With a cannabis reform referendum planned for September 2020, this 2017 session where journalists Colin Hogg and Russell Brown discuss marijuana legalisation is more relevant than ever.

Interested in how legalisation was playing out in the USA, Colin Hogg hit the road to see what moral decline had descended upon those parts of America where the drug is now legal. 

As high times hit America with laws shifting and attitudes changing, his 2017 book The High Road took readers on an adventure that’s one part Hunter S. Thompson and one part Bill Bryson. Riding shotgun to discuss the book at Going West was journalist Russell Brown, who has written extensively about the issues surrounding cannabis law reform.

The session includes a Q and A discussion on where legalisation might take New Zealand.

Colin Hogg is one of New Zealand's best-known journalists. Hogg grew up in Dunedin and Invercargill where he joined the Southland Times as a cadet reporter. He has written columns about being a man for the New Zealand Woman's Weekly off and on for over 30 years and also worked in television as a writer, producer and occasional presenter and director. The High Road is his ninth book.

Russell Brown is a broadcaster, journalist and web publisher. He was the host of Māori Television’s Media Take, and before that TVNZ’s Media7, and is the founder of the Public Address group blog. He writes regularly about drug policy issues for various publications and was central to breaking the story around predatory meth testing companies whose work resulted in the eviction of many Housing New Zealand tenants. He has been writing and publishing internet content for nearly 25 years.