Party pill king: ‘I’ve got unfinished business’

Sunday, 7 June 2026

Matt Bowden was the brains behind party pills like BZP and other legal highs, until they were no longer legal. His empire collapsed, he absconded to Thailand but now he’s back with unfinished business. He sits down with Lloyd Burr to discuss the rise and fall of an industry he’s adamant was about reducing harm, not proliferating it. And he doesn’t hold back, with claims the US threatened our government with trade sanctions, the DEA wanted to “take him out”, and big booze lobbied politicians to change the law because legal highs were killing their profits. Buckle in.

The full episode is embedded further down in the article

I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Matt Bowden after our hour-long chat in the BYO pub. If everything he said was true, he was a naive, misunderstood victim of a system that punished someone trying to do good in the world.

But those feelings soon began to evaporate when I realised how bonkers it was that I was sitting at my desk Googling “Did the CIA kill JFK?” and “Do illicit drugs fund the CIA?” as Bowden believes.

He’s undoubtedly a fascinating guy. The kingpin of the party pill scene of the 2000s, then the godfather of synthetic cannabinoids, all while pursuing a career in rock'n'roll under the name ‘Starboy’.

You’ve got to have guts and audacity to look at the problems caused by meth, heroin, and other illicit recreational drugs, then decide to create a regulated, safer, cheaper alternative. Bowden didn’t just attempt to do this once, but twice - shut down by the government both times.

Why? The narrative that’s probably most accepted is that the party pill and synthetic cannabis industries were outlawed because they were killing people. Their products were unregulated, readily available and sold to kids.

Their long-term effects were unknown, and it all became much worse when cowboy operators jumped at the chance to make a quick buck by making unsafe products in their garage, and simply tweaked the chemicals to skirt rules.

Long story short: They were addictive and deadly. (Stuff even did an investigation into synthetic highs, which you can read and watch here.)

But Bowden says that narrative is incorrect, is not the full picture and what really happened is much more sinister. The real story, he claims, is full of threats, intimidation, big corporations paying off politicians, with his reputation smeared beyond repair.

Here’s a brief summary of his story.

Note: Both our quotes have been edited for brevity, clarity, and to remove waffling.

Why’d he start?

It was around the turn of the millennium when methamphetamine started to become more and more popular which prompted Bowden to think about a better, safer and cheaper alternative.

“People had gone from sniffing meth to smoking it,” he says. “Instead of having a drug habit that was manageable where you’d take drugs at the weekend and get on with your life during the week which a lot of people were doing, smoking meth became much more addictive.

“People moved into mental health issues a lot faster, and a lot of lives were really falling apart because they were unable to break that habit.”

Bowden started making some drug substitutes and interest immediately came from Australia so he jetted over there at the insistence of his accountant who saw the dollar signs.

“I went to work with these guys without realising they were gangsters and terrorists, essentially, and were doing a lot of really bad things. They were killing people,” he says.

“I presented to them the idea that we make some safer alternatives but they didn't like it because they liked their gangster ring. So I kind of got the hell out of there.”

Not long after coming back, a family member died after taking ecstasy, which Bowden says galvanised him to find a better way for people to safely get high.

Arise, regulated highs

Bowden flew to Wellington and organised a meeting with the Ministry of Health.

“I said, ‘Who's making up the drug laws?’ And they sat me down with the drug policy team and I said, ‘Hey, I'm a grieving family member, there’s a kid growing up without a dad any more, why don't we have quality control?’

“They said, ‘Well, the reason we can't do that is because America will stop buying our meat and cheese. If we start moving to an idea that goes against America's push at the United Nations to keep the drugs illegal, then they're going to hit us with trade sanctions.’

“So that's why we can't have quality control, and that's why, instead, we have people dying,” Bowden tells me.

He says he asked the officials why there couldn’t just be some safer alternatives that allow people who want to have a good time, to have a good time, and their response pretty much kickstarted party pills.

“The policy team said, ‘If you do that and no one dies, we'll build a regulatory system around it. Just keep it on the down low,’” he reveals.

And that’s what he went away and did. He developed pills specifically to be used instead of illegal drugs like meth and MDMA. The main ingredient was a chemical devised in the 1950s called benzylpiperazine or BZP.

“We sold 26 million pills to 400,000 consumers on 10-and-a-half million occasions over eight-and-a-half years. No deaths, no lasting injuries,” he says proudly.

He’s right about there being no deaths. Not from his products, anyway. Deaths came after the Government banned BZP, and were related to other types of party pills and highs that wanted a piece of the pie.

The first ban

Little was known about the long-term impacts of BZP or even the short-term effects. In 2005, it was made a controlled substance, meaning it was still legal but there were restrictions on dosage, advertising, where it could be sold, and an age restriction put in place.

There were numerous other reviews into the safety of BZP in 2006 and 2007 which recommended making it a Class-C restricted drug like cannabis.

