“Visits with dad were so sporadic I can count them on both hands.” – Image: Getty
“Visits with dad were so sporadic I can count them on both hands.” – Image: Getty

SocietyFebruary 4, 2019

My father, lost in smoke

“Visits with dad were so sporadic I can count them on both hands.” – Image: Getty
“Visits with dad were so sporadic I can count them on both hands.” – Image: Getty

The cannabis referendum debate is deeply personal for some people. This writer details the agonising role weed played in her father’s life.

My earliest childhood memory is opaque and soupy. The more I try and focus on its details, the more they wriggle away. But in my mind’s eye, if I stand back and pretend I’m not looking, I can see the green-brown linoleum floors and high-walled garden of the rehab centre in Newtown. I remember feeling uncomfortable at the way people were acting, and I realise now that everyone’s tense niceness was simply their discomfort at seeing a toddler in rehab.

I was visiting my uncle. My dad’s family has a surname which earns you an awkward silence from a certain generation of Wellingtonian. It’s usually followed by a forced expression which tries – and fails – to say ‘never heard of them!’ or ‘maybe it’s a coincidence!’. I changed my surname when I was 13.

At their height in the 80s and early 90s, my dad’s family were Irish conmen with a reputation that well-exceeded their capabilities. Some of their antics were funny, like the time several of my dad’s older brothers tried to convince their parents that dad, at age four, had stolen the safe that appeared in their house.

The ones that are still alive remain strong in their commitment to absolute mediocrity, even in their criminal endeavours. They would be a living breathing Benny Hill skit if I didn’t know that under it was a tendril of addiction that ruins and kills and spreads and spreads. On my cousin’s 16th birthday they were given a capsule of refined cannabis oil, by their parents, to celebrate.

Every sibling had their own poison, from heroin to beer – but weed was ever-present and especially potent when mixed with the others. Weed was, and still is, my dad’s favourite.

For most people, weed is nothing. Weed is a Saturday night once every couple of months. Or maybe it’s most evenings to help with a pinched nerve. Or it’s the only thing that lifts the box of books living on top of your ribs that is your anxiety. Mostly, people use weed in the way that best suits them, and weed creates fewer negative health outcomes than alcohol by a long shot.

But for some, weed means never leaving your room. It means your every pore percolates with the smell of sweaty grass clippings, and your routine slowly condenses down to hiding in your room where you feel safe with the soft blanket of sticky smoke.

Dad’s use of weed, both alone and with alcohol, has been ever present in his life from the age of 11 or 12, except for the year he tried to get clean at Hamner Springs. I was eight and my parents had long separated. Visits with dad were so sporadic I can count them on both hands. I would climb the stairs of his council flat to the room that I could smell from the ground floor, and we would curiously ask each other questions about hobbies and favourites and memories because we simply didn’t know each other. We still don’t.

People who haven’t been affected by addiction probably won’t know this, but steps 8-9 of the Narcotics Anonymous 12 steps to getting clean requires people who have been hurt by your addiction to outline exactly how you hurt them.

For anyone that prides themselves on resilience and getting the fuck on with things – even at age eight – this is like being asked to look outside and see that it’s hailing, but instead of closing the door and staying warm, you need to take your shoes off and walk in the hail until you find a nest of wasps. And then – in order for someone who is sick to get well – could you please sit on it slowly, describe how that feels and then send in your remarks.

I sat on the wasp’s nest. And a few months later my father came back to Wellington with eyes that were a different colour and a different personality. Where he had been unreliable but jovial, he was pensive and cold. I wanted him to have glassy, green, half-shut eyes again. And he did, less than a year later. He only got one shot at funded rehab.

When the debate about legalising weed comes up, I always sit back and watch the same arguments bubble up. Like clockwork, they always include someone smugly stating that weed isn’t even technically addictive.

But it is. Of course it is. Anything that numbs the things you want to numb can be devastatingly addictive for some people. And for my father, his need to get stoned five or six times a day removed any motivation or ability to parent me in a meaningful way.

Maybe surprisingly, that hasn’t turned me into the narrator from a Reefer Madness video. Instead, it’s made it startlingly clear that the misuse of weed isn’t something people do for fun. And it’s given me no empathy for people who, when faced with that realisation, favour carceral options that have always failed everyone involved.

I can’t quite marry the knowledge that a public referendum next year will decide our country’s drug policy, with a sharp understanding that if weed was legal – and its misuse was properly treated as a health issue – my life might have been different.

And the strangest part of the legalisation referendum and surrounding debate is that people seem more likely to support a legal, health-first approach based on the idea that weed isn’t harmful.

I hope that we vote to legalise weed in 2020, but I also hope people realise how bizarre it feels for families who have been affected by weed misuse and addiction to know that the general public – not drug policy experts or addiction researchers – get to decide whether their sick loved ones will continue to be viewed as criminals. And that throughout the debate they’ll be subjected to all sorts of op-eds ranging from how harmless weed is to how the world will end if we stop jailing weed addicts.

