The team was present at three Kiwi festivals in 2017 (Kiwiburn, Eyegum, and Aum) and has two lined up for 2018 so far.
Olivia first got the idea to found a New Zealand festival care organization after she saw a similar model at an Australian festival. She visited the tent first as a sober festival-goer, and was impressed with their unbiased drug education, with information about dosage and how to identify substances correctly. “It was the first festival I’d ever been to where they had a space for people going through difficult things,” she said.
Later that night she was out with her friends and a guy offered them MDMA, then came back a few minutes after they had taken it to say he had gotten it wrong.

“He came back and said it was ketamine, but he said not to worry because if you eat ketamine, it doesn’t work, and then he gave us some real MDMA. So that was some bad harm reduction advice,” she laughed.
“I was out on the dance floor feeling really good, then the next minute I was puking, and ended up going to the harm reduction place I had gone to check out sober.” Olivia treated this story as a case in point as to why festival care organizations are needed, along with higher quality drug education.
Olivia is still friends with the first sitter who helped her out during that experience, a volunteer with psychedelically multicoloured hair. “So that really started my whole trip with all of this, being a person who needed the care and wanting to pay it forward. That really bad experience turned out to be a really rewarding and educational one.”
When Olivia got back to New Zealand and looked for an organization to volunteer with, she couldn’t find any. “I’m not the kind of person that would say, well, the story ends there,” she commented, shrugging. She founded Deepspace not long after.
Deepspace takes its inspiration from larger harm reduction organizations that not only insert themselves into festival infrastructure, but also support drug testing, education, and research on substance use and abuse. Olivia volunteered with some American organizations after her Australian experience, such as Zendo, the festival care arm of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), going to big American festivals like Burning Man in Nevada. Zendo provides a space for visitors to come sit with a volunteer and/or medic, and provides information on drug effects, dosage, and danger of addiction. When possible, it also provides drug testing services, so that guests can be sure of the real content of whatever substance they have bought or been given.
A Kiwi organization called KnowYourStuffNZ has been providing drug tests at some festivals throughout the country over the last three years. During the summer of 2017/2018, approximately one in five of their drug tests (21%) revealed contents that weren’t what the buyer or user had been expecting. Of these, about half were something totally different than what festival-goers thought they had bought (often bath salts), a quarter were laced with a different substance, and the rest were unidentifiable. KnowYourStuffNZ has a growing volunteer force, and has often informally teamed up with Deepspace to cover all aspects of harm reduction at New Zealand festivals.

In New Zealand, Deepspace’s mission is to “de-escalate all situations” and provide an alternative to physical medical care and security. Its volunteers “don’t give advice, they are just there to listen and hold space”. A visitor can go and spend time with a volunteer sitter if they are having a challenging experience linked to substance use. This does not usually include alcohol: while Deepspace will take care of anyone who needs it, Olivia took great pains to emphasize that their space is not a place for drunk people to congregate. Of the 67 visitors Deepspace helped over their first three events, the most common substances people reported being on were LSD (17) and MDMA (14), sometimes in combination with other drugs. Ages ranged from 17 to people in their 40s, but guests in their 20s were the most common visitors (about half of those who gave their age).

