Remembering The Daktory: NZ's Outlaw Cannabis Club
Every country's cannabis-reform movement has its folk heroes and its lost causes. New Zealand's most vivid example sat in an unremarkable warehouse in New Lynn, West Auckland — a members' cannabis club called The Daktory that, for a few audacious years, operated in open defiance of the Misuse of Drugs Act. Its founder went to prison for it. The building is long gone. But as a story, it remains one of the most distinctly-Kiwi episodes in the country's long argument about weed.
This is a piece of history, told as history. It is not an endorsement of breaking the law.
Information and education, not legal or medical advice. 18+. Recreational cannabis was illegal in New Zealand throughout the events described here, and it still is today. The Daktory was prosecuted precisely because what it did was against the law.
The man behind it: Dakta Green
The Daktory was inseparable from one man: Dakta Green, born in 1950 as Kenneth Morgan. A long-time cannabis-law-reform campaigner associated with NORML New Zealand, Green adopted the deliberately provocative persona — "Dakta," a play on both "doctor" and the Kiwi slang "dak" for cannabis — and built a public career out of refusing to pretend.
Where many activists worked through submissions, petitions and polite advocacy, Green chose open civil disobedience. His argument was simple and confrontational: if the law was unjust, the way to expose it was to break it visibly, dare the state to respond, and force the issue into the open. The Daktory was that philosophy made physical.
What The Daktory actually was
The Daktory operated as a members' club in a New Lynn warehouse — a place where adults could come to use cannabis socially. It was not hidden. It was not pretending to be a café or a head shop with a wink. It was, by design, a space that did the thing the law forbade and invited the public and the press to watch.
The defiance was the point. Green and the people around him framed it as a protest in built form: a demonstration that responsible adults could gather and use cannabis without the social catastrophe prohibition predicted, and a direct challenge to police and politicians to either tolerate it or come and shut it down.
For a while, it became a genuine fixture of Auckland's cannabis subculture — a gathering point, a symbol, and a regular source of news copy.
The Cannabus: taking the protest on the road
The Daktory was not Green's only theatrical act of defiance. In 2008, he toured the country in the Cannabus — a bus that travelled to dozens of towns (reported at 42) staging public 4:20pm cannabis sessions. The idea was to carry the protest beyond Auckland and make the argument face to face in provincial New Zealand: a travelling, smoke-filled act of civil disobedience.
It was equal parts political stunt and grassroots organising — and, like The Daktory itself, it was guaranteed to draw the attention of police. That was always the design. Green wanted prosecution, because prosecution was publicity, and publicity was the argument.
The fall
Open defiance of the drug laws has predictable consequences, and they came. The Daktory was raided, and Green was prosecuted for the activity it represented. He was ultimately jailed — reported at 23 months — for offences connected to his cannabis activism and the club.
The warehouse closed. The experiment ended. By the conventional measure, the state won: the law was enforced, the club was shut, and its founder went to prison.
What it meant — and why it's remembered
Judged narrowly, The Daktory failed. It did not change the law. New Zealand still has not legalised recreational cannabis; the 2020 referendum on doing so was narrowly defeated more than a decade after the club's heyday.
But that is too tidy a verdict. The Daktory mattered as culture and as argument:
- It made the contradiction visible. A roomful of ordinary adults using cannabis without chaos was a living rebuttal to prohibition's worst-case rhetoric.
- It put a human face on civil disobedience. Dakta Green's willingness to go to prison forced a question the comfortable could otherwise avoid: is this really worth jailing people over?
- It is a uniquely local story. Coffeeshops in Amsterdam and dispensaries in California are someone else's history. The Daktory and the Cannabus are ours — a West Auckland warehouse and a bus full of protesters taking on the New Zealand state. No overseas site can claim it.
The reform movement that continued after The Daktory — through NORML, through the NZ Drug Foundation's harm-reduction campaigning, through the referendum and the ongoing decriminalisation debate — took a more institutional path. But the memory of an outlaw club in New Lynn still sits in the background of that conversation, a reminder of how confrontational the argument once got.
A note on accuracy
The Daktory's story has been told in a handful of places — most notably a 2020 feature in The Spinoff — and in encyclopedic entries on Dakta Green and the club. Specific figures (the 23-month sentence, the 42-town Cannabus tour) come from those accounts. As with much underground history, some details are best treated as the record of a colourful, contested era rather than courtroom-precise fact. Where we have given numbers, we have flagged their source.
FAQ
Was The Daktory legal? No. It operated in open breach of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975, which was the entire point of it as a protest. It was raided and its founder was prosecuted.
Who was Dakta Green? A cannabis-law-reform activist born Kenneth Morgan (1950), associated with NORML NZ, who founded The Daktory and ran the Cannabus, and was jailed for his activism.
Does The Daktory still exist? No. The club was shut down following prosecution, and the building no longer operates as a cannabis club.
Is recreational cannabis legal now? No. Recreational cannabis remains illegal in New Zealand. Only medical cannabis, by prescription, is legal.
Sources
- The Spinoff — "Remembering The Daktory: West Auckland's legendary cannabis club" (27 September 2020): https://thespinoff.co.nz/business/27-09-2020/remembering-the-daktory-west-aucklands-legendary-cannabis-club
- Wikipedia — Dakta Green: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakta_Green
- Wikipedia — The Daktory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daktory
- Wikipedia — Cannabis in New Zealand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_New_Zealand
- NORML New Zealand: https://norml.org.nz/
Last reviewed 15 June 2026. weed.nz publishes cannabis history, culture and education in Aotearoa.
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