As that still resilient 8-year-old, now in a 32-year-old’s body, the knowledge that I didn’t have one of my parents around because of addiction doesn’t linger in my mind until I hear someone talk about how weed is perfectly harmless. When I hear that, and when I’m watching a show where someone struggles with addiction, I want to gently take out my sternum and put it next to me until that feeling of wanting to cry has eased and my chest feels normal again.

I guess in the next year or so I’m going to have that feeling a lot.

Read Danyl Mclauchlan on why a referendum is the wrong way to determine drug policy

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air nz safety main

SocietyFebruary 2, 2019

Remembering the most hated Air NZ safety video of them all

air nz safety main

This week Air New Zealand announced that they would be pulling their divisive “It’s Kiwi Safety” video from their in-flight safety briefing. The Spinoff asked Kiwis from all walks of life to pay their respects.

A former flight attendant:

“I was there in the early stages of Air New Zealand trying to be ‘out there’ with their safety videos – the naked cabin crew and Rico the dirty puppet. There were so many and they seemed to cycle through them so fast. The cabin crew would all roll their eyes, like ‘here comes the new ‘hilarious’ thing”

By now, I think the cabin crew are mostly over it and don’t give a shit, after about two days it kind of becomes background noise. Honestly, your job sucks so much and there’s so much to think about – all the passengers, the chicken or the beef – that it’s the least of your concerns.

The first time I watched it, I looked at the crew member when it was playing. I could see the deadness in her eyes, that she wanted to be somewhere else. I felt her pain.”

Image: YouTube

A creative involved:

“Being a part of the safety song and video process was rad. As someone who usually writes original song content, it actually felt really good working to such a specific brief. Even though it was such a big production with so many people involved everyone was really down to earth which was sick. It was pretty surreal. The best part for me was probably seeing the REWA all Stars perform in the old St James, they are so good at dancing it was gnarly getting to see them in real life. It’s interesting a lot of people hate it haha.”

Joseph Nunweek, superfan:

I genuinely can’t believe they caved to peer pressure and cancelled the “It’s Kiwi Safety” video. The list I compiled in November last year was basically a sustained exercise in going very hard for it – at first because I wanted to make people mad. But as I made myself watch all of these videos, the things everyone found so odious – clumsy meter, incongruous transported and domestic aesthetics – paled in comparison to the way other Air NZ vids worship the military-industrial Tolkien/rugby complex, or their bashful use of some very mid-level celebs in order to seek worldwide acceptance.

Since November, the shrill anger has only gotten funnier. Touring celebs like Donald Glover got spied on in their seats for reactions (god forbid a comedy rapper should have to see comedy rap), and more than anything, I got the sense that whinging about the video from the Koru Lounge was a sort of self-deprecating middle-class mobility marker, an “aw shucks, not AGAIN!” short-hand for “I fly a lot for my job and my leisure.” There’s no way to say this without seeming a bit weird but I hope I keep hearing people scream about this innocuous video until I’m deaf with pleasure.


Read Joseph Nunweek’s power rankings of the Air New Zealand safety videos here


The fans:

“I don’t mind it! The kids bloody love it and bust out “it’s kiwi kiwi KIWI!!” randomly. On a flight to Wellington I did overhear the women next to me say she ‘normally likes Che Fu – but not in this’”

“I bloody love it. It’s very sweet, and silly, and awkward and naff. What’s not to love? Remember the one where Rhys Darby made transphobic jokes? Or that one with the misogynist puppet? Or the way back one where the rugby star refuses to kiss the gay crew member? Surely they’re more offensive than some naff 90s rap homage?”

Image: YouTube.

A rapper:

“Whilst this one sticks out I’m not far removed from the trauma of the All Blacks fumbling their way round some corny rapping. Corny is my least favourite thing and Air NZ lay the corn on thick, dealing herculean blow after blow to our international reputation just when we thought we’d escaped the embarrassment of having John Key represent us on the world stage.”

A celebrity:

Unfortunately Julian [Dennison] isn’t available for comment.”

Image: YouTube.

The haters:

“I was so embarrassed watching it. I made eye contact with a flight attendant and I definitely did not get the vibe she was much of a fan either. There was a line about how if you asked your flight attendant to rap they might do it. I don’t think this woman would have, though.

“Every time it played, I’d look around the plane and you could tell the Kiwis because they’d all be cringing, head in hands or staring blankly ahead while the tourists were all confused. Also seeing the flight attendants try and keep a straight face was amazing.”

“It’s hugely embarrassing. It made me want to apologise to every Australian on the plane. However it’s also somewhat comforting because it’s corny in such an NZ specific way. I mean, I hated it, but I was flying back to NZ for the first time in years. It’s like ugly carpet at your grandparents’ house.”

“What an absolute landfill of an advert, and it just keeps going. It feels like they threw a bunch of cultural signposts into a blender after ingesting a bowl of spiked punch. You can eat a bunch of alphabet soup but you can’t shit out Macbeth.”

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