Blazed as Patrick Gower (image: Newshub).
Blazed as Patrick Gower (image: Newshub).

SocietySeptember 20, 2019

Paddy Gower’s weed documentary was fun but severely flawed

Contributing writer
Blazed as Patrick Gower (image: Newshub).
Blazed as Patrick Gower (image: Newshub).

Writer and cannabis legalisation expert Russell Brown watched episode two of Patrick Gower on Weed, and found it highly entertaining but dangerously light on facts. 

Patrick Gower is good value when he’s high. In the second part of his documentary Patrick Gower on Weed, he does what you’d expect in a modern weed documentary and immerses himself – first with a doctor, then a member of the Auckland elite who’s producing cannabis tea in California, and a “ganja yoga” group. He’s funny. It’s interesting, and a good watch.

And yet, I was pretty angry by the time I finished watching it. The reason why can be summed up in a little speech he gives to a delegate at a SMART Colorado seminar five minutes from the end. Gower says:

“I know New Zealand and I understand how the government works there. And if they vote yes to legalise, then that’s it. I kind of think we’re gonna do this and we’re not going to have a plan.”

Except, we already have a plan and it’s fairly detailed. It’s contained in the Cabinet paper published in May and it’s the result of work by a Ministry of Justice team that began last year. They’ve studied the cannabis reform experience in various jurisdictions and produced a draft set of proposals, (which I summarised here on the day of its release).

“A legal industry [in New Zealand] will likely bring big brands, new products, advertising and licensing,” Gower warns the viewer. Parts of that sentence are true. Most of it isn’t.

There will not be advertising of cannabis if the “Yes” vote succeeds next year. The MoJ blueprint includes a complete ban on advertising and severe restrictions on marketing. The chances of that being reversed by the time legalisation becomes law is zero. Why would it? We already (unlike the US) prohibit the advertising of tobacco and we restrict the advertising of alcohol. It’s not rocket science.

An influx of “Big Cannabis”? Maybe. Some of the local medicinal cannabis companies now pitching for investor cash would enter an adult-use market if one emerged. And if – this is important – they actually get licences to do so. It’s not a given. The stated aim of the proposal is to not increase the cannabis supply in New Zealand. There will be social conditions attached to the licensing process.

Importation of cannabis is expressly banned under the Cabinet proposals. This doesn’t mean that big US companies won’t try and have a presence here, but they face some significant obstacles. That’s not the case under the new medicinal regime – because the Ministry of Health has not yet licensed any New Zealand company to produce cannabis products and they had to come from somewhere, which currently largely means the Canadian company Tilray.

Gower frets about potency without limit. The Cabinet paper proposes potency limits. It does provide for regulated sale of concentrates. A sensible alternative – and what Canada is doing – would be that regulation will be staged and consideration of concentrates comes later.

In Vancouver Gower visits a dab bar and it occasioned some of his fretting for New Zealand about the way things might cut loose under legalisation. But here’s the thing: those dab bars, serving up concentrates, aren’t the result of last year’s national cannabis legalisation. They’ve been there for years. Indeed, the government is now starting to close them down under the new federal law.

Vancouver authorities had simply grown tired of enforcing cannabis prohibition, and just tolerated the sale of whatever, because it really didn’t cause much trouble. The federal government introduced the law in part to get a handle on what was already happening. Gower doesn’t say that and I don’t think he was trying to deceive his audience. He just didn’t know. But as an argument against legalisation and regulation, it fails on the basic facts.

Perhaps it needed the documentary needed a third part? (Image: Three).

Elsewhere in the programme, Gower gives Colorado-based Kiwi weed entrepreneur John Lord repeated opportunities to say that New Zealand should “go all the way” – that is, embrace full commercialisation and corporate cannabis– “or not do it at all”. Lord isn’t tasked with justifying such a stance, which is a shame, because it’s fucking terrible advice. Would we say the same about tobacco?

Gower covers the concern that has garnered the most headlines here this year: what about the kids? He hears the concerns of the SMART delegates to that effect. But he never mentions the major study – reported very ably by his own company – that showed that in Colorado and other US states, teenage use not only hasn’t increased with legalisation, it has generally declined.

He interviews Dr Joe Boden of the University of Otago about the risks of youth use – but not about Joe’s view that the best way of addressing the overall risk is a strictly-regulated market. He never finds a Canadian politician to explain that trying to get a handle on youth use was a key reason for legalising and regulating. These are real failures.

