Hard News by Russell Brown

"We just kept saying yes," New Zealand Drug Foundation executive director Sarah Helm told me the evening before Through the Maze: On the road to health, where nearly 50 people and organisations were represented on the stage over two busy days.

In contrast to the foundation's last four-yearly symposium at Parliament, there was no carefully-staged policy bid and the pandemic meant that, apart from a couple of visitors from Australia, there were no marquee international speakers in the room. Instead, it was a chance for the diverse group of people who gathered to feel like a community and to reaffirm shared perspectives.

Health minister Andrew Little, the symposium's Parliamentary host, gave the opening speech. He began by addressing "the elephant in the room" – which, to his mind, was last year's referendum on a bill to legalise and regulate cannabis.

The referendum was mentioned several times during the symposium, but the minister's perception that it was somehow hanging over the event was really his alone. The sad truth is that if there was an elephant in the room, it was Andrew Little himself.

There was chatter that he might use the speech to make an announcement, or as a way to shift the policy stasis he himself had ordained. People talked earnestly about whether it would be more productive to protest, or to avoid backing him into a corner, given that he seemed to have responded so poorly to the recent open letter from multiple health and social service organisations calling for drug policy reform. There were few, if any, offstage conversations in which the Minister of Health was discussed as anything other than a problem.

In the end, there were no real announcements. It was a short speech (as someone observed to me, it felt like it suddenly ended two pages early) largely concerned with justifying the government's position. If you were to go looking for nuggets, then the affirmation that the government sees drug-checking as an everywhere-all-the-time service, and not just something that happens at summer music festivals, was one. That sounded like an acknowledgement that these services will need to be funded. It might have made it a little easier to think about a service to test green fairy products under the same law.

It's worth recalling that drug-checking was a reform that the Prime Minister effectively ordained over Little's head, after he'd declared there would be no reform for the foreseeable future about an hour after the referendum result. Nothing bad happened and there was no discernable ngeative impact on public opinion. Indeed, over a summer when eutylone flooded the market, it quite probably saved lives. The minister who declared there would be no reform ended up very happy to own this one.

Little also tossed in what might have been a revealing definition of cannabis decriminalisation – "self-use and some sharing" – before dismissing decriminalisation as an option, and there was some thought that he might have left scope for a broadening of the current palliative defence for the medical use of cannabis. The two Parliamentary journalists present checked with him afterwards: no, he hadn't.

You don't really get to present yourself as compassionate until you can logically explain why someone with a terminal condition who gains relief from cannabis is a patient, but someone with a debilitating chronic condition who finds similar relief is a criminal.

The minister said that "the medicinal cannabis regime is not yet operating as we expected" – he could hardly do otherwise – but gave an assurance there would be more products available later in the year. He may actually have strayed from his prepared text and said that manufacturers had told him so. But that is not really what local producers are telling the ministry.

Medical Cannabis Scheme a "Blazing wreck" read the headline of a release from the patient advocacy group MCANZ on the day following the minister's speech. Not a single new product has been made available under the new regime – and unless the ministry makes a third six-month extension to its transitional rules, which allow prescribers to import their own, the price of CBD products will go up, not down. Meanwhile – more in some districts than others – the police are raiding green fairies who the courts seem increasingly unhappy about punishing. It's a rolling mess.

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With the minister out of the way, the real symposium could begin. Several presentations stood out for me. Firstly, there were the addiction services practitioners – the humble, modestly-paid people who work at the frontline. They explained the way that there's a huge social dimension to helping people with methamphetamine problems get better: forging relationships, making connections.

Rachel Scaife of Odyssey and Lifewise talked about Haven, the drop-in support centre they opened during last year's Covid chaos, making a space for people with alcohol and other drug problems to feel safe and make a first step.

Odyssey's Andrew Munro emphasised that effective treatment for meth dependence needs to encompass families as well. The most destructive stigmatising, he said, can come from close family members. They need to become part of the process. Andrew Hopgood from the Porirua initiative New Zealand P-Pull explained why they don't make clients relinquish their gang membership: "that's their whanau".

