It’s been seven years since I flew to Wellington to address the health select committee, and a few months more since my old friend died. My written submission on the Misuse of Drugs (Medicinal Cannabis) Amendment Bill 2018 had gone in only after I assured a diligent Parliamentary staffer that I was aware it contained “admission of criminal activity” and that I was indeed looking forward to personally discussing my admitted criminal activity with the select committee members.
My friend had survived 31/2 years since his diagnosis with glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive form of brain tumour, but by January 2018, the struggle had overwhelmed him. Shortly before his wife took him to Mercy Hospice, she asked me if I could find him some cannabis oil. He had responded well to an oil they’d been given during his illness, but that was gone now. I said I’d do my best.
The morning after I got the oil, my friend’s wife called me in a panic. He had had another seizure and doctors at the hospice warned that the position of the glioblastoma in his brain meant seizures would only become more frequent. She was under pressure to have him sedated – unconscious – until he died. This would not only be traumatic for her, it would prevent him seeing his community of friends, many of whom were only just learning it was time to say goodbye.
I rushed to the hospice. When I arrived, it seemed as if the seizure had shattered my friend. His jaw was rigid and his eyes were dull. But in the hour after I gave his wife the oil and she gently rubbed it on his gums, his apparent wellbeing improved markedly. He smiled the big, goofy smile I thought I’d never see again.
“Something else happened – or, rather, didn’t happen,” I told the MPs. “He didn’t have any more seizures. I can’t tell you that that was because of the medical oil. But he didn’t have any more seizures. The doctors remarked on it over the next few days, expressing surprise.”
My dear friend died after a handful of deeply precious days in which he and his loved ones were able to say their goodbyes. It was and remains my belief that the cannabis product helped him have that time awake and aware.
“I would unhesitatingly break the law again to give him those days,” I told the committee. “And I believe it is wrong that I – or anyone else – should have to do that.”
Gandalf’s story
This is also the story of how I met Gandalf. I had been directed to the cannabis patient advocate Pearl Schomburg and, by a stroke of good fortune, the Northland green fairy (an “unofficial” supplier of medicinal cannabis) was visiting her home. I talked to them about my friend, the life he’d lived, the music he made. When Gandalf handed me a dropper bottle of the oil he’d extracted from the cannabis plants he’d grown, he waved away the money I tried to give him. Tell your friend thank you for the music, he said.
You will understand, then, why I will not pretend to be neutral about what happened recently: the raid on Gandalf’s small, isolated property by dozens of police officers who ripped up his plants, smashed his little grow house with axes and seized all the oil he had made.
I want to know why, after years of what appeared to be tacit acceptance on the part of local police, his life has been torn up and he faces criminal charges and possibly prison. Pleading not guilty to three charges, he is due to appear in court on April 29.
Gandalf, who I can now call by his real name, Paul Smith, is quite a character. He left school at 14 and his life since has included driving heavy machinery in a quarry and skilled wood-turning: his big, bewitching wooden bowls used to sell in Parnell galleries. He and his wife Karen raised their kids on their patch of land, in an old farmhouse the previous owners had somehow dragged up what is humorously referred to as the driveway.
He rarely wears shoes and he burps and farts loudly and often. He has some of the unreconstructed attitudes you might find in a 66-year-old man and I do wonder sometimes how Karen puts up with him. He’s also deeply kind and strikingly hardworking and was devoted to his “girls” – the plants he grew organically and harvested once a year.
When ESR collected green fairy products for a study in 2019, the results were a little alarming. Many of them – so-called “CBD oils” especially – were not what they were supposed to be. But one group of oils stood out as being true to label – and all of them were Gandalf’s. Subsequent private testing has indicated that his artisan, new-agey growing practice sometimes produces results – unusually high levels of beneficial minor cannabinoids ‒ that big foreign producers dream of.
When I spoke to the select committee, I welcomed the fact that the bill, as well as laying the groundwork for a phamaceutical cannabis scheme, provided a defence for anyone in palliative care to possess and use cannabis from any source. But it did not protect anyone around the dying person. Mercy Hospice now doesn’t have to look the other way but I, my friend’s wife and Gandalf are as criminal as we ever were.
Yet anyone with enough money can now go to a clinic and be prescribed legal weed, almost all of which is imported and most of which is considerably higher in intoxicating THC than what Gandalf grew. It’s also much stronger than would have been permitted under the proposed legalisation that sank with the 2020 recreational cannabis referendum.
Two-tier system
I understand why the Ardern government took fright after the referendum. Although the “Yes” vote only narrowly failed nationally, it lost in most electorates – most notably in South Auckland, where, for all the admirable logic of well-regulated R18 retail, they had enough of a problem with the plague of liquor stores. I understand that, too.
But how many people really wanted what we have now: a medicinal cannabis scheme in which product regulations are so onerous that local medical cannabis producers can’t meet them, so we buy our weed from Colombia? One in which one class of patients is in the clear and everyone else is a still a criminal. More than two-thirds of therapeutic cannabis use is still in the latter category, according to Massey University’s 2025 New Zealand Drugs Trends Survey.
There are claims made for the medical efficacy of cannabis that aren’t supported by evidence; or which are plausible but not clinically demonstrated. But phase II clinical trials of THC and CBD (cannabidiol) in combination with conventional treatment for the glioblastoma that killed my friend are in progress. When he died, their potential benefit in shrinking tumours had been demonstrated only in mice.
We can also look at successive observational studies, here and overseas, which consistently find that cannabis helps some people with chronic illness (especially pain conditions) stop or reduce their use of more onerous pharmaceutical medicines. People truly feel they’ve got their lives back.
A petition has been launched asking Parl-iament to extend the “palliative exemption” to those who produce and supply cannabis for patients, and for the exemption to protect those with chronic illness as well as the dying. Not criminalising those people seems only decent.
But medicinal cannabis law reform ultimately needs to be more than that. Perhaps this year, the 50th anniversary of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975, should be the one when we ask: is this how we really want things to be?
