Stuff NZ
Police have raided “Gandalf”, a renowned “Green Fairy”, destroying greenhouses that supplied hundreds of patients with black market medicinal cannabis.
The 66-year-old from Northland is devastated and concerned for the people he says he helps.
He is one of New Zealand’s most well-known “Green Fairies”, a term used to describe those who provide black market medical cannabis.
Stuff understands police have been well aware of his operation for years. ‘Gandalf’ assumed police had turned a blind eye, given they knew it was being used to help people.
But police have shut down the operation. And so Gandalf, for the first time publicly, is speaking out on the record – under his real name – Paul Smith.
He has previously appeared on the documentary Patrick Gower: On Weed, anonymously by using his pseudonym ‘Gandalf’ and not showing face.
A police summons he supplied to Stuff showed he was charged with cultivating and supplying cannabis after police raided his home on Tuesday.
Smith says he’s done nothing wrong – in fact he says he’s actually helping people stay alive.
In an interview with Stuff, Smith burst into tears as he discussed what would happen to his “patients”. He keeps a detailed exercise book of names and addresses of his patients, with careful notes of their ailments and conditions. Most of them, he says, are dealing with chronic pain, cancer, insomnia or anxiety. Depending on the condition, he prescribes a different strand or medicinal cannabis product – such as a CBD oil without THC, which is what gets people “high”.
“Those people rely on my medicine for a good quality of life. In many cases, they rely on this to save their lives – especially the cancer patients. I’ve got two boxes filled with thank you cards from grateful patients,” Smith said.
“What the police have done is so f… morally wrong,” he said, through tears.
He continued, “The whole system is just so wrong. It doesn’t work. It is just set up to make money and fail, and that’s where Green Fairies like myself have to step up and fill the void, because no one else will. And f… the law. It’s as simple as that.”
Medicinal cannabis is legal in New Zealand and doctors can prescribe its use. But it is extremely costly to buy medicinal cannabis, and it’s also expensive to sell it through the legal framework the Government set up to regulate the industry.
As a result, Green Fairies have popped up across New Zealand to provide much cheaper medicinal cannabis. Smith said there were fairies across the country, but most of them were a lot smaller than him.
He said he kept expanding because more and more people were getting in contact, and “I couldn’t turn them away”.
Stuff has visited where he grew weed, in what he called “poly-houses” – big plastic covered sheds. The sheds are crammed with two metre high cannabis plants, each of which have flowering “heads” that are the size of a human fist.
When they’re filled, you’d have to push the cannabis leaves aside to move through the poly-house. But after police visited on Tuesday, arriving with guns pointed, the sheds were destroyed. Witnesses described police officers – between a dozen and 16 of them – smashing through the plastic and digging up the plants.
“I can no longer help them. There are hundreds of patients,” Smith said.
He said he considered entering the legal market, but couldn’t afford the “$250,000 to $300,000” required to get licenses.
If he did, then he’d have to charge the same rates as “those big corporate guys”.
“I charge half price what they do, pensioners get an even higher discount and those living on their own without any financial support are gifted this. There is no charge, no matter how often they need it. There is no cost for them because I am not interested in making money. It’s as simple as that,” Smith said.
He said he did not sell any cannabis for recreational use, and was only interested in helping people who couldn’t afford the costs of “cannabis clinics” and pharmaceutical companies.
He also said he had been planning to retire soon and had been working on a plan to help his patients find other sources.
“I had stock piled enough medicine to keep going for six months. The first thought that came to my mind was, ‘what am I going to tell all the patients?,” he said, after realising police had taken the stockpile as well.
He said his plan for winter was to plant vegetables in the sheds, to supply soup kitchens, feed pensioners, and help the homeless. But that wouldn’t be able to happen, as he estimated police caused $25,000 worth of damage to the sheds.
“They have literally taken food from the poor,” Smith said.