Philippa Jones of NZ Needle Exchange revealed that her organisation has been doing work on where it would fit in to a true health-based approach to drugs: some of the services that work envisages, she observed, are simply not possible under current law – criminalisation is too much of a barrier. Even now, Needle Exchange doesn't know basic things about its client base – including how many Māori there are – because it would be imprudent to find out those things.

"Of course," she said, "if our clients weren't criminalised they might feel more confident about sharing that information."

In one way or another, each of these frontline workers made clear that criminalisation is the major barrier to wellbeing for their clients. This isn't really news – it was the clear conclusion of the 2018 Mental Health and Addictions Review – but hearing it directly from the people doing the work gave it an extra resonance.

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In a completely different vein, I found Professor Joe Boden's speech about the conceits of science compelling. Joe, the director of the Christchurch Health and Development Study, has his name on research that was brandished on both sides of the cannabis referendum debate last year. He was critical not only of its misuse by prohibitionists, but, remarkably, of some of the assumptions of the work itself.

Most notably, he revisited Tests of causal linkages between cannabis use and psychotic symptoms (Fergusson et al, 2005), which used data from the CHDS. It also used what now looks like a pretty bad tool for the job, or at least used it poorly.

The most commonly-endorsed items on the SCL-90 checklist used to assess potential psychological issues for the study were  "I sometimes have thoughts that other people do not share" and "never feeling close to another person". If these were removed, the association between regular cannabis use and psychosis disappeared. (It's worth noting that the study was actually criticised at the time for not stating which symptoms were most reported or whether the difference in average symptom level came from a few people having many symptoms or many people having a few symptoms.)

Joe also talked about "the nomothetic curtain": the difference between imvestigating "the thing" (in this case, drug use), which is nomothetic research, and idiographical study of the "unique and contingent aspects of individuals". A focus on nomothetic approaches, he observed "can obscure what's really happening".

He said that he last year led a trajectory analysis of the same CHDS data on cannabis use. That produced something that looked a lot more like individual human lives.

This was important, he explained, because too much research in this field assumes, through labels like "drug addict", a permanence of condition, and pays not enough attention to the dimensional aspect of any condition. That is, its severity.

"Remember there are people out there, and not just things," he concluded.

In sum, it was was an important affirmation that science is not values-free. Or to put it another way, when all you have (or allow yourself to to use) is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

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Some of the ideas Joe shared were expressed more forcefully in a session on drug stigma.

Director of Māori Development at the Universty of Otago (and former Drug Foundation chair) Tuari Potiki talked about the institutional racism he experienced when he was younger ("the bias didn't seem unconscious at the time"). And how his youthful drug convictions counted for more than everything else he's done with his life when he was asked to address the UN General Assembly in New York. It took seven months to secure him a US visa and it was unclear until five weeks before the event that he'd be allowed in.

He was followed by Wendy Allison, the founder of KnowYourStuffNZ, who talked about the privilege that means her organisation gets reform allowing it to do its drug-checking work, while reform for users of other drugs – who are generally poor, non-white and more marginalised – goes missing.

Thus, we are not willing to be used by the government to show everyone how progressive they are. In fact I would suggest that tutuing about with the Misuse of Drugs Act in a way that makes privileged people safer while not helping anyone else, is not that progressive. We deserve better.

So what can we, as privileged people, do? 

One thing I’ve learned from the KnowYourStuff project is the power of ethical non-compliance, and that privileged nobodies can make things happen if they have the courage. We need to use that privilege get on with doing the things that help the people in our communities who need it, whether the government approves or not.

That’s what the needle exchange did in the 1980s, it’s what KnowYourStuffNZ has done, it’s what the Green Fairies are doing, and if you’re in a position of privilege, then it’s what you should do too. Because vulnerable people die while privileged people wait around for government approval.

That might come at a cost – she revealed that she tanked an interview for a white-collar job last year by refusing on principle to submit to a pointless pre-employment drug test – but those who can bear the cost, should. That might mean coming out as one of the one in eight New Zealanders who uses illcit drugs.

