Hard News by Russell Brown

This past summer, like every summer, many New Zealanders went to music festivals and parties and took recreational drugs. But at some events there was something unprecedented going on.

Wendy Allison, the pioneer of of event harm reduction in New Zealand, had some new kit.

I've interviewed Wendy before – anonymously in this 2015 story about going to ESR to get a pill tested (spoiler: it wasn't what it was supposed to be), then for the 'Partying Hard' episode of my From Zero podcast series for RNZ. She and her crew have been quietly testing substances since a night in 2014 when people around her at an event lapsed into "eight to 10 hour psychotic breaks" after taking something that was supposed to be MDMA. They've become expert at using and understanding the results from the reagent testing kits you can buy at your local head shop.

But last summer, the New Zealand Drug Foundation and the New Zealand Needle Exchange Programme clubbed together to buy a portable spectrometer, a briefcase-sized device which provides a more accurate and more comprehensive analysis of what's in a drug sample. The reagent kits are still part of the process (and can identify LSD, where the spectrometer is pretty hopeless), but the introduction of the spec was a big advance. Harm was prevented.

The work, conducted by volunteers, now happens under a new banner: Know Your Stuff.

But, as I note in a new story backgrounding the project in Matters of Substance, there's a really big problem here. All this is illegal.

Event promoters in particular face huge legal peril under Section 12 of the Misuse of Drugs Act if they "knowingly allow" controlled drugs to be consumed on a site they manage. The maximum penalty is 10 years imprisonment. There's also the likelihood of voiding their insurance.

My new story looks at what happened at one festival when Wendy spotted a problematic trend with drugs on site (powders being presented as MDMA which were actually cathinones). She was obliged to seek permission from the event manager to tell the onsite medical team about it. The manager readily gave the go-ahead. But he wasn't officially supposed to know any of this was happening. He took a significant risk in doing the right thing. It shouldn't be like this.

Another promoter I spoke to was emphatic that he would, too, have had Know Your Stuff on site but for the legal risk. He thinks its a good idea. So do Associate Health Minister Peter Dunne, emergency doctors and even, so far as the carefully-worded state ment I got can be parsed, do the Police. It's just the law that's the problem.

That law, as Dunne explained on Q+A this morning, is unlikely to be changed until the Misuse of Drugs Act is reviewed during the next Parliamentary term. That's disappointing – but at the same time it's encouraging thatwe've been spared the grandstanding by politicians and police that has infested this debate in Australia.

There was some good news in Know Your Stuff's results, which will be presented by Wendy at this week's Parliamentary Drug Law Symposium. Most notably, where Wendy's 2014-2015 testing found that most presumed LSD was actually the vastly more dangerous 25i-NBOMe (aka "N-Bomb"), last summer, the acid was really acid (that is, LSD, or the very similar ALD-52). MDMA was more likely to actually be MDMA too. But still, nearly a third of samples tested were not as presumed.

Even where unexpected substances aren't likely to present an acute risk of death or serious harm like NBOMe, knowledge gained from testing is relevant. The various cathinones, for instance, react badly with other drugs and are especially contraindicated with alcohol. So it's something that not only the medics, but the bar staff should know about. Even the harm-reduction counselling that's part of the checking process itself is valuable.

And there is the fact that, as Wendy points out every year, testing is an extremely effective way to enourage people not to use drugs. Last summer, two thirds of people told they didn't have what they thought they did chose not to take it.

I'm looking forward to hearing Wendy speak this week, but for now there's a new Pledge Me page where you can help to support Know Your Stuff's work. Even with volunteer labour, there is a cost to all this. And it may save lives.

Also: Today's Q+A report, featuring an anonymous young professional who find something really weird in his MDMA.

And: don't forget that you can also chip in a little to fund my reporting from the symposium. 

It's an odd, but pleasing, feeling seeing a screen drama whose characters you know in real life. And it's a feeling quite a few people will have if they're in front of the TV in a couple of weeks' time when Why Does Love?, a two-hour telemovie telling the story of the (Dance) Exponents screens on TVNZ 1.

The story begins in Christchurch, where, as the story goes Jordan Luck, Brian Jones and Steve Cowan, recently landed from Timaru, post an ad for a drummer on the board at CJ's, a musical instruments shop run in pastoral style by a kindly Irishman, and wind up with both a drummer (Michael "Harry" Harralambi) and a bassist (Dave Gent).

