A Gisborne research institute is drawing international attention for a methamphetamine recovery programme that hands participants the keys to advanced medical imaging and pairs it with mātauranga Māori, helping long-term users achieve sustained abstinence in numbers that have surprised addiction specialists overseas.
He Haerenga ki te Whakaora, which translates as the journey to recovery, is run by Mātai Medical Research Institute on the East Coast. It is a kaupapa Māori programme but it is built on a foundation of clinical neuroscience, with participants given access to MRI scans, psychometric testing and full cognitive assessments delivered by neurologists, cardiologists and psychologists. For most of the people who walk through the door, it is the first time anyone has shown them what meth has actually done to their body.
Senior Research Associate Wendy Mohi, a former police sergeant who spent years watching the human wreckage of meth from the front line, told RNZ the imaging was unlike anything participants had been offered before. “With MRI scans whai ora see for themselves the impact meth use has on their brain and heart. There are specific areas of the brain impacted and there’s a kind of shading and deflation where the damage is.”
That visual evidence becomes a turning point. As participants stay clean, follow-up scans show the affected regions starting to recover. “They can literally see the damaged areas of their brain and heart start to recover and it’s a huge motivation for them,” Mohi said.
The clinical side is wrapped in te ao Māori. Whānau are included rather than excluded. Recovery is framed as physical, emotional, spiritual and relational rather than as a medical problem to be solved in isolation. “Te ao Māori ensures wraparound support for the entire whānau and helps maintain a broader focus on physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing,” Mohi said.
Mohi believes the gap the programme fills is the one she saw in her policing days. Detox and rehab can get people clean, she said, but they are then often returned to the same streets, the same houses, the same friendships that drove the addiction in the first place. “There are services out there, but not enough, and too many work in isolation. Rehab clinics get people clean, but they’re often sent back to the places and people that fostered their addiction with no ongoing support.”
Sarah Helm, executive director of the New Zealand Drug Foundation, said the early results were significant enough to be reframing how researchers think about addiction. “It’s world leading, and it potentially turns how we view drug use and addiction on its head.”
Helm said the international interest was not just about outcomes. It was about the way the programme refused to set clinical medicine and Māori practice in opposition. “To have a little kaupapa Māori research outfit in Gisborne leading the way globally is staggering. It’s the combination that’s proving more effective.”
One of the most striking findings to come out of the first cohort relates to ADHD. The team noticed that most of the people coming through the programme were not using methamphetamine to chase a high. They were using it to function. Many were later diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, often for the first time in their lives.
“They weren’t using meth to get high or get a buzz, they were using meth to maintain the energy to function normally,” Mohi said. With proper diagnosis and treatment for ADHD, sustained abstinence became achievable for people who had cycled through other services for years.
Helm said this was a piece of the puzzle that had been almost entirely missing from the research literature. “If there are health reasons for people using substances, we can offer them a better approach,” she said. “Because they are treating the person, not just a condition, they’ve helped long term meth users with ADHD achieve sustained abstinence.”
Methamphetamine has become an entrenched problem in parts of New Zealand. Police wastewater testing regularly puts the East Coast and Northland at the top of the national consumption tables on a per-capita basis. The Drug Foundation has long argued that supply-side enforcement alone has failed to dent demand, and that locally led health responses are the only thing that has consistently shown results.
The Mātai programme is small. The first cohort was a handful of people, not a national rollout. But the findings on ADHD, the imaging-led motivation and the kaupapa Māori delivery model are being written up for publication, and international groups have started asking how it could be adapted in their own communities.
For Mohi, the deeper measure of success is not in the imaging or the abstinence figures. It is in reconnection. Participants in the initial cohort have re-established ties with iwi, whānau and their wider community, often for the first time in decades. “Once they know who they are, there’s no stopping them,” she said.
Both Mohi and Helm said the lesson for policy makers was straightforward. Systems designed without Māori partnership keep missing critical pieces of what long-term recovery actually requires. The Mātai approach, built deliberately around Te Tiriti partnership, is now being held up as evidence of what becomes possible when clinical science and mātauranga Māori are treated as complementary rather than competing.
“We’ve been met with resounding confirmation,” Helm said. “This makes sense to people.”
Has anyone in your whānau or community been touched by meth, and what do you think of a recovery model that combines MRI scans with mātauranga Māori? Drop your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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