Down at the Maraenui shops on a Monday evening, a boy leaves the fish and chip store carrying a steaming parcel, balances it on his handlebars and rides off into the winter night. A couple of kids in rugby uniforms drag baskets of clothes from a van to the laundromat, the metal studs of their boots grating on the concrete. Over at the dairy, a Mongrel Mob member emerges with a bottle of coke and swaggers past two young men pushing a car down the road. A group of people mill around the ATM.

A grinning young man stands outside the bakery wanting to talk. “I just got out of jail today,” he slurs. He was inside for three months for stealing to pay for synthetic cannabis. It’s bitterly cold and he’s only wearing a T-shirt, track pants, and a pair of sports socks under his plastic slip-on sandals. He looks no more than 18 and is painfully thin. “I was using $180 of the stuff a day. It wasn’t good.” He’s not using it anymore, he says, before losing his trail of thought and wandering off.

An older man, hood up, sits on a bench outside the dairy. He still smokes synthetics. “It’s everywhere. I can handle it though, others can’t,” he says, nodding towards a man coming out of the Golden Chance gaming lounge. “He’s not in good shape. He can’t smoke alone cos he has seizures.” Some local kids died after smoking synthetics last year, he says. He can’t remember names. “The government’s to blame. They put it on our shelves in the first place, then they took it away.”

He walks away towards the growing line of people at the ATM. Their cash in hand, some nip into the Price Cutter next door, some head to the Four Square at the other end of the shops, some line up at the vaping shop. A few join the trail of people making their way to the nearest synthetics “shop” around the corner, down a dark street. Customers are guided by a lit window where tinnies of synthetic cannabis are quickly passed out.





Walking the streets of ‘The Nui,’ as Napier’s poorest suburb is affectionately called by locals, you struggle to find anyone unaffected by synthetic cannabis — they are either hooked, have been hooked or know someone who has been hooked.

Locals say people are making and selling the drug to escape their daily lives. More than half of the suburb’s households receive a government benefit, according to the 2013 Census. Unemployment is at 20 percent, nearly three times that of Napier, and more than four times the national rate. Affordable housing is hard to find — the suburb has the fastest rising house prices in Hawke’s Bay — and the neighbourhood is without proper street lighting so, come nightfall, it is swallowed by darkness.

They don’t blame the Mongrel Mob, which has a strong presence in the community. Its members are their brothers, sons, fathers, and mates. The gang has publicly taken a stance against the drug, threatening to beat up or move on users who smoke in public. But the police aren’t buying it. The gangs are certainly involved in some way, even if it’s because they’re taking a cut of sales from any “shops” on their patch, they say.

No one is debating the hold synthetic cannabis, known as “synnies”, has over the suburb, or that the problem is seeping out to surrounding neighbourhoods. The police believe most, if not all, synthetic cannabis in Napier and Hastings is now being made in Maraenui. The suburb is feeding addiction and antisocial behaviour amongst the most vulnerable and homeless in Napier’s city centre, they say.