Things happen quickly, courtesy a cheeky chappy called Peter Waller, who works for the key promoter in town, Jim Wilson. Peter wasn't quite as petite as the character you see on screen, and the real Jim had a much cooler style than his character does, but in general the casting and characterisation is one of the delights of the first hour.

In particular, Matariki Whatarau really is like Dave Gent, Simon Mead is a better-than-plausible Harry and Olivia Tennet is styled to a tee as the band's lighting tech Donna Redmond. Jordan Mooney gives a strong performance without quite capturing  his namesake, but perhaps that's inevitable. I've certainly never met anyone like Jordan.

Research for the drama clearly draws on contemporary photographs and videos – one shot directly replicates the original of Jordan performing in the video for 'Victoria' – which creates a sense of deja vu. But it bears noting that nearly all the plot points actually happened. Jordan's mum really did hit it off backstage with David Bowie.

The first half of the story reflects the times and the state of the group – it's zesty and fun and well-written – but the second suffers a bit from the same loss of momentum that struck the band. I've known them since 1982, I flatted with Jordan across the road from Mandrill Studios and I wrote the Audioculture history,  so I'd seen the movie before (the omission of the scruffy Rip It Up journalist is a major omission). But people less well grounded in the tale might struggle a little as it goes on. And the ending lacks the redemptive impact it reaches for.

But even if it starts more strongly than it ends, Why Does Love? is really worth watching. It's the first time something like this has been tried (Billy T James had been a few years at rest by the time his biopic was produced)  and it authentically captures a special time in the culture.

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There's a new release on Kog Transmissions – and it's a hip hop record. Well, kinda. In truth Rei's A Place to Stand is an intriguing blend of Aotearoa hip hop, dancehall, the big electronic sounds of Kog (label founder Chris Chetland produced it) and te ao Māori. You can hear it all in the most recent single, 'Hāti'.

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Another new track with a lick of the big Kog Studio sound (Chris mastered it), Tali's new single 'Powerful'. All proceeds go to Women's Refuge New Zealand.

Tali did The Mixtape with Alex Behan on last Saturday's Music 101 and it was very good listening: stories well told through music, which is what the Mixtape's meant to be.

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My friend Keegan spotted this Trade Me auction for a "rare 1960s Ralta turntable".

It's actually a Ralta Integrated Circuit Stereo and Te Papa has one.

Bidding on Trade Me topped out at $1200, which apparently wasn't enough for the vendor.

As you do, I subsequently wasted some time googling vintage New Zealand stereo gear – and, on the website of Christchurch based Vintage Audio World, discovered this very sexy thing.

It's a Pioneer 7120 valve amplifier, made under licence here in the 1960s by  Concord Electrical Company, which sold to a buyer in Sweden.

New Zealand's strict import laws meant that that, like bicycles and many other products, stereo systems were often either licensed for local manufacture or design and built from the ground up. Some of them were kit-built tat and some of them were legendarily good. There's a whole story to be told here. I think I feel an Audioculture article coming on ...

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Last week I noted the international headlines over the new cassette release by Dunedin noise artist L$D Fundraiser being literally mistaken for a bomb. Campbell Walker sent me an interesting backgrounder addressing the assumptions, "some of them ridiculous, some of them just lazy or wrong-headed", in the reports on Spin and NME.

It's a bit long to reproduce in full here, but, of note, Campbell says:

As a musician, L$D Fundraiser utilises an extensive array of largely pre-digital sound tools, both designed and accidental, to create bleakly beautiful, heavy - and heavily sustained - sculptural, repetitive/nearly repetitive compositions. He's always somewhere in relation to some element of the history of music, not noise, usually something buried away in some corner of psych music of the last 40 plus years. He looks like he comes from Cleveland in 1974 - having just got kicked out of Rocket from the Tombs maybe - but assembles his compositions in ways that best reflect a very specific set of parallel paths that remind me most of very early industrial culture, just after punk, filtered through both cultural and technical paths assembled from the detritus of a small town at the end of the world. It may be poetically appropriate to consider this as music two doors down from the city's dump, but it's also very nearly concretely true. And much of both the equipment and material of L$D Fundraiser's work has always drawn from the things we discard as a city.

