Weed by James Borrowdale

Author:James Borrowdale [Borrowdale, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143774334
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2013-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

6.

Political Puffs: The Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party

* * *

“I just thought: Fuck this stupid law.”

* * *

It was the size of a camel’s tampon, wrote the New Zealand Listener’s Tom Scott. The symbolic joint apparently weighed two ounces, packed with cabbage towards the roach so as not to waste the flame-end prime buds when the inevitable confiscation occurred. But before its forbidden fumes could be inhaled into the lungs of protestors and exhaled out over the Parliament lawn, there were the speeches. It was 20 February 1996, the first time Parliament had convened for the year.

Mike Finlayson — then the national co-ordinator of the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), soon to be number two on the list for the newly formed Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party — clambered up the raised concrete in front of Parliament and addressed his fellow protestors, whose attire, Scott’s piece tells us, “tended to suggest that the boardrooms of the nation hadn’t exactly ground to a halt through absenteeism”; one man was dressed as a joint, another was in a beekeeper’s costume. Finlayson thanked those who had hitch-hiked in from out of town, and positioned cannabis use as a freedom-of-choice issue the long nose of the state had no business poking into. The Beehive, he said to huge cheers, motioning over his shoulder, was too full of politicians, and not full enough of representatives of popular will. One of those offending politicians — several elected representatives had gathered to witness proceedings — was on hand. In the interests of free speech, Finlayson passed the megaphone to John Banks — then Minister of Tourism, formerly Minister of Police, of the National government. “You are losers,” he bluntly obliged. “You are riff-raff!” Cannabis, he said, was a ticket for a “one-way journey into Hell”, where “abject misery” awaited.

Dialogue — or abuse — dispensed with, Finlayson hopped from the raised partition and alighted among his comrades for the two o’clock smoke. The joint was like a baton, he recalled, and it was passed to him as if from one relay runner to another. Four or five lighters, dug from the pockets of his fellow protestors, were proffered to kiss the end of the joint, and a skein of smoke ascended to hang over the group of 400 or so. Finlayson, then 40, noticed a cop moving among the bodies in his peripheral vision on his way to intercept the joint, until a comrade — later charged with obstruction — blocked his progress. Finlayson held the burning limb, the size of a baby’s arm, aloft — over the mêlée, amid the rising smoke — like an Olympic torch raised in victory. “As I held it up,” Finlayson recalled, “and this is something that will never leave me, there was a roar that came up from that crowd that was so primal. It was like, ‘Fuck off, get off our back, leave us alone!’ Just that roar of anguish and grief and anger all combined … Then I passed it on.

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