Matt Bowden must be a rockstar – it says so on his business card. He is also, by his own account, a dandy, a visionary and, erm, an interdimensional traveller. Others might just say he's an unrepentant drug dealer.
It's a little confusing, but stay with us.
Bowden was the former methamphetamine addict who introduced the legal party drug BZP to New Zealand in the early Noughties, and then morphed into a semi-respectable and highly articulate lobbyist for the party pill industry as it tried to stave off the BZP ban that finally arrived in early 2008.
But last week the Star-Times revealed that Bowden was back in the legal drug trade, involved in the production of the synthetic cannabis products that are currently freaking out parents and enlivening daily newspapers.
So on Wednesday, over lunch at a cafe on Auckland's North Shore, Bowden was once again defending the right of New Zealanders to get off their chops using his products. Well, sort of.
Because just like in his BZP-boosting days, Bowden takes a confusing blend of stances, mixing stern warnings about the downside of drugs and calls for tighter regulations, with a blithe assertion that it's fine for him to manufacture legal highs, because "someone will be making money out of it, so it might as well be me, and I'm doing something useful with that money".
When Bowden was the face of party pills, he wanted to appear credible, so he took reputation management advice from a PR company. He cut his hair, wore dark suits, kept his nose clean.
Today, the hair is long and shaggy, with highlights. He's wearing pointy black boots, skinny trou on skinny legs, a velvet-and-gold-thread jacket and lots of eyeliner. When the waitress asks for his order he says, "I'm ready to rock! I'm ready to eat!"
Because, these days, Bowden is actually an artist. Sure, the money in his bank account comes from manufacturing mind-altering substances, but he'd also like to introduce the world to his glam-rock, guitar-wielding alter ego, Starboy.
Starboy is, he explains, "an interdimensional traveller... in time and space responding to the cries of this troubled earth... It's about raising consciousness and hope and freedom. About love. What the world needs".
The world will, no doubt, make up its own mind about what it needs, but a fortnight ago, several hundred guests at Bowden's 40th birthday party on the North Shore – estimated to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars – saw Starboy's first big outing.
It was, says Bowden "the birth of a new persona", a return to the long-dormant ambitions that saw him play in metal bands in his youth.
It was, says one guest who'd rather remain nameless, "like watching a mid-life crisis on stage". There were women hanging from the ceiling on trapezes, others in bunny suits, loads of booze, and Bowden up on stage with his band amid lasers and costumed dancers, wearing Kiss-style makeup, big boots and long shiny coat, and evidently "enjoying himself much more than anyone else was".
TIME WILL tell whether Bowden the rockstar will make a comparable impact to Bowden the party pill guy. In the meantime, it has become apparent Bowden is also one of the synthetic cannabis guys.
So what does he have to say about recent concerns – that dairies are awash with products such as Kronic (media shorthand for the 50-odd similar products available), that teens are getting fried, and that parents are furious about its ready availability? (And yes, the Star-Times, like all other media outlets, is queasily aware that each new story about the latest drug "menace" also serves as free marketing for it.)
This is where talking with Bowden becomes perplexing. Actually, he says, Kronic is "not my product", but he concedes he provides some components, and was also involved in bringing the first synthetic cannabinoids to New Zealand a few years ago.
But then he says: "I don't think people should smoke these products. Smoking increases the chance of cancer."
And this: "It shouldn't be marketed to 16-year-olds at all. If I had my way, the person that has the product should have a qualification in alcohol and drug counselling, and if there's a child, you're not going to serve them."
And he's delighted, he says, that Associate Health Minister Peter Dunne will soon put through a law amendment to restrict the place of sale, signage and age of purchase.
That's all very nice. But for goodness' sake, the fact remains that for now this stuff is being marketed to and smoked by 16-year-olds. And Bowden is making it.
He is unabashed.
"The business is there, so I may as well get paid for the work I'm doing, things behind the scenes and keeping things on track. Especially if I can use that resource to fund research that's desperately needed in the area of drug and alcohol treatments – and to further the arts as well."
Then he talks, eloquently and at length and with numerous references to research and legislation and the rest of it, about how an enlightened, tightly regulated legislative framework like the one New Zealand is moving towards, where novel drugs will be properly tested and tightly regulated rather than banned, is proof that, as a small developed nation, we're leading the world by example.
