Matt Bowden

The great BZP experiment: how New Zealand lost its head to party pills

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illustration: six red pills on a tongue, in a lightly drooling mouth

From 2000 to 2007, the party drug BZP was legal to buy and available from your local dairy. What happened? ‘This is what movies say drugs are like,” says Jim*, remembering how he felt when he took six party pills in one night. He was a musician, student, and regular drug taker – he’d munted … Read more

How NZ’s cutting-edge experiment with drug legalisation came crashing down

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In his latest book, Fentanyl Inc., journalist Ben Westhoff (The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Vice etc) goes deep on the epidemic of ‘legal highs’, including the notorious, deadly fentanyl. There’s an extremely intense bit where he poses as a buyer and infiltrates a Chinese drug lab.  It was New Zealander Matt Bowden who invented the … Read more