I’m aware that most people aren’t in a position to take that risk, but if you are – if exposing yourself to that stigma won’t ruin your life, I encourage you to do so, even if it's only to those close to you. Change their view, let them change someone else’s. 

It was, she said, "an understanding of the normality of drug use" that underpinned the effectiveness of KnowYourStuff’s practice, which had been praised earlier in the day by the minister himself.

In an environment without judgement, stigma can’t thrive - and in the absence of stigma we create space for real, honest conversations about drugs with our clients.

Without stigma, we'd be able to have real, honest conversations about drugs as a country. We’d be able to take a hard look at the actual drivers behind problematic drug use: Inequality. Disconnection. Trauma. We’d be able to talk about what actually works to reduce harm instead of always focusing on use (and by extension, users). And if we care about reducing harm, it’s our duty to make that happen.

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The Australian researcher Professor Nicole Lee drew a similar distinction between seeking to define success in the rate of use of any drug rather than the incidence of actual harm. She noted that meth use in Australia (they have much better data than us) has been trending down for a decade – at the same time as hospital admissions and other measures of harm are spiralling up. What, we have to ask, is drug policy for?

This is an understanding that has developed in, it needs to be acknowledged, New Zealand law enforcement. Detective Inspector Blair MacDonald, manager of the National Drug Intelligence Bureau, presented on the drug early warning service High Alert and working with "our good friends" KnowYourStuff and the Drug Foundation. It shouldn't escape us that this is a good and remarkable thing.

Perhaps invitably, he was asked whether asked whether legalising real MDMA would help quell the problem of dangerous and sometimes deadly cathinones being sold in its stead. His answer was diplomatic but clear in its way. There had been a shift in recent years, he said, in the police approach to drugs, focusing on preventing harm.

"We don't want to be the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. That's about as much as I can say."

Noeleen Chaney of Northland DHB rattled through a lot of data on the Te Ara Oranga scheme in her region, under which police work with health providers to offer help to people with meth problems as an alternative to prosecuting them. Short version: it works. (The scheme was launched under the last National government, but I imagine would be derided as "soft on drugs" by the version of the party that festers in Opposition were it to be proposed today.)

I had an enjoyable chat with Tuari onstage at the end of the first day about the prehistory of the war on drugs as it related to New Zealand, based for my part on the history I wrote for the Drug Foundation magazine in 2014, which I think you would still find an interesting read.

Two notes from the introductory video from Johann Hari resonated: one is that our first drug law (the Opium Prevention Act 1901) was bound up in race. The other is that ever since then – through the International Opium Convention, the League of Nations, the United Nations Single Convention 1961 – we've basically been ordered around by more powerful nations. How much easier might medicinal cannabis have been if we hadn't bowed to UN instruction to stop our doctors prescribing tincture of cannabis in the late 1950s?

The story of UN pressure circles right back to America and its chief prohibitionist Harry Anslinger, who drove international policy in his country's name. We got the draconian Narcotics Act after police officer Bob Walton returned from being instructed by Anslinger's people in America and we've been trying to climb out of it ever since. Ironically, America might be climbing out faster than we are.

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There were some politicians in the room: Chloe, of course, and Australian Reason Party member Fiona Patten, who was a delight to meet and talk to. Labour MP Arena Williams stood out on the political panel as someone her party could and should encourage to pursue an interest in evidence-based drug policy.

But over two days of listening – and bearing in mind the mindless Parliamentary squabbles of recent weeks – I started to despair of politics and politicians. As Helen Clark pointed out, Norway's deeply considered move away from its prohibitionst past to decriminalisation is now at risk because there's an election this year and their Labour Party has decided to use that reform as a point of attack. There is no principle in that. Just politics.

I do understand, to an extent, our government's wariness around cannabis reform. Although the referendum result was very close, "Yes" didn't actually win in many electorates – and it fared badly in Labour's South Auckland heartland, where people might have been forgiven for not wanting cannabis retail on top of their problems with liquor retail.

But to declare, as Andrew Little did, that "even though the case for change is obvious", the government didn't get the "social licence" for any reform at all just defies reason. The last government was supposed to review the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975. Little himself promised to do so. The Law Commission called for a review a decade ago. How on earth does the referendum result preclude sending the damn law to a select committee to hear submissions?

