Our morning news shows are back for another year. Tara Ward tuned in bright and early to bring us these highlights.

There’s only one place to turn for your life lessons these days, and that is breakfast television. It’s the only show where you can learn about inflation and lymphatic drainage in the same half hour, not to mention a rare universe where stories about sausage crime, the war in Ukraine and the weather happily exist side by side. This morning, Breakfast and AM returned to our screens refreshed and rejuvenated after their summer break, and it turns out they’ve lost none of their magic. Here’s everything we learned from the return of our early morning current affairs champions.

Breakfast’s new set is really, really bright

TVNZ’s Breakfast returned with a loud bang this morning, showing off a fresh set that may or may not require sunglasses at six o’clock in the morning. Perhaps this background kaleidoscope of bold colours represents a rich sunrise, or maybe it’s a metaphor for the fractured state of the world as seen through the complex lens of morning television, or maybe as Anna Burns Francis suggested, “it’s a punch to the face.” Either way, good morning, Aotearoa!

Meanwhile, AM’s background was a mysterious scenic wonderland

Where is this majestic New Zealand city behind Ryan Bridge, and when can we all move there?

There’s some new-old faces on Breakfast 

Breakfast kicked off 2023 by welcoming Anna Burns Francis and Chris Chang to the team, and it felt like they’d always been there. That was because they had, with Chris previously filling in on Breakfast and Anna regularly crossing live from cold places throughout America. It was “Changman” this and “ABF” that, and while Matty reckoned they were already “part of the furniture”, Anna was just glad they’d all turned up on time. Also new: this big bird, continuing the short history of big birds watching over Matty McLean on the Breakfast sofa.

It was the battle of the Chris’s

It was a very merry Chris-mas when Chris Hipkins and Chris Luxon appeared on Breakfast and AM simultaneously after the seven o’clock news, and AM kicked things off with this extremely chill image:

Breakfast missed the chance to have Chris Chang ask Chris Hipkins about whether there are too many men named Chris, instead leaving it to Anna Burns Francis to question Hipkins about things like “the economy” and “the election”. Boring! Luxon, meanwhile, started speaking in rugby metaphors, saying Hipkins becoming prime minister is simply an openside flanker moving to number eight. How many number eights have also been named Chris? Makes you think.

Chris Chang is still waiting for his invite to Matty McLean’s wedding

Breakfast kicked off with a quick debrief on Matty’s recent nuptials, but poor Chris Chang was quick to point out his wedding invitation was seemingly lost in the post. Awkward? Not at all.

Someone on Waiheke Island is putting sausages in letterboxes

Both AM and Breakfast covered the important issues of the morning, like business confidence and water safety, but they saved the most important issue until their final hour. A mystery figure is leaving sausages wrapped in bread in people’s letterboxes on Waiheke Island, and both Breakfast and AM are determined to get to the bottom of this heinous crime.

Both shows ruled out Waiheke resident The Mad Butcher as the culprit, with AM asserting that Sir Peter Leitch “would never treat sausages that way”. “Usually a sausage in a letterbox is a good thing,” Ryan Bridge mused, but Breakfast offered a more shocking theory, put to them by none other than The Mad Butcher himself. “He says it’s a hoax,” they reported, but without pointing the sausage finger, that sounds like something the Surfdale Sausager would say to put us off the scent. Is this a spicy joke stuffed inside a casing of confusion, or someone’s new year’s resolution gone wrong? You decide.

Jenny-May Clarkson once went on Celebrity Treasure Island and shot Marc Ellis in the neck

Look, it was just a paint-ball thing that happened “a few haircuts ago”. It’s not like she’s putting sausages in someone’s letterbox, OK?

New Years resolutions suck

“Are they motivating or do they just remind us of our personal failings?” Breakfast sliced straight into our fragile emotional cores after eight o’clock, with a discussion on new year resolutions. Matty’s 2022 resolution was to learn the guitar, but he revealed his guitar had sat in his car boot for the past 365 days, and his 2023 resolution was to get it out of the boot. None of his colleagues held any hope, while on Instagram, a Breakfast poll revealed that 85% of viewers were resolving never to make a resolution again. “Thank god,” sighed Anna, as guitars in boots around the nation sobbed in cold, dark silence.

‘Coming up next: something’ is the supertease of 2023

AM knows how to keep viewers hanging on. “Something’s coming up,” Ryan told us as the show went to an ad break. “Tune in, it’ll be next.” Can’t argue with that.

AM and Breakfast screen on Three and TVNZ 1 every weekday morning from 6am-9am. 

