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Asia Pacific|‘Gandalf’ the Medical Marijuana Grower: Folk Hero or Criminal? https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/world/asia/medical-marijuana-new-zealand-gandalf.html the global profile ‘Gandalf’ the Medical Marijuana Grower: Folk Hero or Criminal? A police raid and criminal case against a longtime cultivator of cannabis in New Zealand’s Northland region has stirred up debates about medicinal marijuana. Paul Smith, known to many as “Gandalf,” at his home in Hukerenui, New Zealand.Credit...Ruth McDowall for The New York Times The man known to many as “Gandalf” trudged barefoot through upturned soil beds, shards of shattered glass and fallen wooden beams with protruding nails. Eight months ago, more than a dozen armed police officers swarmed his remote home in New Zealand’s Northland region. They took axes to the frames of three greenhouses he’d built and ripped out the plants he’d lovingly cared for — his girls, as he used to call them. For years, 66-year-old Paul Smith, a self-described old-school hippie with an unruly silver mane and beard befitting his Gandalf sobriquet, had been cultivating cannabis — perfecting strains, refining the process of curing the buds and extracting their oil. He said that he supplied most of the resulting product to hundreds of New Zealanders in pain. Many who turned to him for relief, he said, were cancer patients, some in the final years of their lives. Others were children experiencing epileptic seizures. Amputees, diabetics, transplant patients and people suffering from arthritis, Parkinson’s, gout, sciatica or herniated discs somehow found his home phone number and called his landline. He would note down each conversation by hand in a red composition book. Mr. Smith is one of the underground figures known in New Zealand as “Green Fairies” — growers and suppliers of marijuana for medical use who operated outside the law for years before the country legalized medical marijuana in 2020. Legalization introduced myriad regulations for growers and distributors, requiring fees, licenses and other steps that could cost an entrepreneur hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most of the growers continued to operate in the shadows, and many of their customers kept turning to them until law enforcement stepped in, according to drug policy researchers. One of Mr. Smith’s packages was intercepted last year, leading to a police raid in February. He now faces charges of cultivating, possessing and selling cannabis and cannabis oil. The criminal case has made Mr. Smith a cause célèbre among marijuana advocates and patients, many of whom said he had helped them in times of dire need for free or little cost. Supporters have staged rallies at Mr. Smith’s court hearings, decried his prosecution to local news media and raised funds for his criminal defense. “It’s disgusting that the real entrepreneurs of this industry have just been cut out. Not only cut out, but persecuted,” said Mitch Harris, who recounted how his daughter, August, who is deaf, blind and developmentally delayed, benefited from Mr. Smith’s oil, which reduced the frequency and severity of her seizures. The New Zealand police declined to comment specifically on Mr. Smith’s case, but said in a statement that medical cannabis is controlled by the health ministry to ensure that products meet safety regulations. Mr. Smith’s story has particularly resonated in the Northland region, a sparse and underprivileged part of the country jutting out north of Auckland, where his anti-establishment ethos of operating with little regard or respect for the law or authority reigns. For many of his clients, the expense and effort of obtaining a legal prescription and finding an authorized distributor would have been enough of a barrier that they would have gone without. The medicinal properties of cannabis derivatives remain scientifically understudied and less than conclusive. But some who have used Mr. Smith’s products say they or their loved ones have experienced marked relief. Delia Quedec said Mr. Smith’s oil gave her late husband appetite and energy in the last years of his battle with bladder cancer before he passed away in 2023, making him well enough to take her on a final trip to the country’s scenic South Island. Once, when there was a fire at her house during her husband’s illness, Mr. Smith sent them not only his product for free but also 500 New Zealand dollars, or about $280, in assistance, she recalled. She was in disbelief he was being prosecuted instead of being honored. “I didn’t for one minute think the police would raid him,” she said. “He should be given a knighthood for the amount of pain and sickness he’s helped relieve.” Mr. Smith — who got his Gandalf nickname at a long-ago costume party — didn’t set out to be a medical provider. He said he grew up in the 1960s with little adult supervision — passed around between relatives, spending time in an orphanage and leaving school at 14. He became a vegan for a time and grew his own food. He experimented with LSD, psilocybin and mescaline in his youth, and grew cannabis, on and off, starting at age 19. After meeting his wife, Karen — with whom he has three children, plus grandchildren — he moved to a property about a half-hour off the nearest paved road. The family hunted wild goats and the occasional pig, and subsisted off the land. He was a natural horticulturist, and cannabis was one of the many crops he grew on their remote bushland. In the decades before turning his focus to medical cannabis, Mr. Smith was prosecuted on cannabis-related charges three times, receiving sentences of home detention or community service. About a decade ago, he met Pearl Schomburg, who had been suffering from rheumatoid arthritis for years. A friend of hers gave her some of Mr. Smith’s oil, and Ms. Schomburg said she felt immense, immediate relief from her severe, chronic pain. She told her friend she couldn’t afford it on her disability benefits; it cost about 100 New Zealand dollars for a 25-milliliter bottle, or about $57 for less than an ounce. So Mr. Smith gave it to her, she recalled. “I don’t know any other green fairy in New Zealand who operates like he does,” she said. Around the same time, Ms. Schomburg began speaking out publicly as an advocate for legalizing cannabis for medicinal use. When patients came to her asking for information, she began referring them to Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith said messages from people seeking relief began piling up on his answering machine whenever he was away for a few hours. He said he started working long hours, seven days a week, to meet the demand. “There’s a lot of people out there that need help, and the health system is failing them, big time,” he said. Ms. Schomburg said that as a 73-year-old great-grandmother with an autoimmune disease, she had believed it was safe to speak openly about her experience with cannabis. She thought that Mr. Smith, a grandfather devoted to supplying patients in pain, would similarly be unlikely to face prosecution. She said it was always apparent to her that Mr. Smith, a man who can barely stand to wear shoes, was never going to jump through the hoops to seek legal accreditation. “These guys don’t want to put on white jackets and protective clothing,” Ms. Schomburg said. Karen Smith, Mr. Smith’s wife of four decades, said in an interview on the deck of their home that she had always been anxious about a potential police raid. She sat on the same deck earlier this year as officers tore through their property. “At the end of the day, we just have to look at how many lives we changed, and that makes it OK, especially the little children,” she said. “The benefits far outweigh the fear that I had.” Victoria Kim is the Australia correspondent for The New York Times, based in Sydney, covering Australia, New Zealand and the broader Pacific region. Related Content Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