There is a debate within Labour's caucus on this stalling of reform and an even stronger one amongst its party membership. Andrew Little simply does not seem to be the minister capable of steering a way through that debate – not least because he will also be stewarding a staggeringly large reform of the entire national health service. Please, just give the drug delegation to someone else.

• If the Salvation Army, the NZMA, the Mental Health Foundation, the Public Heath Association et al collectively ask you to remove the criminalisation from the use of cannabis, don't go off in a huff. Talk to them.

• Acknowledge that the current medicinal cannabis scheme has real problems. Accept that the public increasingly sees the therapetic use of cannabis in a different light to "recreational" use – there are 80 year-olds using cannabis balms – and respond to the real environment, not one that simply fits existing practice. Ask yourself: are these really the people we want to drag though court? If not, do something about it rather than relying on pissweak John Key rationalisations about police discretion. Police would welcome the guidance.

• Send the Misuse of of Drugs Act 1975 to a select committee for review. It's hard to imagine a move with less political cost attached than that.

In short, fear and stigma sometimes make good politics. They very rarely make good goverment.

NB: I was able to take a week to prepare for and attend the symposium, and to write this, because some of you contribute to that work via our PressPatron account. If you appreciated this post, feel free to click the Supporter bar beneath this post and chip in a little. Cheers, RB.

Last night, the New Zealand Herald posted a story from its political reporter Derek Cheng which bundles together a number of current issues around medicinal cannabis. The most alarming is that of Katy Thomas and her epileptic son Eddy, which has recently been taken up by Green MP Chloe Swarbrick. Their story was first reported a couple of weeks ago by TVNZ.

Swarbrick – the only member who seems willing to be caught caring about this stuff – posted her letter to Health minister Andrew Little on Facebook on April 23. I've posted it in turn in the comments below, along with a reply from Andrew Little, the Minister of Health.

The gist is that CBD oil imported from and prescribed by their GP was intercepted at the border twice in a month – and as a result six year-old Eddy's nocturnal seizures are now poorly controlled. This is not only distressing, it's potentially deadly. Any one of those seizures could be fatal.

One oil was apparenty intercepted because of paperwork – the prescription wasn't attached on arrival. I was mystified as to exactly why the other, which was to be delivered to the GP, was confiscated and destroyed. Swarbrick's letter cites Section 2A(1)(b) of the Misuse of Drugs Act, which defines a CBD product. She doesn't actually say the medicines were intercepted because they contain more than 2% CBD, but the two journalists who have reported the story have taken that meaning. But anyway, it's not the case. That's not what the law says.

So they're wrong on a key detail, but not in a way that reflects an iota better on minister Little, the Ministry of Health or New Zealand Customs. What is happening here is an awful picture of official callousness and detachment.

Section 2A doesn't limit the quantity of CBD in a product to 2% (which would be pretty low). It says that "specified substances" – that is, any form (isomer, esther, etc) of THC –  can amount to no more than 2% of the quantity of CBD. The products that have been intercepted did not contain any form of THC. So what actually happened?

I've spoken to Katy and been able to determine that, to an extent.

Since at least 2018, Katy has been importing products from the British company CBD Brothers, a licensed producer of CBD products. Recently, via her prescribing GP, she has been bringing in two products, the Purple Plus Water Soluble and the Red Edition CBD Oil, a full-spectrum oil derived from cannabis indica plants.

According to the WHO, CBD enjoys more evidential backing as a treatment for childhood epilepsy than any other condition, and these ren't dodgy novelty products. Each one comes with a certificate of analysis of the batch from which it is bottled. What happened is not that Batch 68 of the Red Oil contained THC, but that its certificate showed it contained 0.136% CBN, which equated to 3% of the total CBD content. (Ironically, if the oil contained more CBD, there wouldn't have been a problem.)

But CBN, while a cannabinoid, is not THC. In the absence of THC, it is not intoxicating, still less in the trace amount at which it is present in the oil. It's not mentioned on the Ministry of Health page covering the definition of  a CBD product, although Katy told me it is cited on one page I've been unable to find. But, again, it is not THC.