While we wait for sensible drug law reform, we can thank our lucky stars for the NZ Drug Foundation and the lifesaving – or at the very least, bad-trip-preventing – work they do testing drugs at music festivals. 

Aotearoa’s summers are typically marked by an influx of sketchy party drugs and avoidable harm. This year has been no different. During the last three days of 2022, at the Rhythm & Vines festival in Gisborne, the New Zealand Drug Foundation found 25B-NBOH – a potent psychedelic and stimulant – in samples presented as LSD. 

Like many modern designer drugs, or novel synthetic substances, not much is known about the potential toxicity of 25B-NBOH. But Drug Foundation executive director Sarah Helm said similar substances like 25i-NBOMe had caused hospitalisations, psychosis and death in New Zealand and worldwide. 

“25B-NBOH can be active even at very tiny doses, so it’s difficult to dose accurately and may increase your risk of overdose,” she said.

Helm is warning it may still be in the community.

25B-NBOH? It sounds a little Blade Runner

25B-NBOH is in a class of drugs intended to mimic the effects of more traditional psychedelic substances. They’re the sort of things people often call “bath salts” – though that label more correctly applies to compounds that are either too obscure to legislate, or intentionally designed to avoid existing laws. Unlike more common drugs like meth, for example, they don’t generally have their own widely-recognised street names. 

Because New Zealand is such a small market, the drug scene changes quickly, and supply issues caused by the Covid-19 pandemic have reduced the availability of more mainstream substances like MDMA, cocaine or LSD.

The 25B-NBOH found at Rhythm & Vines was sold on paper tabs and misrepresented as LSD. Some of the tabs, quite poetically, were pink and featured an image of Pickle Rick from the animated sitcom Rick and Morty. As well as being ethically wrong, misrepresenting drugs can lead to dosing mistakes and harmful interactions with other substances when the person taking them is unable to safely assess the risks of a particular combination. 

What else did they find?

The usual synthetic cathinones – dimethylpentylone, eutylone and a variety of other mysterious-sounding compounds – as well as your more typical festival fare. 

How do we know all this? 

The New Zealand Drug Foundation, as well as other organisations at events around the country, operated a testing booth at Rhythm & Vines which was open to any festival-goer to get their drugs tested openly and free of charge. 

Because of these programs we have a pretty good idea of conditions on the ground. For example, 78% of substances tested turned out to be as expected. Another 12% were a different drug entirely, and 10% had a little something extra mixed in. Most commonly, cathinones were being sold as, or with, MDMA, but benzodiazepines, amphetamines and cocaine had been adulterated too. 

This data is interesting, and cited internationally, but it also helps harm reduction services at home prepare for impending health implications. The detection of fentanyl, an opioid which has killed more than 100,000 people in the USA, bolstered the foundation’s calls for increased supplies of Narcan (used to counter opioid overdoses) in Aotearoa. 

Drug checking hasn’t always been legal. Legendary pioneers KnowYourStuffNZ were founded as a volunteer organisation in 2015 by Wendy Allison – or Wendy Allison ONZM as she is following the latest New Year Honours – after a wave of novel psychedelics and adulterated substances hit Aotearoa with an accompanying increase in medical events. At that time, drug checking operated in a grey area, and providers took a very real risk they would be prosecuted for their work. 

Then in 2020, Aotearoa became the first country to have explicitly legal drug checking. 

These programs have prevented untold harm including death and serious injury by identifying dangerous substances and helping users make informed decisions about the drugs they choose to take – or to throw away, as more than 60% of clients did in 2021/2022 upon learning their bag was full of mystery powder. 

That all sounds great. What’s the catch?

It sounds great because it is. If there’s a downside, it’s that outdated drug laws make these services so essential.

Prohibition creates an incentive for the illegal market to produce new and more potent drugs, with novel associated harms, and funnel huge sums into the hands of unscrupulous parties.  

Drug checking organisations do a priceless job, but part of the reason their work is so vital is because of the market conditions which make comparatively dangerous and unknown drugs so viable to sell. Regulation reduces that motive and therefore the risk to users. Sensible reform is just a legislative amendment away. 

Recent shifts towards treating drug use as a health, and not criminal, issue have undoubtedly been a move in the right direction. Legalised drug checking has enabled harm reduction organisations to protect and inform users. But as history shows, prohibition doesn’t prevent much at all. 

In the meantime, while we wait for common sense drug law, organisations like the New Zealand Drug Foundation, KnowYourStuffNZ and the New Zealand Needle Exchange will be testing at a festival or clinic near you.