Benedict Collins is a political journalist working for 1News in the press gallery in Wellington. From his first days as a reporter, he's had a strong interest in covering anything to do with illicit drugs and enforcement. He's covered punitive drug-testing sanctions applied to beneficiaries, the battle to legalise pill-testing at festivals, the 2020 cannabis referendum, and in 2018, helped expose a meth-testing scandal that had government, landlords and homeowners wasting hundreds of millions of dollars.

Benedict's book on the subject, Mad on Meth: How New Zealand Got Hooked on P was published in 2023.

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