So why single out CBN, when the certificate of analysis shows one or two other innocuous cannabinoids? I wonder if the officials are hanging on these lines in Section 2A specifying:

It should have come as no surprise after the narrow referendum defeat last year of a bill to legalise and regulate cannabis that its loudest and best-funded opponents should have wandered off to find a new culture war. The people behind SAM-NZ, Family First and Say Nope to Dope have never really cared about drug policy, evidence or reducing harm to the vulnerable.

But one prominent "No" campaigner, the Salvation Army, issued a statement immediately after the result calling on the government to develop "legislation that provides comprehensive and well thought-through decriminalisation", which should include "the further removal of criminal sanctions for casual use of cannabis" and better funding for drug treatment.

There hasn't been a lot since then, but last week, Ian Hutson, director of the Social Policy and Parliamentary Unit of the Salvation Army, joined addiction medicine specialist Professor Doug Sellman, a declared "Yes" voter in the referendum, to write a column expressing "frustration" at political intransigence and urging Parliament to "immediately enact decriminalisation of cannabis for all users of cannabis".

Their call follows an open letter from the Public Health Association, the New Zealand Medical Association, the Mental Health Foundation and others to overhaul the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 – which provoked a ridiculous response from Health minister Andrew Little.

There was a similar call from Dr Huhana Hickey, Professor Khylee Quince, Manu Caddie and Dr Mark Hotu, the guests on TVNZ's Marae yesterday, who agreed that reform of our creaking 46 year-old drug law was a matter of urgency. (Dr Hotu seems to have forgotten that he wrote a poorly-reasoned and factually wayward column opposing a "Yes" vote last year, but we'll let that pass.)

Manu expressed the view that further reform this Parliamentary term was not only urgent, but – the statements of Minister Little notwithstanding – likely this term. My understanding is also that Little's position does not necessarily reflect that of his colleagues in government. But I wonder if far too much of the energy required to get to that point will be expended on concocting a way for the minister to save face.

If there is a consensus around decriminalising cannabis, it would be fair to say that is less the case around what decriminalisation should mean.

The Salvation Army called for a removal of criminal penalties for "casual use" of cannabis, but it's unclear what that means. What is non-casual use? Does it include self-growing? The ability to possess a limited quantity without question? Social supply?

In his column with Professor Sellman, Ian Hutson seems to favour Portugal-style decriminalisation of all drugs. I would love for New Zealand to follow Portugal, Norway, Oregon and Australian Capital Territories in doing so, but I'm not sure the Portugese model, which was developed in response to a crisis in intravenous drug use, usefully addresses the reality of cannabis in New Zealand.

Portugese police are supposed to interact with someone using or possessing cannabis in the same way they do for heroin. But they actually don't, because it doesn't really make sense to do so. They're more likely to just ignore someone smoking a joint. So you've still got a law that relies for its viability on not being applied by police.

Professor Sellman writes that his preferred legalisation model would be an equivalent to Sweden's "SOE model" for alcohol, under which the supply of cannabis is a state monopoly. I, too, worry about Big Cannabis – and I thought that the Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill included provisions around market size, marketing and licensing that could have set an example for the rest of the world. I'd have amended it further to Keep Cannabis Small. But I'm not sure a state monopoly is really a good answer for cannabis.

Why? You only had to be at J Day in Auckland on Saturday to see. There were more vendors this year, a dozen or more, offering a range of home-made cannabis products. There's already a community producing and distributing these products, in a way that doesn't really answer to traditional perceptions of the "drug trade", and it's not simply going to pack up because the state grants itself a monopoly on production or supply.

But it's actually worse than that under the current law. Take a moment to admire these cannabis-containing muffins:

These muffins – and the cooking oil, balms, tinctures and infused honey that were for sale on Saturday – are "cannabis preparations" under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975. That means that while cannabis flower is a Class C drug, baking it in a muffin escalates it to to Class B – the same as morphine, amphetamine and GHB. If you hand the muffin you have baked to another person, the maximum penalty is 14 years imprisonment.