 As sound and as music, it's an often buried, introverted sound. The three adjectives I would use to describe the sound of L$D Fundraiser - and I think the music shifts between different clusterings of these three elements through almost all of the work I know - are oppressive, depressive and ecstatic. 

He's also a street artist:

Anyone walking the streets of Dunedin should have come across the work of L$D Fundraiser before, perhaps sniggered at it or puzzled over it, maybe wondered what it was doing there, or what it was trying to sell. But L$D Fundraiser isn't really trying to sell you anything. Indeed what he's been arrested for wasn't so much a promotional stunt as a genuine attempt to find a new way to distribute the music to someone other than the same old folks who've been listening for years. Over the last few weeks, about 10 copies of StreetNOISE have been pasted up on walls known as band postering areas around inner city Dunedin, and most of those tapes have been picked up without the police needing to be called. The release of the StreetNOISE album (not a demo tape, as the Otago Daily Times had it, but perhaps they don't realise that tapes are a valid and appropriate release medium now) was really not a publicity stunt for an album release but rather the actual album release itself as a giveaway.

In that light, Campbell believes, police should at some point have been able to recognise the visual style with which they were met after a member of the public called in. And "I'm not sure the idea of charging L$D Fundraiser with threatening to damage property is reasonable, given that it was the police who made the decision to close down the city and blow up a cassette tape, made by an artist they should have pretty readily identified."

Meanwhile, Henry Oliver reviewed the album at The Spinoff Music and the artist himself was due to appear in court today. Any updates would be very welcome.

Finally, here's Campbell's video of L$D Fundraiser live at None Gallery in 2012.

L$D Fundraiser live at None Gallery from Campbell Walker on Vimeo.

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Tunes!

Just a couple this week. Dreamy new Toro y Moi, from the album Boo Boo, which is out next week:

And Leftside Wobble is back in the saddle with an absolutely gorgeous slice of back-in-the-day dubby deep house. Available to buy for a quid here on Bandcamp.

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The Friday Music Post is sponsored by:

Representing New Zealand music

According to a story by Kirsty Johnston on the Herald website today landlords are avoiding telling local authorities if their properties have tested positive for methamphetamine residue – because even if it is cleaned up, the fact of a positive test will remain permanently on the property's LIM report.

This isn't illegal – and, as sketchy as it looks, I can't say I blame them. A remediated dwelling poses no risk to the health of anyone living there. And, as noted here before, even an unremediated place that tests at the 1.5 microgram per 100cm sq level (which is both the Ministry of Health guideline where use is suspected and the forthcoming NZS 8510 standard) is extremely unlikely to pose any risk. Actually, let me rephrase that: at the standard of 1.5mcg there is no plausible risk to human health.

This puts landlords and investors in a bind. If they test, they're stuck with it. And such is is the level of public unease fostered by years of dodgy marketing and inaccurate reporting, any historical positive test is likely to take tens of thousands of dollars off the value of their asset.

And yet that's what some property managers are inviting their clients to buy into. A friend of mine who owns a small apartment in inner-city Auckland recently received the following standard letter from SuperCity Rental Management, a division of Ray White:

You may be aware of the recent changes surrounding methamphetamine and it's [sic] effects on residential investment properties.

SuperCity Rental Management has a zero-tolerance policy for the use of illicit drugs within any property under our management, so on top of the usual checks we do at our inspections for any evidence of drug problems, we are writing to let you know that with your instruction, we can contract a company to perform a methamphetamine test on your property.

This will be a baseline test to determine if there is presence or absence of methamphetamine and its precursors. This baseline test will be carried out in accordance with NZS 8510 standards and meet the Ministry of Health guidelines.

If there is a reading above current safe guidelines, we are happy to assist with facilitating the associated clean up and work to get the property back to safe levels.

This is an optional service to be undertaken completely at your discretion, please be aware that if we do receive a report back with levels above the current Ministry of Health guidelines, we will be obligated to act on this.

We recommend checking your insurance policy and contacting your provider if applicable to check if you are covered for methamphetimine [sic] contamination. Please let us know if there's anything which we should be aware of.

Please feel free to contact us if this is a service you wish to use, or if you have any questions in regards to the above.

Now, let's step back a moment and consider the implications here. If my friend pays Ray White to retain a third-party company to come in and test his flat and the test is positive, he doesn't know who is responsible. Maybe it's the current tenants, maybe it's the ones before. He has no viable avenue of redress. He's just paid a few hundred dollars to reduce the value of his flat by potentially tens of thousands.

