Dear Jim Anderton,

I once had a dream of New Zealand as the Amsterdam of the South Seas, a place where tourists could come and smoke marijuana in cafes with a Polynesian ambience, experience mild psychedelics while watching sunsets over West Coast beaches, get ramped up on stimulants for all-night parties, and experience meaningful encounters on a variety of empathogens.

I figured it would be a better selling-point and attract a better and more interesting standard of tourist that any amount of “100% Pure” posters - unless of course we were talking the purity of substances here.

New Zealand, I thought, could turn itself into a niche marketed paradise. Factor in our legalised sex-work, our network of casinos, the sheer quality of New Zealand contemporary music, and all this - once added to our beaches, bush, mountains and all the standards - and you’d actually have an attraction that would be worth traveling halfway around the globe to experience.

It would have a follow-on effect on New Zealand that could only be beneficial.

We’d have to think about aesthetics, about making our country more attractive. We’d have to think about our culture in a more stimulating way. We’d have to get creative. We’d lose some of the rigid thought-structures of this, the most provincial country of them all. Our conversations would begin to sprawl in tune with our overseas’ guests. We’d become a Country of Refuge from a world that seems to be governed by the obese nastiness of modern consumerism and the last gasps of growth-orientated final-stage captitalism before it eventually sinks us. A certain service-mentality coupled with the pace of altered consciousnesses would relax us. Our rhythms would change. And at last we’d be entering a Pacific Century where the times and tides of our ocean-surrounded islands would somehow make us free…

But you’ve fucked it, Jim.

This is the final weekend before your party-pill ban takes effect.

And then it’s all over.

Now I didn’t even particularly like benzylpiperazine (BZP). Like everyone I did a short stint on them for a year or so but they didn’t work for me. Yes, they did get you up and going. Yes, I did enjoy a few events because of them. ‘Are they easy on the come-down?’ the obviously drug-familiar Marc Ellis is recorded as asking in a police-intercepted conversation as he made a more serious drug-purchase now somehow PR’d out of existence. Well, BZP wasn’t, for me. And ultimately the come-down wasn’t worth the minor sparkle and the staying power of the pills.

But I could see the beginnings of something bigger in New Zealand’s small party-pill industry. Given time and Kiwi ingenuity and the wonderful world of psychoactive substances I could see a growth industry. This was confirmed with Stargate International’s non-therapeutic trial of ‘Ease’. This wasn’t a BZP-based pill. It was methalone - methylenedioxymethcathinone - a substance media-commentator Russell Brown referred to as ‘ecstasy for adults’.

Like many Aucklanders I was a member of the Ease trial group. I can attest that Ease were a sweet, subtle, gentle way of enjoying things without the boom-crash-opera of other illegal substances. It was civilized. I admired out party-pill industry for finding a perfect substance . And I thought, standing under a palm-tree once at a party in an early summer evening, that this indeed was the way of the future.

But you fucked that too, Jim.

The dour weight of your electorate in Christchurch fell upon us all and the Ease trial was closed, officially, on some clumsy logic based upon analogues of analogues of banned substances and even the Police weren’t quite willing to prosecute. I thought it was going to be the first step in a wonderful evolution of an industry that had the possibility to create a new New Zealand, a boutique marketed nation, disentangled from a world that seems increasing bent on relegating us all to financial cogs in a grim universe, but you didn’t see that.

You obviously disagreed with me, Jim.

And now with the party-pill ban finally in effect, it might all be over, baby-blue.

It was a triumph of irrational hysteria. Note the Christchurch doctor who got a taste of media-fame in a hyperbolic study of BZP admissions to a Christchurch hospital. It was often a triumph of media hypocrisy where the savvy, socially-adept, drug-consuming reporters for a variety of organisations abandoned personal principle.

Note TV3’s overkill on the son of an employee who allegedly went into a coma based on BZP ingestion - where we never ever quite got the results of the blood-work on what else may have been ingested.

Note the repeated BZP shock-horror stories through 2007 on John Campbell’s Campbell Live which marked the beginning of the end for my respect for the program as ‘current affairs’ - a respect which was to finally die with a later uncredited faked ‘interview’ with an actor mouthing words whose verbal relationship to the alleged protagonist of the interview is still somewhat murky. Honest John? Nuh.

The New Zealand Herald climbed upon the bandwagon with a condemnatory series, as it has done repeatedly in the past, where research was abandoned in favour of slanted reporting. And I noted your paid medical professionals, Jim, who queued up with unnecessary hyperbole and an absence of facts.

Despite the fact that New Zealanders had consumed millions and millions of doses of BZP and anyone phoning around hospitals found a paucity of BZP related admissions, Jim, it didn’t matter to you. There was a bandwagon to join. You were the face of Ilam and Fendalton’s vicious pensioners. You were the voice of the ugly, repressed New Zealander that we had all hoped had died a death some time back.

New Zealand’s entertainment-drug industry was about to be suppressed and you were going to do it.

Jim, you were going to take a generation who were enjoying an above-the-board legal tip of a huge recreational drug industry and send them back to the gang-controlled unpleasant world of really problematic illicit drugs. You were going to remove a bit of harmless Saturday Night fun and replace it by infinitely more risky substances in an infinitely more risky commercial environment.

The door was opened to drug-use in New Zealand a very long time ago. We are amongst the world’s highest consumers of illicit substances. It was about time we had a bit of vision and a bit of hope.

But instead we got a Christchurch MP’s dour last ditch stand on pleasure - a Minister who’d be better off focusing on his other portfolios, Fisheries where he seems determined to make sure we are the last generation to enjoy seafood, Agriculture where he hasn’t even managed to free battery-chickens….

So party-pills are gone and in a number of New Zealand minds it is going to figure as a background to their vote choice this year. It might note be the number one priority when they walk into an election booth but it is going to rankle, way down.

The fickle media - note Campbell Live again - is doing a reversal on the law-change. Was it right? What about people now forced into usage of even more dangerous substances? And they’re all obviously going to have an orgy with the next drug-related death of a former-BZP using teenager from a more serious illegal substance. The headlines are easy to see: ‘Did Jim Kill This Kid?’

No drug is ever entirely free from problems. Everything we put into our bodies is dangerous in excess whether it be salt or alcohol. More people die from paracetamol poisoning in New Zealand every year than die from Ecstasy or methamphetamine. But the answer at this late stage is not more repression. It never was. It always was assimilation and education. Drug-use has been a constant in all known human-history. It always will be. We don’t deal with it by denying it.

And so, Jim, you were given an opportunity and you fucked it - again and for everyone.

Congratulations.