Of course, the law is not generally enforced that way, because that would be crazy and unjust. For similar reasons, police have taken the approach of regarding J Day events as a form of advocacy and steered clear of them. And, frankly, they have no other need to attend – Saturday in Albert Park was an extremely relaxed affair, thanks in part to the absence of alcohol.

But it's not possible to look at our 46 year-old drug law and honestly declare it's not in need of comprehensive reform. It's time for some moral courage.

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Audioculture recently republished my epic two-part feature on touring Europe with The Chills in 1987. But the decision was made to leave out a couple of passages that ran in the mag originally but were deemed unsuitable for a website used in schools. Which is fine and prudent – but it did strike me that landing in this place where things were done differently had prompted me to write for the first time about the culture and economy of drugs. I was just very interested in how it worked:

It tickles something else to appreciate the way cannabis preparations from around the globe have found their way to the corner of the bar of a tiny cafe in Amsterdam. Café dealers will be able to offer a range including Mexican seedless, dry, dusty grass from Africa or Colombia, dark, spicy-smelling buds from Jamaica, hash from Afghanistan (purchased, they say, from rebel forces on the Pakistani border), Nepal, Turkey, Morocco ... and even locally-grown sinsemilla, the product of Californian consumer grass technique. The man will have a board listing his products and prices and possibly a folder, like a photo album, of sample bags. As befits its retail status, most quantities are worked round a 25 guilder (about NZD$25) standard price. At that price for two grams of Jamaican buds it’s not wondrously cheap, but this is retail. If it’s all too confusing you can buy a piece of “space cake” for five-seven guilders.

There are hundreds of cafés in Amsterdam but only dozens which encourage cannabis smoking. Of those which do, some are large, perhaps with two floors, some are small. Those aiming for young tourists have big video and sound systems, while others just hum with a quietly hip soundtrack and low conversation. The big ones serve alcohol, the small ones usually don’t. Some are part of a chain, like the Bulldog cafés, which even extend outside Amsterdam. The Bulldog tries to play both games with its Leidseplein branch which has two basement hash cafés and a big, bright, airy restaurant for tourists upstairs. Periodically, a straying group of English matrons will have to be quietly told by the barmaid that hash is being smoked down here and perhaps they’d be happier upstairs. They have to be careful. One such matron last year was served a piece of space cake, hallucinated, and demanded that the British Foreign Office declare war on Amsterdam.

I was also very interested to, for the first time, read High Times magazine, which was strictly prohibited in New Zealand:

Many bookshops carry English-language publications as well. Notable among them is the legendary drug culture magazine High Times. It’s an obscene publication in many countries – if the ever-lovin’ NZ customs found one in your suitcase they’d certainly take it off you and probably want to have a quick look up your bottom for good measure.

It’s pleasing to find out that High Times is an excellent magazine. It’s well-written, very well researched and the four-colour printing is spot-on, which it has to be to depict the subtle but important differences between one cluster of brown-green buds and another.

Inside each ish there’s Ask Ed, a comprehensive growers’ problem page (“The increasing pH is probably being caused by the gravel, which is probably limestone ...”); the Trans-High Market Quotations, a nationwide chart of current recreational drug prices compiled from readers’ figures; Activist News; a legal directory; a readers’ Top 40 of favourite things (usually topped by sex); and even a lung-watering centrefold.

Individual issues include features like a Ken Kesey interview and short story; an enthusiast’s (everybody connected with the mag seems to be an enthusiast) account of a gruelling trip up the Amazon to sample a little-known hallucinogen called Nu-Nu; good music features covering ground from the Fall to Trouble Funk (but the readership still loves the Grateful Dead, it seems); and a calm, serious article on the danger of crack – and the way its mystique has been inflated by those eager to sell newspapers.

It’s all made possible by heavy advertising support, from the likes of growing-aid manufacturers, peddlers of legal “diet aid” type stimulants, and all manner of non-drug products which intersect with the lifestyle.