Olivia described what a person can expect to see if they enter the Deepspace area. First, there is “an entrance tent with information and pamphlets about dosage, advice on different experiences, and there are two sitters out front, friendly faces so that people know where to find us. Then we have a courtyard kind of space: you come through our admin space, and then into the courtyard, and then there is a yurt and a beautiful bell tent where we have beds and pillows, spaces to lie down. If someone is really disruptive they can go into one of the more private spaces”. She mentioned that the design of having different areas – the darker yurt, the lofty bell tent, and the outdoor courtyard–was inspired by the uncomfortable layout she encountered during her first experience in a care space in Australia. “Everyone could see everyone which was really scary and intrusive, you could see someone next to you convulsing and someone else freaking out… so we have three main spaces, where people can sit or talk or sleep, with different moods.” Deepspace volunteers are often “health care workers, mental health nurses, and psychiatrists”, and there are usually 20-30 volunteers at a festival with 3-5 people on duty per shift, usually with one roaming the grounds with a radio to see if anyone needs to be brought in. Festival medical and security staff are invited to an introductory briefing so that they know what kinds of help Deepspace can provide, and who to direct there.
Olivia has seen drug cultures vary across the different festivals she has attended and worked – in Australia and New Zealand, she sees a serious binge culture when compared with a few longstanding US festivals. In states like Oregon or California, she had friends whose “parents were Deadheads,” had “grown up going to festivals,” and usually knew how to handle themselves on drugs. At New Zealand and Australian festivals, she believes people “romanticise overconsumption”. She said people often “Snapchat their friends gurning (facial distortions often resulting from amphetamines or MDMA) and freaking out, instead of helping them get to medical”.
Olivia added that better education was really her biggest mission: “Friends are laughing at their friends going through psychosis instead of helping them – no-one gets drug education in high school, no-one knows what to do. We need a cultural shift to make it cool to be safe and know how to look after your mates. If everyone had a little bit of Deepspace training then Deepspace wouldn’t need to exist, because everyone would be having a safe and supported time.”

Shortly before she passed away, Lecretia’s husband, Matt Vickers, relayed to his wife that the High Court had ruled against them. Lecretia was not able to speak, but was still mentally competent. Remembering this moment, Matt later told the press: “There was no mistaking her response. She was hurt and disappointed. She fixed me with a stare with her good eye as if to say ‘Isn’t this my body? My life?’ Her breath slowed and she turned her head away. Her reaction utterly broke my heart.”

A new attempt at assisted dying legislation in New Zealand has recently reawakened memories of Lecretia’s case, and has faced both significant support and significant opposition.

David Seymour, Epsom electorate MP and leader of ACT New Zealand, introduced The End of Life Choice Bill in June of 2017. It recently passed its first reading. A flood of public submissions followed, and the Select Committee is preparing a report to recommend changes before the Bill goes through a second reading.

New Zealand holds a vast array of deeply held convictions on the topic of assisted dying. Some, like Lecretia, contend that the right to die with dignity is an essential part of human freedom. Others raise questions about coercion, vulnerability, and whether or not it is possible to write a “safe” assisted dying bill.

“Assisted dying” takes more than one form. A physician can administer a lethal dose of medication to a patient who doesn’t want to give it to themselves, or who physically can’t. Or, a patient may self-administer under a doctor’s supervision, which is sometimes called assisted suicide. Many people and countries draw a line between assisted dying, assisted suicide, and “passive euthanasia,” which usually means that death was brought about by the absence of care. A doctor might withdraw or withhold treatment, like turning off life support. Passive euthanasia is already legal in New Zealand.

In David Seymour’s End of Life Choice Bill, there are quite a few conditions you have to meet to be able to access assisted dying, passive euthanasia, or assisted suicide.

You must be 18 years or older, a NZ citizen or permanent resident, and you must also suffer from a terminal illness likely to kill you within 6 months, or a “grievous and irremediable” medical condition such as or Huntington’s or Parkinson’s disease. In addition to these conditions, your circumstances must be advanced and irreversible, you must be experiencing unbearable suffering, and you must be of sound mind, able to communicate your decision and understanding of assisted dying to your physician.

The Bill allows your doctor conscientious objection. If they do not feel comfortable with euthanasia, they are allowed to refuse and refer you to someone else.

A few weeks ago, I went to a press briefing hosted by Hospice New Zealand. I arrived a little early, and most of the panelists came up to say hello, welcome me in, and offer water, a lolly, and a seat. While they were kind to all of the journalists (and I think it takes a kind person to go into palliative care) they seemed very enthusiastic to see a student paper present. One of the organizers approached me afterwards and commented that it was exactly the young, student age group, who should really think about our values around death and dying.
Hospice NZ also invited panelists from Australia New Zealand Society of Palliative Medicine (ANZSPM) and Palliative Care Nurses New Zealand (PCNNZ). The speakers were all decidedly against the End of Life Choice Bill. They argued that New Zealand patients are not referred to palliative care often enough, and that people might opt for euthanasia without being aware of all their options. Palliative care is not well funded enough to be accessible to everyone in New Zealand. If everyone had access to good end of life care, they argued, no one would want euthanasia.

