never been banned in New Zealand, BZP was legal. Bowden set out to bring BZP to his fellow ravers and then to the entire country.
Bowden is not a typical drug lord. Though he became incredibly rich from selling chemicals that are now illegal, he said his ultimate goal was to save kids from overdoses and addiction. His attempt to overhaul New Zealand’s drug laws was bold and unorthodox, not unlike the man himself. He doesn’t crave obscurity like most kingpins. Rather, he seeks out high-profile opportunities to make his case, and for a time could be seen on New Zealand television wearing flamboyant suits, science-fiction-inspired garb from his steampunk fashion line, and platinum blond, feathered hair. His passions over the years have run from learning complicated chemical processes and delving into the minutiae of legislative bills to performing rock operas as his David Bowie–inspired alter ego, Starboy.
He also claims to talk to God.
“Growing up, I had a strong Christian period,” he explains, over a Skype video call, speaking quickly and in a thick Kiwi accent. “I guess I had a vocation, or calling. I had a relationship with the Creator that was based on a belief that God is alive and can talk to us and cares about our lives. If we care to talk to the Creator—and ask, ‘What’s the path I’m supposed to be on? What am I supposed to be doing?’—he’ll answer and lead us and guide us.”
Bowden decided to dial this hotline to heaven during a loveless period in the early 1990s. “I asked, ‘Hey, when are you going to bring the right girl for me to marry?’ ” God responded, Bowden claims, explaining that he would know his great love because she would deliver him a cocktail. This did not happen overnight, however. Bowden had to wait for seven long years. In the meantime, his life began unraveling as he became addicted to meth. One night, feeling particularly sorry for himself, he went into a strip club and found himself making eye contact with the woman on stage.
“This light shined down upon this man as he was walking into the room,” the dancer said. “He was looking at me with this big Cheshire grin and this bright green shirt and this blond ruffled hair.” Before long she made her way to the bar and then, just as was prophesied, brought him a drink. And that’s how Matt Bowden met his wife, Kristi, a cover model for the Australian versions of Penthouse and Hustler, who is known in the industry as Kristi Kennedy. This was July 4, 2000, and they would go on to marry and have two children.
Around that same time, Bowden launched another life-changing endeavor: he began spreading the gospel of BZP. A member of a class of drugs called piperazines, BZP is more like an amphetamine than ecstasy. Employing chemists in labs in India to synthesize the drug, he began by giving away samples to friends in the club scene. They seemed to like it. He claims it helped some people—including him and Kristi, who had been hooked as well—kick their meth addictions. His initial experiment successful, Bowden set to mass-producing BZP. He settled on manufacturers based in China. “From looking at the Internet, I saw where the pharmaceutical industry goes when they need to produce molecules,” he said. “So we went to the same sorts of factories.” He began distributing BZP in head shops around the country. It started to catch on, until hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders were taking it. Beginning in 2004, New Zealand’s meth usage rate began to drop.
BZP also gained popularity in Europe, sold under names like Legal X and Cosmic Kelly; Bowden wasn’t selling it there, but his party elixirs appear to have inspired others. “Piperazines were the first new drug to adulterate MDMA that we saw,” said Rainer Schmid, of Vienna General Hospital in Austria, who runs one of the most sophisticated chemical analytics laboratories in all of Europe. “This was a direct result of Bowden.”
BZP seemed to be a great solution to the decline of MDMA. For the most part, it was safe. And though the United States had scheduled it, the drug was still legal in Europe and New Zealand, where it was sold everywhere from gas stations to local malls. A pack of six tablets might cost forty dollars. Some twenty-six million BZP pills had been sold in New Zealand by 2008, making it the country’s second-most-popular recreational drug—trailing only marijuana. The fighting, overdoses, and violence that had defined New Zealand’s crystal meth culture declined.
But soon a new change occurred: copycat chemists began releasing BZP products with escalating dosages and without proper labeling. Worried that government regulators would come down on them, Bowden confronted other New Zealand dealers. “You all stole my intellectual property,” he told them. “You’ve all broken my copyright.” Yet instead of getting angry or threatening to sue, he asked them to join forces. “Let’s get around a table and work together to develop some safety standards,” he said. Together he and the majority of the country’s BZP manufacturers formed a group called the Social Tonics Association of New Zealand (STANZ), which developed a “code of practice” regarding the production and distribution of its drugs, seeking input from the police and government. The idea was to make BZP as safe as possible. The association attempted to set rules for maximum dosages and age limits, but the best way, it reckoned, was for the government to regulate it.
At this point Bowden’s career began to shift. He focused less on growing his party-pill empire and more on spreading the gospel of safer drug consumption. Drug dealers never run public awareness campaigns, but Bowden attempted to convince the people and politicians of New Zealand that a regulated drug industry would be a tremendous public-health benefit. Since some people are always going to take drugs, he argued, offering something that wouldn’t kill them would be a public service.
“I’m not actually promoting drug use,” Bowden said. “I’m promoting safer policy.”
STANZ commissioned a study to help it understand the health consequences of BZP use. The group hoped it would sway the government to its side, and the results were encouraging. “We weren’t seeing a lot of adverse events,” Bowden said. Though BZP caused a number of hospitalizations, STANZ found “no record of any death, long-lasting injury or illness attributed solely to BZP.”
The New Zealand government was willing to hear Bowden out. In 2004 the Ministry of Health commissioned further studies of BZP, taking seriously the task of understanding the drug—so seriously, in fact, that an addiction specialist and advisory committee member named Dr. Doug Sellman went to a head shop, called Cosmic Corner—which carried brands with names like Kamikaze and Rapture—and took BZP himself. “They gave me this little packet. I went home on a Friday night and took it and sat in front of the television, waiting,” he said. Not much happened, except he stayed up until the middle of the night and had a bad hangover the next day. “You don’t have to worry, really, about this drug,” he told the committee, and its report recommended BZP not be banned.
In 2005, at the recommendation of the Ministry of Health, the New Zealand government passed a law requiring BZP buyers to be eighteen and regulating the drug’s dosage and manufacture—just as STANZ had hoped. But a year later, after reviewing a series of new studies and consulting the public—Bowden said the media had begun painting BZP in a negative light—the Ministry of Health determined that BZP posed a “moderate risk” and thus should be reclassified. In 2008, the New Zealand government banned BZP.
The battle, however, was just beginning.
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