High Times is a funny, informative, and, in its resolute matter-of-factness, quite responsible. For better or worse, its ethos is probably summed up by regular writer Ed Hassle: “Drugs can be your friend as long as their power respected. Drugs can grant visions, calm fear, expand the mind, and relieve pain. But they can also cause insanity, bankruptcy and death.”

The irony, of course, is that the Dutch system is now regarded – not least in the Netherlands itself – as dated and in need of reform itself, relying, as it does, on criminals to look after production, import and wholesale supply.

After a quiet spell in the news on account of, well, other stories, cannabis and what to do about it staged a modest headline revival this week. First there was this Stuff report on a journal article by Massey University researchers Marta Rychert and Chris Wilkins on how the cannabis referendum campaign unfolded.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s decision not to reveal her position on the cannabis debate during election campaigning could have been a "decisive factor" in last year’s referendum, academics believe.

The article in the Drug and Alcohol Review isn't freely available, but I've read it – and the headline claim, quoted accurately from article's abstract, isn't really backed up in the text, which declares only that Labour's decision not to campaign on the referendum (a Green Party policy) and Ardern's decision not to declare her vote (a "yes") in advance added to the "volatility" of the vote. That's it.

The authors also speculate that in financial terms the "Yes" and "No" campaigns probably cancelled each other out.

My sense of recent history is a mess; sometimes I can't rightly say what happened, when. I tell people about something I did two years ago and it turns out it was late last year. And still, like all of us, I'm still effectively in the moment that unfolded in March.

I recall realising even before we went into our pandemic lockdown that what a lot of what people – including me – were doing was a matter of processing anxiety in public. It was evident, vividly, on social media, where sometimes we expressed it by policing each other, shouting at each other , drawing lines, letting fly. Heartbreakingly, I found myself shouting desperately at old friends who began a descent into malignant conspiracy theories.

By contrast, when, in the first week of lockdown, Bauer Media took the opportunity to shut down its New Zealand operation, removing our household's last reliable source of income, what should have been really alarming seemed to almost get lost in the overall roar of dread.

The wage subsidy helped there, in a way that went beyond mere finance. It was money that had turned up in the bank in a way that didn't rely on the unknowables of the virus economy. It said: there's a backstop. A few weeks later, when some work actually did turn up, making an online series for Spark Lab called The Pivot Reports from my kitchen table, I discovered that had been a widely-shared sensation among small business people. It was room to breathe and it was available swiftly and with few questions asked. The subsidy was an $11 billion chill-pill and worth every cent.

We now know that New Zealand wasn't very well prepared for a global pandemic, and that it took a succession of decisive actions, rapid responses and lessons learned to get us where we are, for now. It's a trusim to say it now, but the government's communications mattered hugely. They worked with the anxiety I mentoned above, as much as against it, in getting us to do the right things. And they invoked a historical national tradition of working for the common good. That card works a little less well every time it's played, so you'd best play it well first time.

In sum, I've thought a lot about this tweet I sent in February. There were screwups and the shine went off a few things, but we have been well-governed at a truly critical time.

Quality of government and trust in systems are about to become very, very important. Governments conjured by merchants of chaos, lately ascendant in the world, are going to be a real problem.

— Russell Brown (@publicaddress) February 29, 2020

There were personal challenges amid it all. During the first Level 3 lockdown, my mother suffered a fall and a stroke – it's still not quite clear which came first – and I flew down to Wellington to spend my days with her and my nights in a hotel room in a locked-down central city. She suffered failures of care that have led me to formally complain to three different organisations. Dealing with ACC was endless and exhausting. Responsibility for Mum's emotional health weighed heavily on me and I had some moments of real despair.

But Mum's home, where she always wanted to be, and she's making a go of it. Since she was young, she's repeatedly had to fall back on her own resources, find personal strength. It's what she knows. I asked her recently how she'd been that week: "I'm boxing on," she said.

There's no question of her joining us for Christmas, but I'm greatly comforted by the care she's getting from the local Nurse Maude organisation. Those women are lovely. They were also good enough to let me know that Mum had asked them to cancel her midday visits over the Christmas break, apparently to give the nurse worker a break ("I can make myself a sandwich"). To be fair to Mum, she did back down more or less immediately on that one.

