As part of the Mardi Grass 2025 festival, Nimbin Town Hall was the scene for a weekend of talks on the remarkable properties of a certain controversial plant, in all its manifestations.
On Saturday, Lismore lawyer Steve Bolt provided an update regarding the laws relating to roadside drug testing and medicinal cannabis, Paul Benhaim spoke about the use of the plant as a psychedelic and its potential for ‘deep therapeutic inquiry’, Dr Patrick Keyser covered the differences between the legalisation situation in the USA versus Australia, and Simon Pettinger of Cymra Life Sciences talked about the regulatory challenges faced by organic, certified Australian producers, as they battle a flood of inferior imported product.
Roadside testing laws (and their relationship, if any, to impairment) were the focus of a detailed presentation from expert Dr Michael White, as well as the subject of a lively Q&A with the audience featuring a number of speakers.
After the Kombi Konvoy, there was another in depth Q&A about the future of psychedelics from multiple perspectives, before the joint-rolling competitions and comedy that evening.
The question of hemp
Sunday began with a fascinating talk from the founding editor of The Cane Toad Times and author of Marijuana Australiana, Dr John Jiggens, about his research showing that the convict settlement of Australia might have been an elaborate cover for a plan to make NSW a hemp colony, in an effort to strength the British Empire’s military and trading dominance.
This was followed by a detailed presentation from agronomist John Shaw Muir, showing hemp’s extraordinary diversity and usefulness, with many practical examples from Australia and across the world.
Gerald Taylor spoke about accessing the human endocannabanoid system through the skin, specifically to deal with pain, sleeping issues, anxiety and cancer, with examples of new blends which he claimed were delivering remarkable health benefits.
Research scientist and passionate cannabis advocate Emily Rigby spoke about key developments and challenges of the Australian medicinal cannabis industry, nine years after legalisation, with calls for home growers not to be swept aside by American-style industrialisation.
Clinical practical examples were provided by Queensland’s Dr John Teh and Chloe Jean Tea from PlantMed Medicinal Cannabis.
While politics and politicians were less of a focus than this year due to the overlap with the federal election, a number of serving members and candidates spoke at the 2025 Hemposium, including David Shoebridge (Greens federal senator for NSW), Jeremy Buckingham (Legalise Cannabis NSW MLC), and lead NSW candidate for the same party federally, Miles Hunt.
Celebration
Hemposium organiser Miss Guidance told The Echo that the main thing was to make sure people were no longer criminalised for using cannabis, with evidence that young and First Nations people were being particularly targeted. She said that Mardi Grass was attracting an increasingly wide range of supporters.
‘It’s not the usual vilified cannabis user, it’s people from all walks of life with all sorts of ailments,’ she said. ‘There are a lot of older people with sick children and families. This is really a community herb. Prohibition has been a crime against humanity.
‘Mardi Grass has been running for 33 years now, which is mind blowing. We’d love it to keep running, but we’d love it to be more like a celebration, rather than having to constantly whinge about cannabis law reform. We’re not criminals. We’ve got to move away from that attitude.’
Miss Guidance said that while COVID had made it difficult to get international speakers in recent years, there remained a strong international interest in Mardi Grass.
‘Next year we’ll be having two speakers from the US. One is Dr Sue Sisley, who’s a major cannabis researcher in Arizona, and the other lady Dr Melanie Dreher, who studied under the anthropologist Margaret Mead. She’ll be coming to share her experiences with cannabis in Jamaica.’
Multicam coverage of the entire 2025 Hemposium was livestreamed to social media for those who couldn’t be there in person, and will soon be available to access via the Nimbin Hemp Embassy’s YouTube channel.
Picture gallery of Mardi Grass parade, photos David Lowe:
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