 So, can you please introduce yourself and the organisation you work for? Kia ora, my name is Tracey Portiki and I work for an organisation called Te Rau Ora and we're an indigenous Māori health and wellbeing organisation. Kia ora. I'm Ross Bell, I'm the Executive Director of the New Zealand Drug Foundation so we're sort of the country's leading drug policy organisation and I need to say that this is the first time that New Zealand... Tracey is on the Government delegation to the CND, it's the first time they've had an indigenous person on the delegation so it's her first time here as you know, and is also the first time New Zealand Government's had an indigenous person on the delegations, that's very cool. Congratulations. So, there are very exciting developments in terms of cannabis policy in New Zealand, can you explain us what is happening and everything about the referendum? One of the big questions for New Zealand is when you've seen some of the cannabis regulation that's happened in North America, will First Nations people and marginalised communities benefit from legalisation so I'll get Tracey to cover that off. But in terms of what's happening the Government has proposed a public referendum which is going to happen on 19 September this year and that referendum will ask the New Zealand public, do you support cannabis legalisation or not? And in terms of the detail of how that will work, the Government is drafting a bill, some of the details of that bill and the potential model of regulation will be as now public. For example, they're setting a purchase age of 20, they're not allowing advertising, there'll be tax and that tax money will be reinvested back into cannabis harm reduction. We don't yet know how the model will work in terms of is it going to be commercial or is it going to be more non-profit, or the vote happens, the public will get all of the details about what is being proposed and they get to choose should New Zealand legalise cannabis. At the moment we have no regulation and no regulation for Indigenous people in New Zealand means getting arrested and put into prisons where we are well overrepresented in all of those negative spaces. So 50% of the population who are currently incarcerated are Māori and we make up only 15% of the population. So we have some big issues and for us it's an opportunity for a change. And yes, we are concerned about the lack of communication and consultation with our communities about what the potential legislation might look like and how it will impact on us. So it's sort of, yeah, we need to change things and we want to have a say in what that change looks like. So we're calling on our Government to be a good treaty partner and we have a treaty with them and they have a constitutional obligation to have a discussion with us. How would ideal regulation look like? From a principle, you know, the values that the Government's approaching this at, I think gives us greater confidence that we're not going to end up with a super for-profit overly commercialised market. So the Government has said it wants to, just like Canada did, it wants to protect young people and it wants to move the organised crime away from the market. And some of the proposals that have already come out give us confidence that it can do that. I also believe that even if we did regulation badly it's better than what we've currently got. And so I think that there's enough out there for the public to be confident that the Government's moving down the right track, that they're not designing a bill that's going to be super commercial. But there are still questions about who's going to benefit economically from the market. And we don't know that yet. The details around the... So there will be a licensing scheme, you know, a licence to cultivate and a licence to sell and everything in between. But we don't know yet whether there will be a percentage of those licences given to Māori. We don't know whether there will be a cap on the number of licences a company can hold. So in terms of a timeline all of those details will probably come out in about April. The whole campaign, trying to convince the public to vote for this thing will run from about June and then the election itself is in September. In terms of how New Zealand has undertaken this, it's had three years to engage with the public. It hasn't done that that well. Everything is actually getting jammed into the final few months. The vote happens at the same time as we vote for what Government we want. And to complicate matters even further, there's a second referendum that voters will be asked to vote on, which was around euthanasia. So, complicated. Is there a strong opposition to the referendum? And if yes, where is it coming from? Yes, there's a strong organised opposition. And it's currently coming from socially conservative... There's a specific organisation that is a conservative Christian organisation who oppose everything, who are anti-marriage equality, who are currently right now fighting the Government around changes to our abortion law, that they are against the euthanasia referendum. So, they are actually quite a fringe group and they're very well connected. They're receiving finance from conservative groups in America. A lot of their messaging on cannabis is taken directly from anti-cannabis or anti-reform groups in America. So, they have quite a coordinated opposition. But the thing for me is that when you look at their messages and when you put their messages before reasonable people, they're not credible. It doesn't stack up. Most people know that prohibition isn't working and that we have to do something different. So, the kind of really moralistic arguments that they're using I don't think are going to work. In my country, we have an ethnic minority called Roma people and it's like 7% of the population and they are very much affected by the use of synthetic cannabinoids and synthetic cannabinoids use rampant and it has some devastating effects on these socially excluded, marginalised communities. Is there something similar going on in New Zealand with Maori people? Yes, definitely. So, our communities are more impacted in every area including poorer health comes, lower employment rates, poverty and so on. So, any movement away from... and really, we've operated in a system that's been very discriminatory. So, the hope with an opportunity to have a vote at the September referendum around cannabis is an opportunity to just slow things down, and just stop things just a little wee bit in our communities. So, it's important. I mean, because I saw the work that you had done on synthetic cannabinoid impacts in your country and it's identical. Two years ago, we were having people dying from the use of synthetic cannabinoids and the Government of the day was saying they shouldn't use these things but when you scratch the surface, the majority of people who were dying were Māori, homeless, unemployed. Poverty, homelessness, they are the drivers of this. The question whether legalising cannabis will mean that there's a safer alternative I think is a genuine issue for us. It could well be that providing people a safer drug-like cannabis will reduce the harm from these other ones. Ross, if there is one lesson we learnt from the Canadian example is that it's not so easy to beat the black market. I mean, it's still resistant. So, do you expect the same in New Zealand or can you make some precautions to avoid those mistakes which they made? Yes, it's good that someone like Canada has gone before us and we can learn from those mistakes. So, it depends on how it all works. It depends on if you are going to do the tax. Is it where do you set that tax? Is it going to be so high that people will stay on the black market? I just think the lesson from Canada is implementation was done badly. The biggest populated province, Ontario, did not have retail stores on day one. So, you're going to make mistakes. They've made some, you know, guaranteed that New Zealand will make some as well. But even if you look at what's happened in Canada just in the, you know, they've only had legalisation for just over a year, they are unpicking 50 or 60 years of prohibition. So, we can't expect, you know, that within the first two years you're going to eliminate the black market. We need to be realistic about, you know, what's going to happen. I think, you know, there's been a huge shift away from the black market and while it's not the majority in Canada, you know, there has been a big shift. Billions of dollars is now being, you know, spent on cannabis in the legal market so you're taking that money away from, you know, organised crime. So, yeah, but we can, hopefully, we won't make the same kind of mistakes that they did. I think I asked everything I wanted if you have anything, any other things to share. One question we are getting asked a lot is, are we going to win? You know, what are the polls showing? And at the moment, the race is tight. We're, you know, in partnership, we're running the yes campaign so we've chosen to put our effort into winning the referendum. Everything is tight. It's almost evenly split. There is a big group, probably about 20% of the public who haven't yet decided but who I think are persuadable. Once they get to learn more about what the Government has proposed, the focus groups that we've run, the research we've run, is once people have, once undecided voters get that information, they only move one way. They move towards yes. So it's close. I'm quietly confident.