Nimbin isn’t the tourist town it used to be.
Twenty years ago, three buses a day came over from Byron full of curious backpackers. And where else could you easily buy weed?
We had three backpackers hostels, now we have none, and there are no daily buses from Byron, or not that I notice.
Occasionally a big bus from the Goldie still turns up with over-eighty-year olds. Chicken George used to love selling ’em cookies by the dozen back then, after a tour and talk on the village history.
I try to explain why Nimbin’s different to visitors who ask. The Aquarius festival in 1973 bringing special trains of university students from afar to this village full of empty shops, which the hippies promptly bought.
Then they proceeded to try and live an alternative lifestyle. More sharing and caring for each, rather than competing in the “who dies with the most wins” game. Or even just the mortgage and stuck in a job-I-didn’t-like game either. Freedom!
They can be great conversations, depending on who you’re talking to. Sometimes I get straight to the point, it was drugs that did it.
We had visions of where we were heading and the damage it was doing to the Earth and ourselves so decided we should live our Truth and get back to the garden as Rusty says. They all get that.
There is still a steady trickle of visitors coming through the village, we’re still a curiosity but in many ways as messengers it’s job done on that level.
Hippie wisdom is mainstream and there if you want it. Football clubs use meditation and yoga. Big supermarkets have little organic sections. Weed is legal, and definitely the pot smoker stigma is eroding slowly.
Nimbin is not the unique novelty it was, and the entertainment on the coast for visitors has grown a thousand-fold in the last few decades. Van travellers visit us and the Showground is good value. And cannabis users will always like us.
For a while there, backpackers’ visits to Nimbin included buying some cookies, but for the new generations weed is no novelty any more. In fact there are quite a few figures showing youth use of pot is way down where it’s legal and deglamourised. The forbidden fruit zone. I’ve long thought we should prohibit organic apples.
Speaking of which, a huge percentage of the Nimbin visitors for 50 years came to enjoy the village and culture but also to score their weed. Their medicine.
Epileptics, Parkinson’s sufferers, anxious and depressed mental and physical pain sufferers. Often saving up and scrimping to be able to afford some medicine out of their fortnightly cheque.
Many of these long time Nimbin visitors no longer need to come. They get their weed in the mail, or at the local chemist.
It wasn’t meant to happen this way, in my hippy dreaming anyway. We wanted to grow our own and have co-ops for small growers to sell their produce.
Micro-licences rather than Big Cannabis dominating the market. Hemployment using the amazing growing knowledge Australians have garnered in the last 50 years. Instead, the doctors have cornered the market.
I see it is very tricky changing from illegal to legal. The gulf between the experienced, and not, is massive and incomprehensible.
Who knew half the counties in California don’t allow retail pot sales?
Currently they estimate Americans spend about $100 billion on weed each year, but only one third is legal.
Highly organised gangs using forbidden seriously toxic chemicals are growing endless cheap crops in states where pot is legal and the consequences not so bad. All they need is water and it can be grown on desert land, with chemicals!
It’s transported in semis across the country where there are huge price variations.
Canada, with nationwide legalisation, estimates nearly 80% of sales are legal with widespread retail access. The patchwork of state laws in America is just what we don’t need here.
Lots of people I talk to are happy with their legal weed. It works for their whatever. They don’t care it’s indoors, not organic, irradiated and grown in Canada or Thailand. It’s cheaper than the street and it’s legal. Huge that it’s legal.
It’s different for us in Nimbin where pot is openly part of our life, way more accepted and understood, but out there in the big smoke, no-one wants trouble with the coppers.
And most will happily register their use with the proposed new driving system if it happens, because no longer will they be anxious drivers. Simple.
Most supermarkets do have tiny organic sections but Nimbin supermarket is one third organic, a whole department upstairs in fact.
Plus we have another excellent organic shop in our one tiny street of shops, run as a co-op with volunteers, open every day.
We are different, it’s just not so obvious these days. And some people will always want outdoor grown-in-the-sun organic pot.