From Kirsty's story:

First National Real Estate chief executive Bob Brereton said contamination - even if remediated - could drop a sale price up to 5 per cent.

"In the same way a leaky home has a stigma attached, contaminated houses have a negative public perception," Brereton said.

"They take longer to sell and are harder to tenant. It's a simple reality."

Real estate agents are bound to inform potential buyers when they know a house is contaminated.

But wait, there's more. New Section 59(B) of the Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill currently before Parliament would apply.

If tests carried out in accordance with any regulations made under this Act have established that the premises are methamphetamine-contaminated,—

(a) if the tenant is not responsible for the methamphetamine contamination, the rent abates; and

(b) the landlord may give notice of termination, the period of notice to be not less than 7 days; and

(c) the tenant may give notice of termination, the period of notice to be not less than 2 days.

So the rent stops and his tenants could just walk. (But he could also throw out those tenants at a week's notice, even if they're not responsible. The other new sections in the bill clarify tenant liability and insurance issues – which are a bit of a minefield, given that many insurance policies cover costs arising from meth manufacture but not use.)

His position is slightly better if the initial test is below the standard (assuming a below-standard-but-not-zero result isn't recorded somewhere that someone can see and misapprehend it). But he's locked into testing every time he changes tenants – otherwise the original baseline becomes meaningless. And if one of those future tests does come in above the standard, he faces a battle in the Tenancy Tribunal. Even if he is able to retrieve the cost of remediation from the errant tenant, he has no hope at all of redress for the likely fall in value of his property henceforth.

There is a real potential health risk in properties that have been used for methamphetamine manufacture. But that's a different process. The police are usually involved and the council must be notified. But domestic manufacture is far less common than it used to be. Most meth is imported as a finished product.

NZ 8510 is on its way – it was due this month – and there will be properties that test above the new standard. There may even be some properties that present an actual plausible health risk, so the issue can't entirely be ignored.

But in general we're not talking about any real risk to health. There has to be a standard – rather that than the MoH guideline that was inappropriately used for years – and it's conventional that that standard will be set a long way below the level that might present a risk to the most vulnerable infant. But most of the rest is about perceptions. And that's a big can of worms.

My friend, I said, you would be mad take up Ray White's kind offer.

There's a game you can play at conferences in any sector: count the women scheduled to speak and contemplate how far the event is from a true share of voices. The New Zealand Drug Foundation's two-day Parliamentary Drug Law Symposium in Wellington next week is a little different. All 14 of the speakers accorded biographies on the symposium website are women.

There's a reason for that, one I've commented on before. And it's that drug policy is a sector where women work at the coalface and where women drive change. Last year, I had the privilege of interviewing the late Helen Kelly, who changed the conversation about cannabis in New Zealand. Last week, I talked to Tricia Walsh, who turned around a harrowing life story and now addresses the harm wreaked by meth among East Coast whanau, in a way that only someone who's been there could do.

The symposium lineup features a number of other remarkable New Zealand women, including Julia Whaipooti, the chair of JustSpeak, and Professor Khylee Quince of the AUT School of Law. There will also be a presentation by Wendy Allison, who has done more than anyone to bring harm reduction at events to the threshold of acceptability. (I have a very interesting story on Wendy's work drug-checking at festivals in the issue of Matters of Substance that's out next week.)

They'll be joined by the likes of Ann Fordham, the executive director of the International Drug Policy Consortium, the umbrella group for drug policy NGOs, and Alison Holcomb, who has worked with the American Civil Liberties Union on criminal justice reform initiatives and directed the cannabis legalisation campaign in Washington state.

I'll be there too. I considered touting a story to another media organisation but decided it made more sense to cover the symposium here on Public Address. I'll cover proceedings in general and also look to do several substantial interviews. Hey, maybe even some video vox-pops.

I've paid to attend and I've even bought a new laptop to travel with, so if you're interest in this subject and you're in a position to help, you'd be very welcome to toss me a little coin via our Press Patron page (you can make a one-off or ongoing donation by clicking that red button). I'd be ever so grateful.

You can also still register for the symposium yourself – but be aware that registration closes on Friday.

