Thread by @publicaddress

I *partly* agree with the complaints that the programme focused on extremes in its depictions of people who use and produce cannabis in NZ. But it's complicated. The truth is that most of the 300k+ past-year NZ cannabis users are too normal and boring to put in a documentary ...

https://twitter.com/publicaddress/status/1307977575411585025

Even the people who did appear aren't really quite as fruity as they looked on TV. When you're obliged to wear a masquerade mask, you look like a weirdo. If you have to hide your face, you look dodgy.

Rua Bioscience's head grower Brandon Wevers presented as a nice, open family man who happened to have spent decades growing illegal weed. We'd have perceived him differently had he been honking through a mask to evade identification. That's what the law does.

Even the "Dab Kings" aren't quite the roaring THC Bros they presented themselves as. They overlap with the green fairy community and there are cancer patients right now using vapes delivering the shatter resin they make. They're not hoodlums spraying synnies onto herbs.

But that's not to say the hoodlums won't arrive at some point. The real value of 'On Weed' is that it showed what's happening right now, under prohibition. Things are changing and it's folly to pretend that keeping the law keeps everything in some steady, if dysfunctional, state.

It does make sense to present a regulated, controlled alternative, focused on cannabis flower and inaccessible to young people. And it was useful that Paddy constantly made clear what would and wouldn't be allowed under the Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill.

I also thought the triangulation of the regimes in Canada and Uruguay was a useful way of explaining where our proposed law would sit. But there's also the issue of the initial conditions in each jurisdiction that has legalised.

The weak govt cannabis in Uruguayan pharmacies wouldn't sell at all (and it's still not very popular) if the black market there wasn't dominated by rubbish weed from Paraguay. By contrast, Canada had high-THC dab bars that are now being *closed down* under the Cannabis Act.

New Zealand is different again. Cannabis is ingrained in the culture and has been for decades, but the rise of the green fairy community is new and, in some respects, unique to us. That's one of the conditions we want to respond to.

We could respond by prohibiting harder and prosecuting more, going back to what we did before, which plainly didn't work and blighted the lives of people who weren't harming anyone else. Or we could look to reduce harm. I believe that's what the referendum bill does.

One grump: saying "New Zealand legalised medicinal cannabis two years ago" is technically true but leaves out a lot. The sole approved cannabis medicine in the system now has been technically prescribable since 2010, it's just easier now.

There's no immutable gap between therapeutic use and "recreational" use, and a "Yes" vote would open the way to putting some ground rules around the way green fairy products are produced and sold.

I'd love to see Gandalf get one of those proposed micro-cultivator licences. He was never going to raise millions of dollars to be a GMP-certified producer, but he's an expert grower and he helped me help my dying friend. I'll never forget that. He's a good man.

Finally: 'On Weed' did a service by getting samples of illicit cannabis tested by ESR. The fact that all but one sample came in over the proposed 15% potency cap raises some challenges, but there may have been an element of growers presenting their best buds for testing.

But also, let's get past the idea that the highest-THC weed is the "best". Unless you're measuring dicks, that just doesn't follow. Wise heads like Gandalf know that. He grows a couple of strains containing 10 or 12 times as much CBD as THC.

You won't see those in the "recreational" black market. But you would in regulated stores – and the proposed excise tax gradient would mean they were more attractively priced. That seems like something worth enabling.