Confessions of a Crazy Plant Lady

For those of you who know me, you’ll know I’m a bit of a crazy plant lady.

I’m obsessed with forests. Wild flowers thrill me to bits. And edible plants? Well let’s just say if you want advice or knowledge about a plant you can’t eat, you should probably ask someone else.

But there’s one plant that’s had a remarkable impact on my life yet I can barely talk about without exhausting levels of judgement and awkwardness, and that’s cannabis.

—

Cannabis has been in my life a long time and I have far too many hilarious anecdotes to share about this glorious plant. But what I want to talk about is this plant as a medicine and the horrific impacts that prohibition has had with our relationship with this clever herb.

When I was a teenager everyone I know was smoking it. And I mean everyone. What made me different was that I had chronic pain issues from my early teens onwards. And while everyone was having fun getting high, what I was really noticing was that it actually helped my pain.

There was no way I was ever going to have that conversation with my doctor though. How much trouble would I get in? So instead I spent years visiting rheumatologists and physios and gps and never mentioning it. They prescribed me every pharmaceutical medicine under the sun, which have destroyed my guts. I have lifelong problems as a result of “medicine” I took in my early 20s.

However when I was in my early 20s I started to have conversations with old hippies around me about better ways to ingest it. I started to eat it and drink it. And I learnt ways to take low doses so I could keep functioning through each and every day as well as manage my pain without big costs to my body and wallet.

But I still couldn’t really talk about it.

When I was about 22 I got arrested at a J Day protest, ironically for drawing on the ground with chalk. I was charged with possession of cannabis and wilful damage. The police were pretty keen to push the damage charge — the magistrate threw them out. The possession charge though, they couldn’t care less about. Even though I had the biggest joint on me — like, to this day I have still not seen one that big, I was a young white woman attending university. I carried my privilege like an enormous neon sign and the police didn’t even blink at letting go of that charge. I had character letters espousing my exemplary character and how much this was very *cough* atypical behaviour for me and how much of a devastating impact a conviction would have… We didn’t even need those letters. My whiteness carried me through like a kite.

—

Fast forward a couple of years and I’m working in Parliament with a very active focus on drug law reform.

One of the things you probably don’t realise about MPs is that they do a lot of work with specific constituent cases. Many of these cases are hopeless because the law is not on their side, despite the rights and wrongs of a given situation, but you do what you can. Because we were working on law reform we got a lot of medical cannabis cases. I really got to know some of these people and their heart breaking stories. I was able to help many of them because of the amazing risks some people in our community take to help people who need it.

I got to know people in their last years, people with major illnesses, people with minor conditions who’d experienced such straight forward experiences and couldn’t believe something so innocuous could carry such disproportionate jail terms.

But there was nothing much I could do — within the law — to help.

So each day I worked on supporting their cases, but most importantly, on changing the law.

All the while, this medicine continued to help me, and everyone around me was using it.

But I still couldn’t really talk about it.

—

Fast forward again and I’m recovering from cancer treatment and I’m on some serious medication. The damage from the surgery is permanent, the pain will be lifelong. The drugs they put me on were brutal. I’m talking massively high level pain killers with huge side effects. I spent months wandering around in a daze. I had terrible short term memory loss and my vocabulary just disappeared. As a writer this was soul destroying. Almost every conversation I had, I would forget at least one word that I wanted to say. I hated it.

So when I found myself in Nimbin with access to experts in medical cannabis, I leapt at the chance to talk to someone about options. I trotted off with some CBD oil and two weeks later I was off everything. It was amazing. Here I was, someone who was so incredibly versed in the law, the politics and the medical research and even I was astonished as to how great an impact it had on my wellbeing in such a short space of time.

Since that time I have raised the topic with various doctors who have nervously looked around the room or scoffed at my experience. Or delightfully in the case of one new migrant doctor, I had to explain prohibition and why the medicine that was so clearly helping me was unavailable to use.

The stigma is so incredibly pervasive, even someone as forthright and certain as me has issues discussing a management option that I have twenty years experience with in a doctors room. I fear the judgement and the awkward embarrassment. I hate the ignorance and having to explain how I manage my health and the impact it has because our medical establishment is hamstrung by outdated, ineffective and overtly racist laws.

—

So now I’m talking about it.

Because this Saturday Aotearoa gets the chance to have a say on this issue and sadly I’m not able to cast a vote. So I’m asking you to do it for me.

I don’t believe the proposed legislation is the best option but I do believe it is so incredibly better than the current status of prohibition which causes so much more harm than cannabis ever could.

A yes vote is important for all of the young people who face court for doing something that almost every other one of their peers is doing, but they just had the bad luck of getting caught — and I will be straight up — being brown.

A yes vote is important for all of the people who genuinely need this medicine and don’t need to pay exorbitant prices to get highly synthesised medicine, when a simple cup of tea will do.

A yes vote is important for all the people who do have a problematic relationship with cannabis and can’t access the help they need because of the risk of criminalisation. And it’s just as important for their friends and families.

But mostly I think a yes vote is important because at the end of the day this is a plant, and plants are our friends. We need to be able to have sensible and rational conversations about the pros and cons of this frankly miraculous plant without the hysterical shrill absolutism that prohibition has cultivated over the last century.

2020 has been a hell of a year. But if anything good can come out of it I hope it’s that this referendum is a successful one.

Vote Yes.

And Party Vote Green so we have a good team in there to make sure the eventual law that gets passed is a good one.