Drug Foundation boss Sarah Helm determined to be the change maker

Thursday, 24 June 2021

For as long as she can remember, Sarah Helm has wanted to right wrongs.

Fighting for the underdog came from personal experience.

“I was always concerned about social issues from a very young age.

“I remember being five or six and wringing my hands about what was going on in the world.

“I don’t know where that came from, perhaps from my own experience of hardship and seeing injustice right in front of me – injustice to me – and wanting to be able to be in a position where I could do something about it. That has driven me my whole life.”

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Driven, motivated, a dog with a bone – Helm, who took up the reins as boss of the New Zealand Drug Foundation late last year, is downright determined to see drug law reform in Aotearoa.

Realistically, not in this term of government but surely the next, she says.

New Zealand’sdrug laws are from a 45-year-old piece of legislation. “They are literally as old as I am.”

Helm is speaking from her Paekākāriki home, an old cottage perched on a sandy hill.

Flanked by the family pets – a shoe-nibbling bunny named Flopsy and an imaginatively named albino budgerigar called Snowy – she is still wringing her hands at the slow pace of change.

But she’s hopeful. “I feel like we are on the cusp of a sea change. It’s not a matter of if, but when. I think there’s been a tipping point in public understanding that perhaps we need to try some other approaches.”

That is to say, a health-based approach rather than a punitive one.

That’s one of the Drug Foundation’s priorities, a shift towards creating a legal and policy framework that supports helping users rather than punishing them.

Currently, there is no harm-reduction provision within our drug laws, apart from the needle exchange programme from 1987 and piecemeal drug testing, she says.

“We need a rewrite of the legislation, but if we can’t have that right now we would love to see a shift towards decriminalisation to take some of the worst harm off users, so we can encourage people to get help and information and prevent harm along the way.

“Criminalising users prevents honest conversations. It prevents people being able to talk to their GP about it. It prevents us from dealing with it in a legal and honest way.”

It’s unfairly punitive, she says. “If you do get convicted you are much more likely to be Māori, male or young, and your life is permanently impacted.”

Helm says there’s plenty of research to show that convictions do nothing to deter use and decriminalisation does nothing to increase use.

“We are really maintaining this legislative framework based on a false moral promise that is just nonsense. We really want to move past this.”

The Drug Foundation’s wish-list includes investment in understanding the trajectory of synthetic cannabinoid use, and more places for people to have their drugs tested.

High on that list is a rollout of the successful Te Ara Oranga​, the Methamphetamine Harm Reduction initiative in Northland.

Instead of drug busts and locking up users, it is police led but health based in partnership with district health boards and iwi.

“It is having some success, and we would love to see it rolled out across the country.”

Helm’s instinct for change making was born out of necessity.

The child of teenage parents, she was raised in South Auckland and grew up in and out of poverty.

There was family violence and some fleeing from time to time, she says.

She was a parent figure from an early age to her sister, four years her junior.

“That’s the thing about having young parents, you step up to things early. That’s been a real factor for me in my life. It made me quite independent and responsible.”

Academic, she was naturally inclined to reading and school work.

Despite her family not being interested in current affairs and news, she was always tuned in topolitics and what was going on, she says.

She has always straddled different worlds: Māori (Ngāi Tahu) and Pākehā, gay and straight, abled and disabled.

I don’t look like who I am, she says. “I come from poverty and hardship. I am part Māori and part Pākehā. I’m bisexual. I have a few hidden disabilities.

“None of those things are very evident. I have pale skin, I dress in a particular way, I am very educated and able to articulate myself.

“I’ve used the opportunities I have to bring about change for the populations I care about and the issues I care about. I’ve gone to wherever I feel like I can make the biggest difference.”

She is the first in her family to reconnect with her iwi.

Her paternal grandfather fled the South Island as a young man. He didn’t talk about his identity. He wouldn’t talk about being Māori because of the hardships he endured, says Helm.

“My father’s generation have had to grapple with this – being Māori but not being confident in their identity.

“That disconnection and mixed-heritage story is one that relates a little bit to my sexuality story – sitting in between these two worlds and constantly trying to juggle the two.

“The confidence in who you are, your identity, is so fundamental to wellbeing. I want to be up-front and honest about my story because I’d want to know that story if I was a young me.”

As a young person at school she remembers teachers banging on about statistics.

They were damning.

“If you were a young person who has come from family violence, poverty, Māori – any of those things – you’re told that you’re probably going to die young, have a hard life, be unemployed, be a teenage parent.

“I was being told all of these things and I was so determined to have my own story, my own life and to live it the way I wanted to. The privilege of being academically successful enabled me to do that, and I grabbed it with both hands.”

She left home at 15 because of ongoing difficulties and went to live with a whangai family.

Helm flourished.

She recalls becoming a great organiser with an unquenchable thirst for enacting big ideas.

“In my seventh form year I organised a group of women to produce this publication to mark the women’s suffrage centenary. I got all these ideas of what I could be and other ways of being.”

At Auckland University she was ‘full tilt” into everything. She studied hard – graduating with a BA in politics and economics – but got distracted by social change and her need to be part of that.

Student politics was the obvious place to start. She became vice president of the Auckland University Students’ Association and later president of the New Zealand Student Union.

It was here she met the biological gay father of her two children. He lives in Hong Kong now but is a very real presence in their lives and a dear friend.

Helm’s ex-partner, with whom she was in a civil union for 10 years, lives across the road in Paekākāriki. She co-parents their boys, who are now aged 11 and eight.

True to her word, Helm went on to make change wherever she went.

Armed with further educational tickets she took a job with a trade union working with cleaners to recruit and empower them to get better pay and conditions.

In 2018, she led the communications campaign that resulted in primary teachers getting a significant pay rise.

She supported the expansion and growth of GLBTIQ groups in schools throughout the country in response to high rates of suicide, and led a successful bid to increase funding for youth health services.

Most recently, she steered the strategic communications for the all-of-government Covid-19 response during the first resurgence.

A diagnosis of autoimmune arthritis hasn’t done much to slow her down.

In fact, she thumbed her nose at it and took up roller skating – the old school, four wheels per boot kind.

Prescription CBD oil has changed her life on that score, she says. “I could barely walk at times and now I roller-skate and go to the gym and have had no discernible impact of the disease for more than a year, thanks to relatively harmless CBD alone.”

It comes at a huge cost, though, because it isn’t subsidised and many patients are being driven to the black market because of the price and the difficulty in getting a prescription, she says.

She’s never experienced addiction herself, but her family have been most negatively impacted by alcohol.

She chooses to be (mostly) sober.

In her role at the Drug Foundation, change is coming, she’s sure of it.

Parts of the US, Portugal, Canada, among other places, have all rewritten their drug laws. It’s crazy that we are not following other countries in their approach to drug reform in decriminalisation and legalisation, she says.

“It’s inevitable that change will come [in New Zealand], it’s just a question of when and how.”

Perhaps while she’s at the helm.