There’s a sickness in Aotea, and it’s not just in our emergency health stats—it’s in the culture. It’s in the shrugging, sideways jokes about drug use. The quiet normalisation of misery. The worship of isolation. The fetishisation of retreat from society as if that’s a form of enlightenment rather than a symptom.
The drug culture here isn’t counter-culture. It’s not brave. It’s not rebellious. It’s a slow-motion collapse of young minds, fractured families, stolen property, and spiralling mental health. Meth—let’s call it what it is—is a Class A neurotoxin destroying futures, not just individuals. Weed, the so-called soft drug, has long since stopped being funny when teenagers are smoking daily before their prefrontal cortex is even fully developed. What happens next? Confused, disengaged adults with broken relationships, zero resilience, and in far too many cases, suicide.
This is not the good life.
It’s not helped when public figures like our MP Chlöe Swarbrick obsess over drug decriminalisation, as if that’s the issue most urgently facing our community. When you have a generation of kids raised in homes marked by addiction and dysfunction, what they need isn’t a more “progressive” approach to drugs—they need structure, safety, and aspiration. But when even local therapists refuse to draw a line against teenage drug use, we’ve got a cultural problem, not just a policy one.
Too many islanders now wear isolation like armour. The stoic, off-grid, “I-don’t-need-anyone” aesthetic might feel strong—but it’s not strength if it cuts off community, accountability, and compassion. What looks like toughness is often just trauma with a beard. The island doesn’t need more grizzled lone wolves. It needs connection. It needs kindness. It needs purpose.
But some of the loudest voices pushing for change are part of the problem. There’s a current of anti-humanism running through Aotea’s modern environmental movement—people who seem to loathe productivity, industry, and even humanity itself. These are the same people who cheer for mass poisoning campaigns to “save the birds” while demonising those who want to grow food, farm productively, or build businesses. Rewilding everything while importing food on diesel-powered barges. It’s hypocrisy cloaked in righteousness.
Tū Mai Taonga, DOC, and the Iwi trust boards are some of the worst offenders—parading their eco-activism like badges of honour when they ought to be hanging their heads in shame.
They talk about saving “the planet” while openly scorning the people on it. The result? A culture of despair, masked in virtue.
AoteaGBI.news is not here to indulge it.
We believe in people. In growth. In community. In science and sanity. In the right of children to grow up with clarity—not confusion. In homes that are safe, parents that show up, and a future that isn’t reduced to a haze of drugs and defeat.
We won’t glamorise addiction. We won’t brush suicide off as “just one of those things.” And we won’t pretend the status quo is working.
A pivot is possible—but it starts with truth. Then comes courage. Then comes connection. We’re not here to surrender to the darkness. We’re here to fight for the light.
