A WOMAN OF SUBSTANCE
‘The world’s paying attention,” muses Wendy Allison. “Oh my God. It is validating. It’s also kind of scary.”
Fifty-one-year-old Allison has been talking to international media since Parliament passed the Drug and Substance Checking Act at the end of 2021, making New Zealand the first country in the world to formally legalise and regulate the confidential checking of controlled drugs.
The organisation she founded, Know Your Stuff, has been both a leading advocate and a test case for the reform. Now, what she has been doing for the past seven years is explicitly legal. And it’s all because she wanted a farm.
For a long time, Allison would have looked like an unlikely engineer of groundbreaking legal reform.
She grew up in a small Northland town, tried studying law aged 18, dropped out and spent years in shearing gangs, then as a full-time shepherd and eventually as a trainer for shepherds. She still looks – and is – rangy and fit enough to shear a sheep.
“The medics approached us after this event and said, ‘Look, if you don’t do something about this, someone’s going to die.’”
But in 2001, she realised that work would never earn her the “millions” she
