Sex, Drugs & Electoral Rolls - Part One: Introductions

"If you can't get rid of the skeleton from your closet ... you'd best teach it to dance"

- George Bernard Shaw

Sup. My name's Curwen Ares Rolinson - and if developments from about the last year or so of my life have been anything to go by, I'd appear to have acquired a walk-in wardrobe necropolis.

My name might sound vaguely familiar to you. This would be because in the course of my arguably somewhat less-than-illustrious political career, I've done everything from founding and leading New Zealand's most entertainingly effervescent/evanescent political party youth wing (the organization formerly known as NZ First Youth); coming to the attention of the counter-terrorism boys from the NZ Police force as an alleged threat to National['s] Security (for which I spent eighteen months under wiretap surveillance thanks to a tip-off from the Prime Minister's diplomatic protection squaddies); and um ... well ... capping off five years of relatively successful media appearances by winding up in the laser-sights of a half a dozen major broadcast outlets during a minorly catastrophic fall-from-grace mid-way through last year - courtesy of finding myself in court facing fairly serious cannabis charges.

You'll be pleased to know I beat the 3 year prison sentence.

It's that last instance which gave rise to this column.

Straight after being released from the cells at Central out on bail a few hours after being apprehended, I stumbled in to last year's CRACCUM offices, clad only in my pajamas and seeking to borrow $2.50 in bus fare in order to get myself home.

The CRACCUM team was exceptionally good enough to rally round and help a poor mendicant miscreant such as yours truly; on the implied condition that I put pen to paper (or, given the parlous state of my handwriting, finger-to-keyboard) and commit a few of my more *ahem* memorable anecdotes and insights to epistle-if-not-epistolary format as part of a regularly syndicated feature right here in the pages of this very magazine.

As a result, the "Sex, Drugs & Electoral Rolls" column was born.

Best two dollars fifty, if I might be so bold, that the CRACCUM editorial team's ever spent.

Now in terms of what I intend to do and cover in this column ... part of it will, obviously, be political punditry and shining a light upon the issues of the day. It's an area that I have a capacious level of direct, personal - even visceral - experience; as well as a fairly unique perspective to offer that's previously seen my amateur political journalism published internationally and even cited by the Venezuelan government. For more of that, more regularly, check my frequent contributions to Bomber Bradbury’s “The Daily Blog”.   

But one of the other things I want to do - is to pen the sort of print-media that would have been both helpful and useful to me as an undergrad going through some of the struggles which a certain sort of late-teenager or duogenarian habitually grapples with.

It can be quite interesting – if not outright harrowing – being a student. An experienced voice (or, if I’m being honest, an example of what not to do) can often help.

As an example, I dropped out of law school in large part because I quite literally went crazy. The next three years featured a highly ineluctable odyssey of bouncing around through the mental health system (capping out with spending six months under the care of a certain Auckland hospital's mental health ward) in search of both answers, and help. Oh, and it also kinda lead to my whole court-case thing.

Now it goes without saying that wasting a good nearly ten percent of your life attempting to navigate a vast and cyclopean quasi-bureaucratic medical system trying to get some functionality back ... is not a particularly productive use of anyone's time. If I'd known then what I know now, I would have been able to shortcircuit the whole process down to a matter of weeks. That’s why I believe there’s some tangible merit to putting my hard-won knowledge on easily-accessible display in a bid to help people like me - but five-to-seven years further back on the path.

I also spent a reasonable proportion of my adult life attempting to self-medicate the aforementioned mental health problems with a fairly capacious if not outright Sheen-esque consumption of illicit psychoactive substances. This got to a point wherein, at my worst, I was consuming approximately $30,000 worth of hard-core and high-end amphetamines over the period of a few weeks in mid-2011. My drug-habits after that were, for the next few years, consistently and intensively severe enough that the NZ Police actually declared them to be medically impossible. I’m not even kidding.

University's definitely about trying novel experiences while opening up your mind to new and different ways to understand the world (and that's just the higher education bit). But if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s also way too easy to seriously screw yourself, your psyche and your physical health up in irreversible ways. I've seen people who've seriously messed themselves up - not just through the direct consequences of drug-use itself, but also through the lifestyles and patterns of behavior and association it can encourage. Occasionally even whilst looking beyond my mirror.

My journey to full-on sobriety and consciousness unadulterated by anything other than my own recurrent madness has been a frankly unbelievable one. But I can’t shake the feeling that it would have been significantly easier in the presence of an elder and more experienced voice able to genuinely tell me what to expect. Not least of which is that things really *do* get better if you stick with it.

It’s in that spirit that I commit to the public record a small smorgasbord of my insight and experiences with drugs, their addiction, and consequent rehabilitation.

Not to glorify them – although some of the best times of my life have unquestionably had them proximate to me in their influence – but to simply present an accurate perspective which might help a younger me.

As a man who both rigorously and religiously believes in applied “harm minimization”, attempting to share my knowledge in the hopes that some of the personal pitfalls which befell myself and quite a few of my friends and associates are avoided, is the least I can do.  I can’t shake my record – but I can certainly make some good out of it.

Finally, one of the things that I think's sorely missing from our national politics is the sense of adventure, meaningfulness, excitement and derring-do that seeking a more active role in public life can and should entail. Obviously, doing so is not without its risks and its costs. Occupational hazards may include going mad, encountering the detective who was 2nd in command of the Urewera Raids in your living-room, and losing an incredibly meaningful personal relationship thanks to always puting politics first. But in amongst all that, I hope to illustrate just how fulfilling - indeed, thrilling - attempting to forge a place in the politisphere can and has been.

If I can help some of you find that ... maybe even go a bit further than I did ... I'll consider this whole "columnist" business a worthwhile endeavour, indeed.