It is indeed the case, says ESR forensic general manager and drug toxicology expert Keith Bedford, that some of Bowden's views "are also the views of people who are involved in drug policy".
But for all that, says Bedford, "I see Matt Bowden as more of an entrepreneur than a drug control reformer."
WHATEVER YOU call him, Bowden's journey to what he is now has been unusual. He says he was an introvert at school, but all that changed after a "spiritual awakening" at university, when he hooked up with a Christian group called Maranatha. He became really confident and discovered he had a "gift": "Just by looking at somebody I could see things about their past, present and future."
After quitting university he was working in magazine advertising sales. He tried a legal "herbal high", saw an opportunity and started selling them. He went to Sydney to make legal party pills there, discovered the business wasn't so legal after all and came back, but not before picking up an addiction to methamphetamine and mixing with shady characters.
Back home he kept taking drugs, met his future wife Kristi at an Auckland stripclub, had a cousin die while on Ecstasy and had another friend commit suicide with a samurai sword while high on methamphetamine.
Bowden claims that his development of the market for party pills containing BZP – formerly used in cattle worming pills – was always about giving people safe alternatives.
"I thought the first problem here is that the drugs are too dangerous – they kill people. The second problem is that the laws are all wrong."
He'd been making a fair bit of money, but in the mid-2000s took a principled stand, pulling his products from the market, "so it would be clear I wasn't speaking just from the profit motive", instead taking a middling salary from other pill-makers in return for lobbying the government on drug law reform, under the banner of the Social Tonics Association of New Zealand.
While the likes of his friend Logan Miller (who killed himself in 2007) was making up to $20 million a year from party pills and living it up, Bowden had short hair, dark suits, the phone numbers of a few journalists, and a mortgage.
It's a compelling story – and he certainly did the lobbying. But as lunch wears on, he adds more detail, suggesting that rather than simply relinquish that business, he lost control of it. "I didn't keep a really good handle on my business affairs, because I was probably wasted a lot of the time."
Whichever way you look at it, Bowden "sacrificed being a player for the ability to pull everybody together, to be a spokesman and to be taken seriously".
The "taken seriously" bit didn't entirely work – people would corner him in the supermarket to talk about "drugs and kids and the millions of dollars I was supposed to have made". But, "I felt better about myself."
Not so much better that he was ready to take a vow of poverty, though. By early 2006, Bowden was making good money again, selling an ecstasy substitute called Ease, until it was noticed that one of its components wasn't actually legal and he swiftly surrendered his stock to police.
Bowden reckons he got so short of cash that "my car was repossessed and I couldn't make my mortgage payments", but by 2008 there were new opportunities on the horizon: out of Europe were coming new drugs mimicking marijuana: synthetic cannabinoids.
He got involved importing, then making it himself. He doesn't think 16-year-olds should be smoking it, but there you go, and his company Stargate is again a "multimillion-dollar industry".
"I don't think it's going to make any difference whatsoever to consumers if my brand's there or not. If I'm not there, somebody else will be."
The mortgage is now paid off. He can throw big parties and become a self-proclaimed rockstar with a big stage show that may, or may not, travel the world like Cirque du Soleil. He is still passionate about drug reform. He says he recently donated $30,000 to an outfit in America called MAPS, for its research into the experimental anti-addiction drug Ibogaine.
HOWEVER CYNICAL it might seem, and however easy it is to poke holes in the notion of the altruistic drug dealer, I suspect Bowden buys his own version of himself. He simply doesn't see that his credibility in the area of drug law reform is fatally compromised by his choice of income. He's a smart, personable guy (who's actually pretty good at prog-rock guitar solos, if you like that sort of thing). Even the new age rockstar waffle isn't much worse than you'll get from any number of long-haired metal-heads.
He's also not so daft he can't see when he's making the wrong impression. After the Law Commission published a report on the Misuse of Drugs Act, Bowden put out a press release congratulating the commission.
He drones on sensibly about a "big step forward in terms of evidence-based drug policy", but then notes that the issue "is one Mr Bowden has explored in his first rock video", and gives a weblink to a riff-heavy piece of pop-metal. Will it help his law-reform efforts?
"It was a bad call," agrees Bowden. "I banged that out one day and thought, well, that didn't work."
There's a solution though: "I need to transfer across into my new persona and bring the activism into it. I can do both as an artist. I can talk about social justice issues. Bono does that well, doesn't he?"
Source http://www.stuff.co.nz/
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