Worse, actually, is an indulgent interview with the self-professed “Wolf of Weed”, Ross Smith, whose would-be medical cannabis producer Medicann went into liquidation at the beginning of this year. The liquidation is mentioned in the documentary. Not mentioned: Smith resigned from Australian medicinal cannabis company Phytotech after making a series of violent online threats. He also parted company with the European company MGC Pharma after a series of abusive online threats. He made violent, homophobic threats against a journalist reporting on his abusive posts about cannabis industry rivals and was consequently obliged to quit another company, Jayex. And he was recently investigated in New Zealand under the Harmful Digital Communications Act over posts that may have been connected to the Medicann debacle.

Is he really going to score one of the limited number of licences under a regulated market in New Zealand? Really?

And yet Smith is allowed to spout uncontested bullshit like “I just want to see the industry done properly – and to do that, that’s about large corporations”, to make grand claims about securing legendary cannabis genetics and to make the plainly silly claim that $250m in cannabis tax revenue would “fix New Zealand’s roads”. I get that this kind of documentary relies on first-person encounters, but not providing pretty basic investigative detail isn’t good enough.

The time given to Smith – or even the time spent doing “ganja yoga” by the pool in California – could have been devoted to explaining what the referendum process actually is. Which, after all, was the professed purpose of the programme – to inform New Zealanders ahead of next year’s referendum. Instead, by never even mentioning what is currently proposed, it does the opposite. 

I actually largely enjoyed the documentary, I appreciated the good-faith adventuring and the vulnerability in the first episode. But what he repeatedly declared about the inevitable consequences of legalisation is not true. Or, rather, it doesn’t have to be. That should be the whole point. We have choices to make.

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There are key decisions ahead about licensing and regulation – we’d want to be more like Washington state, or Canada with its “artisan” licences, than California, where misguided regulation basically ensured Big Cannabis and made it almost impossible for the existing black market producers to go legit. I know that some stakeholders here are seeking to interest the government in a differential tax regime, where lower-THC (and higher-CBD) products are favoured. Like, say, beer is taxed differently to hard liquor. No one’s done that before, but there is no reason we can’t be the first. There are also discussions about ways to provide for and protect smaller “ethical” producers.

Legalisation in Seattle isn’t the same as in Los Angeles, or Luxembourg, or Uruguay with its state monopoly and pharmacy sales, or Spain with its cannabis social clubs. Yet Patrick Gower on Weed gave the misleading impression that we don’t have any choices. That was really, really wrong. But I trust Gower will agree with me that we should have that conversation.

This piece was first published on Russell Brown’s blog, Public Address.

Keep going!
Youth strikers gather in London to protest against the government’s lack of action on the climate crisis (Photo: Getty Images)
Youth strikers gather in London to protest against the government’s lack of action on the climate crisis (Photo: Getty Images)

SocietySeptember 19, 2019

A burnt-out climate activist on reclaiming the passion – and the fury

Guest writer
Youth strikers gather in London to protest against the government’s lack of action on the climate crisis (Photo: Getty Images)
Youth strikers gather in London to protest against the government’s lack of action on the climate crisis (Photo: Getty Images)

Covering Climate Now: Carys Goodwin reflects on giving up, and what convinced her to take up the fight again. 

The Spinoff’s participation in Covering Climate Now is made possible thanks to Spinoff Members. Join us here!

Four years ago, while working for the Green Party in parliament, I did a brief stint as the climate change adviser. Part of my job was pitching stories to various media outlets – trying to get anything climate-related over the line and into the newsphere. It was incredibly difficult.

No one really wanted climate stories – they were boring, and stale, and technical. No one wanted to hear about poor international climate finance contributions or then-abstract worries of impending doom. Outlets would pick things up if it was a slow day, or if there was a particularly punchy headline. 

As you can imagine, seeing the depth and breadth of the coverage this week has been thrilling, vindicating. But it has also made me indescribably furious. 

I left parliament almost a year after being an adviser, to restart my life overseas and detach myself from the personal, cloying world of New Zealand politics (which I often thought reminiscent of a muggy Auckland evening or a nightmare where you’re naked on Courtenay Place and every single person is someone you’ve seen at a BYO). When I reached my new home – England – I started to look into local political groups, green groups; something to give my “activist” identity a home. I didn’t join anything. I couldn’t. Working on climate change throughout university and a brief, early career had left me dry. I was worn out. I was too sad. 