And then, because there wasn't enough on in 2020, I got myself involved in a campaign for the cannabis referendum. I've written about the subject of the referendum at length elsewhere, so let's just say I'm proud of what we did with We Do. It was a big, exhausting, fascinating experience.

I had watched the polls long enough to know that a win for "Yes" was the less likely outcome, but as the weeks passed I did think we'd get close. We got very close. As I've been telling people, I was ready for a narrow loss – but I wasn't ready for Andrew Little to jump up and declare an end to all drug reform for the foreseeable future. That's not a sustainable or responsible position and it won't stand.

Indeed, it stood only until Jacinda Ardern's government did the right thing and fulfilled a commitment to legalise drug-checking services at events. It was such a relatively uncontroversial move in the end that it's easy to lose sight of how far we've come on this. The idea that we would have High Alert, a drug early warning system that brings together the police, government and science agencies and the community, would have seemed a long shot five years ago.

Wendy Allison, Jez Weston and the other people at KnowYourStuffNZ deserve huge credit for that. They've been ethical and organised, been taken seriously by everyone they've had to deal with, without surrendering the peer-to-peer philosophy at the core of what they're doing. It's still the tribe looking after itself. That's a remarkable achievement.

Things are changing. Most notably, they're changing in America, where the conversation about cannabis reform is tilting significantly towards acknowledging and addressing the damage done by the drug war. I wrote about that last week for the NZ Drug Foundation. Everything's fringe until it's mainstream. Some of us will just keep poking at the parts that look like they might move.

There has been other cause for cheer on the work front. What looked like an extinction event for New Zealand media in March has resolved surprisingly well. Most of the magazines shut down by Bauer are back in some form. Stuff is now independently-owned (this is another one of those things it's hard to believe only happened a few months ago), newly invigorated and paying its staff Christmas bonuses. Editorial commissioning budgets are back and there's work about. But oh, it would be nice if freelance journalism paid better. There's a part of me that loves doing several different jobs about quite different things at once, and a part of me that's just exhausted by it.

There's been another job lately. I'm looking to get our 26 year-old son back into education, for the first time since we had to withdraw him from school when he was 12. He has such a quick, interesting mind. It's going pretty well so far, but we've had false starts before and I know it's not going to be easy. I do occasionally remind myself I generally keep it together fairly well. Maybe I'm boxing on a bit like Mum.

I value the part of my life that's out there with the tribe. I missed my friends during lockdown, I missed talking and dancing. I relished the sense of everyone valuing those things extra hard after lockdown. You felt it at gigs and parties. At one particularly busy and brilliant party this year, the birthday host's wife stood up and spoke about how lucky we all were to be able to do this. Auckland went back into Level 3 lockdown four days later.

But that, in truth, wasn't like the first one. Level 3 isn't Level 4, we knew the drill, and when every small retailer in our suburb had the table out the front with the hand sanitiser it felt oddly like some sort of street fair. The family who took over Point Chev Fresh just before the first lockdown and  looked terrified when you went in (I remember thinking they should just close up and go home) had it all down by August.

Allow me to put in a plug for Point Chev Fresh, by the way. They've been steadily developing the shop and it's a top place not only for produce, but both Indian and Mediterranean food supplies – and they're also just really nice people.

The same is true of various other businesses in our community, not least, Cupid, that little bar I always bang on about. In a horrific year for hospitality businesses, Alix McEntegart and her crew have maintained their composure and their standards, and they've given a lot of us a place to play. The Mum 'n' Dad Disco Christmas party at the bar last Friday, where Sandy Mill and I played our records, was great because it was fun. We need fun in our lives.

For those of us with access to some form of it, family matters too. One of the things that brightened lockdown for us was seeing our next door neighbours come out every day and play with their little kids. As a family, we ourselves are very used to each other's company and that helped too. I also bless the day in January we got Fiona an e-bike. Riding together during lockdown and since has added another great element to our long, loving relatinship. It's one more way we know each other well.

Best wishes, everyone. Stay safe, be well.