The Makalios have set up a Facebook group called New Zealand "P" Pull, which has more than 1200 members.

But as some government agencies struggle to address the problem, are others potentially making it worse? From Zero host Russell Brown wrote a feature on the many problems with Housing New Zealand's zero-tolerance policy for "meth contamination". RNZ's Benedict Collins has reported extensively on the issue, including stories about how the Housing NZ policy may be "tearing families apart", Housing NZ's denial that it was warned by the Ministry of Health over its use of meth cleanup guidelines and that the agency has no idea how many tenants have been made homeless by the policy. RNZ's new podcast series, The Science Of... has an entire episode devoted to the science of meth houses.

The episode concludes with 'The Meth Song', which was recorded by the Makalios and their friends and whanau.

If you or someone you know needs help with meth use, there is help and advice available. Try:

• The Alcohol Drug Helpline
• DrugHelp

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

It's OK to depict drug-taking on TV or slip cocaine references into songs, but publishing the wrong kind of gardening tips can still get you into trouble with the censors.

"We never got any complaints about all the drug taking." - Outrageous Fortune creator James Griffin.

Drugs don't just exist in society, they are pervasive as a theme in popular culture: music, movies, TV and magazines. What is it about our artists and illicit drugs? And why is depicting drug-taking on TV or slipping cocaine references into songs OK, but publishing the wrong kind of gardening tips will get you into trouble with the censor?

New Zealand composers might have lived the life, but they didn't notably write about it until 1968, when clean-cut Kiwi pop star Lew Pryme released a song called 'Gracious Lady Alice Dee'.

In fact, Pryme had not lived the life - he only pretended to have taken LSD for publicity purposes. But the song's composer, Bryce Peterson, very definitely had.

The pace picked up from there. Who'd have believed Aunty NZBC would have permitted this in the early '70s? (NB: the clip below is one made in 2010, but you can see clips from Blerta's TV show here on NZ On Screen).

Watch Blerta 'Drugs' here

But in general, dramatic drug use generally had consequences. Until these two came along and smoked all the weed they liked...

Watch the clip from Outrageous Fortune here

Outrageous Fortune co-creator James Griffin joins us to explain why it couldn't have been any other way - and to muse on why so many of his characters take drugs.

Home Brew's Tom Scott tells the story behind the video for 'Yellow Snot Funk'. Was that all real, bro?

Watch Home Brew 'Yellow Snot Funk' here

Deja Voodoo's Chris Stapp explains why his band said the unsayable in their song 'P':

Watch Deja Voodoo 'P' here

And we pause to admire the artistry of Lawrence Arabia's 'I've Smoked Too Much':

Watch and listen to Lawrence Arabia 'I've Smoked Too Much' here

So, does anything go? Is there nothing that can't be said or shown? Actually, there is. Chief Censor Andrew Jack talks to Russell Brown about one thing that will still reliably get you banned in Aotearoa. And that's ... gardening tips.

All this and a never-before-heard Home Brew song!

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Marijuana is by far the most commonly-used illicit drug in New Zealand. Nearly half of all adults say they've tried it and a recent poll found that nearly two thirds of us favour decriminalisation or legalisation. And yet our laws remain harsher than many other Western countries. Why is weed so popular here, what are the impacts and can we ever agree on a way forward?

Marijuana is easily the most popular illicit drug in New Zealand. Nearly half of all adults say they've tried it and a recent poll found that nearly two thirds of us favour decriminalisation or legalisation. And yet our laws remain harsher than many other Western countries. Why is weed so popular here, what are the impacts and can we ever agree on a way forward?

The law around cannabis hasn't changed since the Misuse of Drugs Act was passed in 1974. But something has changed recently: attitudes towards the law. In two polls this year, two thirds of respondents expressed support for some sort of law reform. And support for change on medical cannabis was over 80 per cent.

There can be no doubt that a key influence on the way the conversation has changed is the decision by the late Helen Kelly to go public with her own medical cannabis use - and to campaign for legal access for medical users. This episode of From Zero includes the final interview with Helen Kelly, conducted only a week before her death.

But if we're to consider law reform, it might make sense to look at the way our legal choices have shaped the way cannabis is now. We might have romantic ideas about dope being grown by kindly folk in the open air - but the reality is that the weed most people smoke is grown in faceless buildings on industrial estates. It's an industrial product - one driven indoors by police pursuit of outdoor growers. Is there a better way to regulate it?

This episode also features interviews with Gerard Hindmarsh, one of the hippie idealists who came to Golden Bay and planted pot in the 1970s, Norml NZ president and Hemp Store owner Chris Fowlie, doctors in Wellington and Nelson and a retail dealer and home grower in Auckland. It tells a striking story. And there is a surprise ending for host Russell Brown...

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

New Zealand's history with illicit drugs is short but lively. Māori were one of the few societies to have no use for intoxicants - so how did we go from zero to having some of the highest rates of illicit drug use in the world?

In the first episode of a new seven-part RNZ podcast series about drugs, Russell Brown looks at the New Zealand drug story through the decades.

"They were just loaded with cannabis, opium, laudanum, morphine and alcohol."

There are many surprising things about New Zealand's history with drugs - and the first is how it all began. Which is... From Zero.

Historians generally agree that pre-contact Māori were one of the few societies with no use for intoxicants. Which isn't to say there were none handy. The New Zealand liverwort is one of the few plants apart from cannabis to contain cannabinoids, but there's no real evidence it was traditionally used. Other plants with psychoactive properties may have been used as rongoā, or traditional medicines - but not to get high.

The colonists, on the other hand, had all the drugs - and often in the same bottle. Patent medicines containing opium, morphine, cannabis and cocaine were widely available into the 20th century. They set New Zealand on the way to the present day, when our use of some illicit drugs is amongst the highest in the world.

Historian Redmer Yska and documentarian David Herkt talk Russell through New Zealand's first celebrity drug scandal, in the 1930s, and the profound loss of innocence that came with the huge Mr Asia drug syndicate in the 1970s. And let's not forget the 1950s, when proper society considered itself drug-free but amphetamines were in many bathroom cabinets and doctors could prescribe cannabis for your migraine.

Future episodes of From Zero will look more closely at cannabis, methamphetamine and other drugs. But for now, sit back and enjoy Aotearoa's hidden history of getting high.

Note: the text in this page has been altered to correct a statement that liverwort was part of traditional rongoā practice. Although this is sometimes claimed, there is no reliable evidence for its use.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details