The panelists were practicing physicians, palliative care specialists, and nurses. Many of them had known patients who, in their eyes, had “internalized” the pressure to not be a burden on friends and family. Prof. Rod MacLeod of Hospice NZ said that it is “impossible to detect coercion from behind a closed door,” and that this Bill would do a poor job of protecting the vulnerable in their last few weeks and months.

The next week, I met Ann David, a campaigner for the right to die with dignity. We sat in the National Library and spoke in a quiet corner as passers-by came and went from the Signatures that Shape New Zealand exhibit. She came prepared with a collection of bookmarked materials, which she used to rebut common arguments against assisted dying.

Ann has been involved in this debate since her mother passed in an Australian hospital under a process called “Terminal Sedation”.

Terminal sedation, or palliative sedation, is currently legal in New Zealand. It is considered a form of passive euthanasia. Ann described the procedure with distaste: the doctors removed all medication except enough sedative to help her mother sleep. They also removed nutrition and hydration, and delivered an enema so that no distressing bacteria could build up.

Ann’s mother had suffered a series of strokes that left her paralyzed, and eventually, unable to see or communicate. She was “locked inside” her body. When Ann realized that her mother had no chance of recovery, she spoke with a doctor about her options. She “didn’t realized what was involved at the time,” she said, but “wasn’t asked to sign anything. Straight after our conversation in a hospital corridor, the doctor instructed heavy sedation and a discontinuation of nutrition and hydration until death. It took nine days”.

Because she was in a state where she could not communicate, Ann’s mother would not have been able to opt for assisted dying under this Bill. However, Ann finds it “duplicitous” that terminal sedation is permissible where assisted dying is not.

Terminal sedation and other types of passive euthanasia are often considered ethical because they aim to relieve suffering, rather than hasten death. The Hospice NZ physicians felt that, morally, easing suffering while allowing someone to die naturally fell within their roles as doctors and nurses, whereas assisted dying “has nothing to do with medicine,” as Dr. Ian Gwynne-Robson of ANZSPM said.

Ann disputed this distinction. “I wouldn’t call terminal sedation passive,” she stated, commenting that doctors have to realize that they might be hastening the end of life when they remove care. “I cannot for the life of me understand why the church and palliative care can condone a longer, drawn out death,” Ann explained further. “I find it extremely cruel. My mother died in her late 80s. What purpose did this serve, that last indignity done to her body? We need to do better.”

Ann finds the current Bill to be a safe step forward. She made a submission to Parliament recommending that two clauses be added for reassurance: that “disability alone” and “mental health alone” will not count as “sufficient grounds for assisted dying”.

Further amendments to the Bill are likely to make it “even safer,” added Ann.

Dr. Salina Iupati, a palliative care specialist with ANZSPM, voiced a concern to me about wrongful deaths before the formal Hospice event began.

Any review board for this Bill, she said, would be a “cloak of medical legitimacy” hiding the true difficulty of telling whether or not a death was above board. After a person is dead, it is extremely difficult to tell if there was coercion, if the patient was of sound mind, or if a doctor made the right decision. In the Netherlands, four cases have recently been raised for review, and the results of these inquiries might tell us more about how effective a review board can be.

When I asked Ann about the problem of oversight, she nodded. “I hear the argument. I go back to the point that we don’t have any review for terminal sedation at the moment, or for requests to switch off life support, or the discontinuation of treatment… so [the End of Life Choice Bill] will be the best reviewed, most scrutinized and most examined process in the country.”

Implementing an assisted dying bill safely is a policy issue. Underneath that policy issue lie countless deeply personal questions, such as where the boundaries of personal autonomy lie, and whether or not there is a time at the end of life where suffering eclipses all meaningful experience. Ann, the Hospice panelists, and the people who made submissions on the Bill have had experience answer some of these questions for them, one way or another.