Instead, I focused on the academic side of the problem. On trees. Burying myself in the world of understanding why we think about nature the way we do, and of how landscapes and geographies are part of who we are, and of the ugly genealogy we can trace between colonial decisions made “then” and our mistreatment of the environment “now”. 

Partway through my research, I went to a UNFCCC COP (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties) in Marrakech. Despite getting accreditation through my university, I fell in with a group of Kiwis I knew or half knew from my old climate change scene, as Kiwis are prone to do. I followed them to panels, or NZ stakeholder debriefs; an honorary part of the group even though I had little business lumping myself in with the work they were doing. The Kiwis I spent time with in Marrakech were an inspiring group of young people; the sort I still stalk on social media and feel proud of when I see they’re fighting the good fight.

But being at COP was something else that made me furious. 

My experience in Marrakech was one of opposites. By day I was in a blazer, stifled, aimlessly trying to rescue a research project that was spiralling out of my control, so frustrated with the lack of progress from both myself and from the diplomats that I felt near-constantly on the verge of tears. But by night I was weaving my way through the medina passageways, buying kilograms of dates I had no room for, avoiding the gaze of tourist-trappers and ducking into kaleidoscopic markets, driving around in a new local friend’s car at two in the morning, staring wide-eyed at the city walls cast against the inky sky and feeling indescribably lucky that by happenstance of geography my spiralling research took me to such a brilliant city. 

Climate change is a thing of opposites too. For years the dominant discourse has been technical. We heard it through the frame of carbon trading and credits, and emissions reductions, and adaptive capacity. Very rarely about the people, very rarely doing justice to the scale of the challenges we’re now facing. 

This is changing. The Guardian’s recent article detailing why it’s giving up “climate change” in favour of “climate crisis”, “biodiversity” in favour of “wildlife”. Stuff referring to its participation in Covering Climate Now as “atonement”. The sheer number of editorials declaring dedication to writing truthfully about our new reality. 

Eita, Tarawa, Kiribati. Kiribati’s future generations are at risk of potentially lethal sea level rise (Photo: Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Now, finally, climate change is being written about with the urgency it has always needed. About the floods, the fires, the hurricanes, the mass migrations, the war, the complete and utter devastation that is facing our planet sooner, and sooner, and sooner. 

It should have been like this the entire time. From the moment we knew. Our story could have been so different – a tale of restored forests, and cities made for real people, and nature creeping into our lives and bringing such joy and delight that it would be unfathomable to think we could’ve ever let it die off because of our own negligence and greed. 

Like day and night. Opposite worlds. 

So, of course, part of me is indescribably furious. 

In a way, though, I’m glad that I’m furious. It’s a feeling of passion and outrage that slipped away as I let the fatigue of working on such an enormous challenge seep in. After Marrakech, the last vestiges of the “activist” part of myself, the part I built an identity around, fell dormant. It was too hard. I finished my dissertation, I stopped going to protests. I leant in on the very-millennial humour that meant making jokes about burning or drowning in casual conversation. I cultivated a new life for myself where I wasn’t “green Carys”, or “climate change Carys”, I was just Carys. 

I gave up. 

(God, I hope I can forgive myself for that in the years to come.)  

There’s a new generation of furious young people now. Young people skipping school to march on the streets, standing up to the condescending middle-aged men who’ve never been more wrong about anything, fighting with such intensity that I feel absurd pride for hundreds of thousands of kids I’ve never met. 

We can’t let them burn out. We can’t let them fade off into a sheltered world of academia instead of taking over the world. We can’t let them sit at their computers, at half one on a work night on the other side of the world, and type feverishly about anger, and remorse, and grief, and having given up. 

The scale of the climate crisis is here, now. We’re being shown it in more depth and detail than I could’ve imagined four years go. More people are on the streets and screaming than at any point before, ever. 

We can still have part of the world we can imagine – restorative nature, and rivers brimming with life, and cities resilient to powerful storms, and landscapes living and breathing, and justice for all who’ve suffered for our arrogance. The opposite world to the one we’re on track for. 

Standing in the wake of all the young people who’ve inspired me – before, and now; friends and strangers – that’s something I think I’m ready to fight for again. 

The Spinoff’s participation in Covering Climate Now is made possible thanks to the contributions of Spinoff Members. Join The Spinoff Members to help us do more important journalism.

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