Dad's disturbing discovery about rental house after family falls ill

A Melbourne father was shocked to discover his rented house was previously a drug lab that was making his family sick.

The father, identified only as Jonathan, said he and his family had been oblivious to the real cause of their reoccurring headaches.

“I just couldn’t throw off the headache, every morning I’d get this headache, I took so much Panadol and I just had trouble throwing it off,” Jonathan revealed.

When his kids also got sick, he decided to have their new rental house tested for methamphetamine.

“Well, my 13-year-old daughter’s bedroom was 80 times the safe level,” he said.

The problem has become so widespread there are now calls for a property register to stop other unsuspecting tenants living in houses contaminated with drugs.

Drug gangs leave behind potential death traps for future tenants, highlighted by police footage of raids showing how more and more crystal meth is being made in ordinary suburban houses.

The worst contaminated houses often need to be stripped back to the frame and their contents disposed of.

“We’ve seen properties that have been 15,000 to 20,000 times over the safe level,” Josh Marsden of Meth Lab Cleaners Australia revealed.

Mr Marsden, who tests and cleans meth-affected properties, revealed his workload has increased in recent years.

“Hotel rooms, Airbnb’s, short-term rentals, they can cook ice in a couple of days,” he said.

Cleaning up is complex and costly.

“We’ve had houses where we’ve located between two and three tonnes of waste,” Victoria Police Senior Sergeant Nick Allwood said.

Meth is cheap and easy to make, the ingredients and recipes are readily available and the rewards can be astronomical.

At the upper end of the market, organised crime syndicates now fly in the best “meth cooks” from overseas for a week or two at a time.

A skilled cook can turn a kilogram of pseudoephedrine smuggled in for about $50 into a kilo of ice that sells for $120,000.

“They’ll pay for them, ship them in, they undertake their cook, then they fly off into the sunset,” Sen Sgt Allwood revealed.

Victoria Police has raided 118 illegal meth labs in the past 18 months, often uncovering several within the same suburb.

Now tenants want a national register of houses for sale or rent.

“You can look into it and see the place you’ve been in, and when was it recently tested,” Jonathan said.