Lecretia Seales had also answered those questions for herself in 2015. In her statement of claim, she spoke clearly about what lead her to her decisions:

“I have lived my life as a fiercely independent and active person. I have always been very intellectually engaged with the world and my work. For me a slow and undignified death that does not reflect the life that I have led, would be a terrible way for my good life to have to end.
I want to be able to die with a sense of who I am and with a dignity and independence that represents the way I have always lived my life. I desperately want to be respected in my wish not to have to suffer unnecessarily at the end. I really want to be able to say goodbye well.”

Waikeria Prison is old; it was constructed about 100 years ago.  The Government of New Zealand has been debating either rebuilding or expanding it, potentially adding 3000 beds to a prison that already houses 650 residents. This decision has been postponed several times, but a final verdict on Waikeria is expected soon. Regardless of what the government decides, the conversation has unearthed serious questions about New Zealand’s criminal justice system.

In the midst of the Waikeria debate, a group of Māori speakers, including Julia Whaipooti of JustSpeak, have gone to New York to talk to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues about criminal justice in New Zealand.

Julia kindly invited me into her home for coffee a few weeks ago. Her space features a wall-size open window; the lounge seating is casually oriented around the view. As we spoke her flatmates wandered in and out of the room, adding insight to the conversation while doing their laundry.

Julia has said that Waikeria prison is sitting on Māori land taken by the New Zealand Government under the Public Works Act. The Public Works Act allows the Crown to acquire land to use for public benefit. When we spoke, Julia added that an Act taking land for the public good and then using it to build prisons was a “conscious act of ongoing colonization”. She spoke firmly: “I have just named how wrong that is. Taking Māori land for the benefit of the public, but that public use is to build a prison that will be filled with Māori.”

Liam Martin, a criminology lecturer at Victoria University, feels that the current Labour government does not want to build the new prison, but is feeling trapped. Liam used Kelvin Davis, the first Māori Minister of Corrections, as an example. Davis was “very vocal” as a member of the opposition, but as a Labour minister, he has been quiet on the topic of prison reform. As a Minister, Davis has “really been sucked into this thing of overcrowding,” said Liam. Corrections has been using the line that it just manages the people sent to them, and that right now, there are too many.

Talking about overcrowding may be a political tool, but the problems are real. There are more prisoners than there are spaces to hold them humanely in New Zealand. Liam told a story about the Arohata women’s prison, where “there isn’t a single space for new prisoners, so they’re using the abandoned buildings at the Rimutaka men’s prison and housing women there, in spaces not fit for human habitation”. The space in Rimutaka was repurposed in February 2017, and is now referred to as the Arohata Upper Prison. It has been improved, but the Chief Ombudsman raised concerns about double bunking and small cell sizes in March 2018.

Amending Bail Laws: A Short Term Solution

One of the causes of today’s overcrowding is a 2013 change to bail laws. The legislation followed a highly publicized tragedy, the death of Christie Marceau, a young woman in Auckland who was killed by a man on bail. The young man was later found to be suffering from schizophrenia.

The Sensible Sentencing Trust (SST), an organization that lobbies for tough-on-crime legislation as the best way to protect victims, were part of a high-profile campaign in 2011-2013 to toughen bail laws. Garth McVicar is the founder of the SST, and was recently criticized for a Facebook post applauding a fatal police shooting in Auckland as “one less to clog the prisons!”

Following the lobbying campaign, the 2013 Bail Amendment Act was passed to stop violent offenders from getting out on bail. Among other things, the Act introduced more situations in which the accused has to prove that they deserve bail, instead of the prosecutor having to prove that they do not (guilty until proven innocent). Today, organizations like JustSpeak argue that the law has been overused. The Corrections Department reports that 1 in every 5 prisoners are being held on remand, or before they have received a sentence.