Many people will have heard Blockchain or “distributed ledger technology” and some may have dismissed it as hype – especially when you hear claims that Blockchain is possibly the most important IT invention of our age. But no matter what your view, there is no doubt that Blockchain is a distruptive technology. For those with little or no knowledge about the Blockchain, what is it, how does it work and what can it be used for?

Bitcoin created the first blockchain, and thus Blockchain technology. Since Bitcoin’s release in 2009 there are now hundreds of blockchains. Some are copies of Blockchain’s blockchain, others are entirely new, such as the Ethereum blockchain.

The premise of Blockchain is deceptively simple. A blockchain is a record of transactions/information — in other words a ledger or a database — that are combined into blocks cryptographically linked to form a chain (hence the name blockchain). The brilliance of blockchain is due to three factors.

First, a blockchain is held by hundreds if not thousands of “nodes” around the world. Thus Blockchain is decentralised. When the blockchain is updated by the addition of a new block, each “copy” of the blockchain is updated automatically. The timing of the blocks depends on the blockchain. For Bitcoin a new block is added around every 10 minutes, Ethereum’s around 14 seconds.

Second, no centralised party adds blocks, rather the blockchain itself does it. If B wants to send C half a bitcoin, the blockchain is checked to see that B has the necessary bitcoin. If B does not have sufficent bitcoin the transaction will not go ahead. The valid transactions are gathered and miners compete to solve a very difficult mathmatical problem. Once that problem is solved a block is created and added to the blockchain.

To incentivise miners — a lot of computer power and electricity is required to create each block — when miners solve a block they are given bitcoins (the block reward) and any transaction fees.  Miners are vital as they provide the blockhain’s infrastructure. (Not all blockchains require Bitcoin’s “proof-of-work” and less energy hungry methods, such as “proof-of-stake” can be used.)

Third, the information on the blockchain is immutable. Even if nodes are hacked, their blocks will not match the majority of the network and will be ignored. There simply is not enough computing power for a hacker to compromise Bitcoin’s blockchain. Nothing is completely risk free; however, it is technically possible for nodes to combine to control over 50% of the network (a 51% attack). Money is safer on the Bitcoin blockchain than it is sitting on a bank’s computer system or when it is sent from one bank to another.  

Terminology is important. There are public, permissioned and private blockchains. “Blockchain” is technically a public, decentralised blockchain, the software is open source and anyone can run a node. Bitcoin and Ethereum are examples of public blockchains. Permissioned and private are not technically blockchains, rather they are distributed ledgers, but they are often referred to as blockchains.

Permissioned blockchains are where only certain entities have access.  Private blockchains are controlled by one entity. Permissioned and private blockchains are not as secure as there are fewer nodes, making them more vulnerable to attack and with permissioned ones it could take only a few parties to combine to control the blockchain. In many ways there are parallels with the early internet with walled gardens, it was not until the walls were torn down that that the power of the Internet came to the fore.  

Although the creation of cryptocurrency is amazing in itself, the excitement about Blockchain is its wider potential beyond fintech. Work is underway on a bewildering array of things, including: eliminating the need for auditors; paying taxes automatically in real time; automatic payouts for insurance claims; putting land records and thus titles on the blockchain; creating digital identies, no need to go through an identification process every time you open up a bank account; allowing people to control their health information; allowing secure uncorruptible electronic voting; disrupting the distrupters such as Uber and Airbnb; and ensuring music creators are paid royalities in real time, not months or years later; the list is seemingly endless. Essentially, if you have a process that requires an intermediary it is ripe for disruption.

Even our conception of how our businesses are organised is being turned on its head with the potential use of DAOs (decentralised autonomous organisations), a company can be run on the blockchain.

Many of Blockchain's uses enlist smart contracts which are self executing programmes that run on a blockchain. In the case of life insurance a smart contract could automatically pay on the issuance of the insured person’s death certificate.

Smart contracts combined with IoT are a futher potent source of disruption. For example, a one-off insurance policy could be issued and be paid in real time if a car driver decides to take dangerous route B rather than the safer route C.

The current state of technology and knowledge of Blockchain is similar to the Internet in the early 1990s. Crucially another promise of Blockchain is to finally make the Internet secure. We can’t predict what will happen, only that it is going to be an exciting and scary ride.

Alex Sims is an Associate professor in the Department of Commerical Law, University of Auckland. She is currently leading a project funded by the Law Foundation into the legal regulation of cryptocurrencies in New Zealand and Australia.