In April 2008, it was outlawed. Bowden says the timing says it all: seven months before a general election.

“Let's be real, an election comes up, there’s a politician going ‘I’m gonna ban it, vote for me’,” he says. “It's a power move for politicians. It's just a football and it's normally because somebody else was losing money.”

Who was losing money? Bowden says it was booze companies because party pill users were no longer buying as much alcohol. He alleges big booze lobbied the government to intervene.

“There was an extra $20m or $100m missing out of the liquor industry's tills every year, and so they were talking to the government, I suggest. There's a powerful lobby there and they said, ‘This needs to end.’”

Ding ding, round two: Social tonics and synthetic cannabinoids

With BZP banned and booze still king, Bowden embarked on a new mission to create a market for what he calls “social tonics” - an idea borne from noticing other cultures preferring things other than alcohol. He also went on to make synthetic cannabinoids.

“I went to the government and said, ‘Hey, I'm going to do social tonics.’ I drafted a law, created a code of practice, consulted with health, hospitals and police, and published it,” he recalls.

“Then the government had to jump in and say, ‘Wait a sec, we're going to do it, we're going to build laws with penalties that give us more power.’”

This was the beginning of the controversial Psychoactive Substances Act which came after a Law Commission report concluded the 35-year-old Misuse of Drugs Act was“fundamentally flawed”.

Bowden says this programme of drug reform captured the attention of the world.

“We developed the legislation, went to the United Nations and presented it in Vienna. Many countries came into workshops talking about how this would work for them. Everyone was watching New Zealand,” he says.

Then came a bone-chilling phone call.

‘I’m going to be taken out’

He won’t say who called him but it was a high-level source based in Wellington.

“They said, ‘Matt, the US DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] have sent us some diplomatic communications and we can't tell you really what it says, but it's a bit of a WTF over what happened in Vienna. You need to get your affairs in order, you're going to get taken down,’” Bowden recalls.

Yep, he believes the DEA was planning to eliminate him if he didn’t stop making legal highs. And he’s thankful for the warning.

“I was taken down, I wasn't taken out,” he says. “I didn't get a bullet and I didn't get run off the road or something. I live in gratitude.”

There was another phone call too, he claims, warning him that booze lobbyists were trying to convince the prime minister to change the law and were donating to political election campaigns. The weapon? Bunny rabbits.

The second ‘ban’

I say “ban” with inverted commas because it wasn’t really a ban but a series of things made it so hard that Bowden pulled the plug.

The first was the proliferation of cowboy operators, which Bowden says prompted him to nearly quit of his own accord.

“We got to a point with synthetic cannabis products where we were selling product to another company and they were doing something else with it - I don't know what - and people were getting sick,” he recalls.

“I just said ‘I'm done’, and went to shut the business. But then people just started making it at home in their garages and the quality control went away. So I had to step back in with some quality control,” Bowden claims.

Trying to be the industry’s hero and pull everyone into line not only made him the front man for the public, but it made him the villain. Given his flamboyant style, he was the perfect villain.

Especially when there was an uproar about the law allowing animal testing - especially bunnies - with these types of products. He claims the outrage came out of nowhere, was suspiciously well-funded and succeeded in killing the industry.

“They stopped us from doing any animal testing. I got taken out of the market and had to leave. Then those dodgy products came to New Zealand. There was nothing else and about 60 or 80 New Zealanders died,” he recalls.

“That was because we got shut down. We were stopping that from happening for like 15 years. On over 100 million occasions, somebody took a product that we developed. Never did that result in a death. When we got shut down, 60 or 80 people died.”

The lessons he’s learnt

The first error was not patenting the use of BZP in party pills, nor some of the compounds his lab later developed for synthetic cannabinoids. It meant everyone else copied him and he lost control of the market.

The second lesson was trusting the government would always do the right thing. The kneejerk law changes and associated lobbying and requests for political donations rocked him.

“I'm gonna be honest, I got scared, I really got scared,” he says.

The third lesson was learnt by going into synthetic cannabis. He wishes he hadn’t.

“I wanted to move into psychedelics and things that we can use to treat trauma, but the industry went somewhere else.I didn't think we needed a safer alternative to cannabis. I would rather have an alternative to ecstasy,” Bowden says.

Could recreational drug reform solve the govt’s debt problem?

This question was the main lure for getting Bowden in for an interview. Could reform in this area be used to broaden the tax base and make the government quite a lot of bank given core Crown debt is sitting at $191 billion?

“If I had patented it then I'd be able to make a contribution to dealing with that offshore debt. But paying off a $200b debt with a domestic market doesn't really make sense,” he says.

“If we were to develop the technology here, patent it and export or license it, then that’s a better way to bring more dollars in. What we've got is an opportunity to build a much better model,” Bowden says.