Inside Hastings’ first medical cannabis consumption lounge: Highly Regarded

Anthony van Duuren and Hemp-Star Christ at Highly Regarded, a pop-up medical cannabis consumption lounge located on Heretaunga St in Hastings as part of the Fringe in the 'Stings festival. Photo / Jack Riddell

Hastings’ first pop-up medical cannabis consumption lounge Highly Regarded filled with a haze on Thursday night. Hawke’s Bay Today reporter Jack Riddell was there as a journalist, and no - he did not inhale.

FIRST PERSON: There’s a first time for everything and the Fringe in the ‘Stings festival certainly provided it on Thursday evening.

The Hawke’s Bay Vapour shop on Heretaunga St West was turned into Hastings’ first pop-up medical cannabis consumption lounge as part of an event at the festival run by Puha Express.

The Hawke’s Bay-based company specialises in vaporising devices tailored for medicinal cannabis and other natural remedies.

After waiting a while outside the security door, a staff member came out and shepherded me to the back where the lounge was set up - about 30 folded chairs and a bench filled with all kinds of futuristic smoking implements waiting to be explained.

A selection of vaping implements at Highly Regarded in Hastings. Photo / Jack Riddell

Tinkering with the strange-looking devices was Anthony van Duuren, co-founder of Puha Express. While I waited for the rest of the audience and performers to arrive, I asked van Duuren about the company.

He said he had set it up in Hawke’s Bay after his uncle had passed away from lung cancer, driven by a desire to help people live longer happier lives with their vices.

“He enjoyed horses, smoking, and Jameson whiskey, and he excelled in all three,” van Duuren said of his uncle.

“If he had a different option, if vaping was around when he was in his prime, I think maybe we would have got more out of him.

“He would have been around to see his grandkids grow up and stuff like that.”

Van Duuren said that the cost of vaping medicinal cannabis was significant - upwards of $1000 just to get started - and he was trying to make it more accessible for the community through his business model.

“People are always going to have their vices; people are going to have their needs but there’s always a better way to go about something.

“The easiest option isn’t always the best, there’s always a price and if the price is your health, then that’s pretty expensive.”

Legal medicinal cannabis became available when the Misuse of Drugs (Medicinal Cannabis) Regulations 2019 came into force.

Currently, doctors may prescribe cannabis for conditions including chronic pain, anxiety nausea and vomiting due to chemotherapy, muscle spasticity associated with multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, glaucoma and palliative care, among others.

Government data shows more Kiwis than ever are using medicinal cannabis - especially in older age groups.

Since the Medicinal Cannabis Scheme began in 2020, the full-year figures have more than tripled, from 9401 people being prescribed cannabis in 2021 to 17,416 the following year and 35,359 in 2023.

As for the prescriptions themselves, just over 108,000 were issued last year, a 130% increase from the 46,867 the year before and a more than four-fold increase from the 22,506 in 2021.

While prescriptions for men nearly tripled from 2022 to 2023 - from 22,863 to 60,232 - for women prescriptions only doubled, rising from 23,952 to 47,633.

Gradually the Hastings room started to fill with about a dozen interested people - the majority of whom were women.

Then came the musky haze as those who had bought their medicinal cannabis from home to enjoy in the lounge started to indulge.

Van Duuren told the crowd that they were welcome to vape only medical marijuana. He also stated that since he was not a police officer nor a doctor, he could not legally ask to see anyone’s prescription.

No one in the crowd seemed to be too bothered by this.

After further 10 minutes of waiting in the lounge, van Duuren announced that he could not get in touch with the evening’s entertainment, comedian and musician Gish.

He also mentioned that Christ wasn’t too far away.

After briefly assuming he was talking about the son of God, a skinny man with a long beard wearing a cannabis-themed suit coat walked into the room carrying large suitcases.

This was Hemp-Star Christ, a self-described weed professor who had taken the five-and-a-half-hour trip down from Auckland for the event.

Christ runs the Whakamana Cannabis Museum’s Auckland location, based out of the historic Hopetoun Alpha Church near the city’s K Rd and he looked exactly like you would imagine someone named Hemp-Star Christ would look.

Hemp-Star Christ operating his high-performance liquid chromatography machine at Highly Regarded in Hastings. Photo / Jack Riddell

Thirty minutes after the scheduled start time, we could now start.

What came next was something of a presentation of Puha Express’ vape products.

Van Duuren stood alongside Christ as he used a piece of scientific equipment for the crowd called a high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) machine, which is used to separate, identify, and quantify specific components in mixtures.

Over the next hour, both men discussed at length the benefits of vaping cannabis over smoking it, and shared their enthusiasm for cannabinoids with the crowd, who by a few minutes in seemed a little too glassy-eyed to fully take in what was being said.

One thing that did sink in throughout the talk is that medical marijuana is available in New Zealand for those who want it and there are business models for selling it.

Van Duuren also sees the spread of it as important for society.

“There’s plenty of harm in Hastings already, all we want to do is offer something that reduces harm.”