Rebecca Reider speaking about medicinal cannabis after being allowed to bring in cannabis through customs.
Rebecca Reider says she’s feeling a bit stoned.
She’s standing in the garden, admiring the size and health of her broad beans.
A TV3 crew have just visited moments before, to film the Californian-born Golden Bay resident smoking New Zealand’s first legal buds since they were outlawed in the 1960s, from her stained glass pipe.
Environmental activist Rebecca Reider hopes to pave the way for others to have the right to use medicinal cannabis.
After she shows off the broad beans, Reider moves to a comfy couch in the sun on the verandah to stroke Pablo, her fluffy black cat who is purring loudly.
The interior of her Collingwood home seems almost empty, apart from a bookcase lined mainly with environmental books, a silver Macbook on an empty desk and a few floor cushions.
This week, the 37-year-old Californian-born Golden Bay resident made history by bringing the first legal cannabis into New Zealand – without so much as a raised eyebrow.
Golden Bay woman Rebecca Reider has made history bringing the first legal raw cannabis flower into New Zealand since medicinal cannabis was outlawed in the 1960s.
The environmental activist and journalist is fresh from her trip back from Hawaii where she was prescribed cannabis for her chronic pain.
Reider flew through Customs in a wheelchair with an ounce of marijuana buds and a 20 gram syringe of pure cannabis oil.
She thinks they might have been expecting her, because the officers didn’t even want to check the letter from her doctor.
“It was the fastest pass through I’ve ever had with biosecurity, but then again, it should be that easy; it’s just a bag of dried herbs.”
She pulls out three jars and shows off her stash.
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“This is the Indian strain, tangie kush,” she says. “It helps with the night-time pain and sleeping.”
The O.G. kush, also from India, is less sedating but still a pain-relief, while the sativa strain called maui waui is more energising.
How much she smokes depends on her pain levels, Reider says.
“I don’t necessarily smoke everyday but I sometimes do. The cannabis oil has been amazing for my pain,” she says. “I take a drop every night before bed.”
Reider came to New Zealand on Fullbright scholarship in 2005 to research organic agriculture and has lived and worked here since.
Currently the National Coordinator for Organic Winegrowers NZ, she has worked as a freelance journalist for the NZ Herald and Organic NZ magazine.
She is also known by her stage name, Redwood Reider, an artist and stand-up poet with a strong political spin.
In early March this year, Reider unwittingly shone a spotlight on medicinal cannabis law in New Zealand, and is now campaigning for every patient’s right to use it.
Earlier this year she appeared in the Nelson District Court on charges for importing medical marijuana chocolate bars into New Zealand and others relating to possession. Reider’s Nelson lawyer Sue Grey discovered a “loophole” in the Misuse of Drugs Act.
The law allows patients to legally bring through customs a one month’s supply of a controlled medicine, as long as it was prescribed by a doctor.
Reider was discharged without conviction.
She suffers from a complex form of chronic pain and has been to more than twenty doctors over the past ten years, most of whom have been unable to help her.
The only relief she says she gets from the debilitating full-body muscle spasms is from cannabis.
Reider travels home to California every year to obtain a prescription from her family doctor.
“I felt such a relief that day in California when my mother drove me to my family doctor to get a cannabis prescription,” she says. “A friendly young person came to my house and delivered my cannabis products right on my doorstep.”
She was so happy she hugged him.
“Only then did I realise how much stress I’d been carrying around being forced into an illegal status over my medical needs,” she said.
But in a twist of fate in December 2015, Customs intercepted five medical marijuana chocolate bars she tried to send to her Golden Bay address.
“Police raided my home here, and I was left staggering around in shock. They had all my medicine in a bag ready to be taken away and disposed of – and all I could do was stand there and beg pathetically for them to leave me a single dose as I was experiencing muscle spasms. Of course, they took it all away.”
Reider says it felt like she was having her house robbed.
“It’s been baffling, when I’ve experienced a compassionate and orderly medical system across the world, to be treated here as a criminal with no right to take care of her own health.”
Her Californian family were stunned to hear she was facing a maximum sentence of eight years imprisonment.
“They’re confused because New Zealand has such a reputation as a progressive society. It’s mystifying how we are still so backward on this one issue of personal health freedom,” she says.
Reider hatched a plan to obtain a legal prescription of medical marijuana to bring it back into New Zealand on a family trip to Hawaii over the winter.
“I corresponded with the Department of Health in Hawaii for awhile, and found out I didn’t have to be resident of that state to get a prescription so that was favourable,” she says.
“What wasn’t favourable is that they didn’t have dispensers like in California, they just had home-grow. So I had to make connections, meet another patient who had more than they needed and get some off them.”
Reider thinks it will be difficult for customs to regulate how much a one month’s supply actually is.
“For one person, one year’s supply would be different [from] another because [people] have really different dosages. It’s really flexible.”
She says a doctor’s prescription is basically a licence to either posess, buy or grow marijuana, and it doesn’t necessarily say how much a patient should take.
New Zealand society has strayed so far from a realistic understanding of what the cannabis plant really is, she says.
“Prohibition has been a joke and one day it would be seen as a human rights violation.
“And actually, the amazing thing isn’t that I bought raw medicinal cannabis into New Zealand; the amazing thing is that this is even remarkable.”
– Stuff.co.nz