Julia added that some people held in remand are stuck simply because they “don’t have an appropriate address” to be given bail. This is true for the homeless, and also for people who need electronic bracelet monitoring. To qualify for electronic monitoring, you need a long enough lease, adequate utilities, your own bedroom, proximity to shopping centers, and other factors that would surely disqualify a huge number of VUW students, for example.

Julia, Liam, and others have called for further amendments to the Bail Amendment Act instead of new prisons. If the 2013 Act were repealed, it would cut the number of people being held in remand in half.

New Zealand criminal justice researchers came forward with an open letter in February, proposing “a moratorium on all new prison construction”. The Prime Minister’s Chief Science Adviser has argued that “we keep imprisoning more people in response to dogma not data”. Prisons are not working as a space where people can heal, and building more prisons only leads to more prisoners to fill them.

Labour has the goal of reducing the prison population by 30% over 15 years. When we spoke, Julia suggested just buying a motel for excess prisoners to stay in as an affordable short-term solution. This might give the government time to develop a long-term plan. She laughed, adding that “the Waikeria prison expansion wouldn’t happen until 2025 anyways,” so in many ways, emergency motel living would be a much more pragmatic use of taxpayer money than a far-off mega-prison.

The Long Game: Reforming Structurally Racist Institutions

Before we began speaking, Julia asked what my whakapapa was. As a Canadian settler visiting Aotearoa, or a settler twice over, it was clear to me that my understanding of the impact of prisons here or anywhere would only ever be intellectual at best. I have only ever experienced the benefits of structurally racist systems. I volunteered in a Canadian women’s prison when I was in my first two years of college, and met a huge number of Indigenous women there. I was always the white volunteer with library books, board games, and the power to walk right out the door. Now, I am the person with the opportunity to write about issues I won’t ever feel the consequences of.

Moana Jackson, a Māori activist and lawyer, has been saying that prisons are structurally racist systems since his 1987 work on Māori in the criminal justice system. In a recent interview with RadioNZ, Mr. Jackson held that “the evidence is clear that [a new prison] will incarcerate even more Māori, in fact one predicted estimate is that a 3000 bed prison will ultimately, in the next 30 years, lead to nearly 80 000 more Māori prison sentences. That is simply unacceptable”.

The interviewer interrupted him several times to ask what he would do “if we had no prisons at all”. You could hear Jackson growing frustrated, asking to simply be given the space and time to answer the question, but he still managed to make his point: New Zealand needs to have a “meaningful conversation” about prisons, and about their eventual replacement with “other more rehabilitative and effective ways of dealing with those who cause harm, and protecting those who are damaged by the harm”.

In his writing, Jackson has argued for a different criminal justice system for Māori, by Māori. When I asked Julia about a future without prisons, she made the point that communities should get the opportunity to put forward their own models for defining and delivering justice.

Radio NZ’s interviewer is probably not the only person in New Zealand to be troubled by the idea of ditching prisons. It is easy to panic at the idea of no prisons without having any idea of what a real alternative looks like.

Dr. Martin pointed me towards Scandinavia, a place that is rethinking what “prison” means. A 2013 Atlantic article described an open prison in Finland. Fewer than 100 prisoners live there, and they leave daily for work or study, returning each evening. They are able to visit close family, when given electronic monitoring bracelets.

Sweden is closing prisons, and the percentages of prisoners who reoffend in Denmark and Iceland have been low, compared with the rest of the world, over the last few decades. Inmates are often able to keep family and friend support networks because they live in smaller, local prisons.

Whether or not Waikeria is expanded, New Zealand is facing a decision about whether to take on the short term problem of overcrowding, or embrace the challenge of reforming its system for the long term. This government has the opportunity to start answering the question “what is an alternative to prisons?”

Julia had a few words to share with VUW students passionate about criminal justice. Her first point was that it’s always tempting to start your own group, but that it is better to follow JustSpeak, PAPA (People Against Prisons Aotearoa) or other pre-existing organizations than to begin from scratch. She thought for a while and added, “influence the spheres that you can influence… I believe in advocacy around your kitchen table. Changes come with cups of tea”.