Abe Gray founded Whakamana Cannabis Museum in 2013. A decade later he co-founded Calyx Club, which now operates from the same building at 19 Beresford Square. People ask why a museum founder started a patient organisation, so we asked him to explain it in his own words.
Twenty-five years of watching people struggle
Medicinal cannabis became legal by prescription in New Zealand in 2020. Legal is not the same as accessible. In the years after the scheme opened, getting a prescription was slow, and paying for one was expensive.
Abe had spent twenty-five years as a cannabis law reform activist by that point: NORML, the J-Days, the referendum campaign, a decade of running the museum. That put him in an unusual position. He understood the ecosystem, the law and the supply chain in a level of detail that almost no patient had access to.
His view was that the knowledge itself had become a barrier. Navigating the system well required the kind of insider understanding that activists and industry people had and ordinary patients did not. Calyx Club was built to close that gap: to take what had previously been available only to people on the inside and make it available to anyone who joined.
A union, not a clinic
The framing Abe uses is a union of cannabis users. Not a healthcare service and not a dispensary, but an organisation that exists so patients can recognise their rights and act on them collectively.
In practice that means pooling the things individuals cannot get on their own: relationships with prescribers, with pharmacists and with licensed suppliers, and the buying power that comes from representing thousands of patients rather than one.
The doctors: Calyx Clinic
Joining the club is free, and the first thing membership gets you is a $40 consultation with Calyx Clinic, the telehealth service in the same building. That is about as cheap as a cannabis consultation gets in New Zealand, and it was deliberate: the appointment is the gate everyone has to walk through, so putting a high price on it just keeps people out.
Calyx Clinic has its own clinical team, led by Clinical Director Dr Paul Charlick. They are the ones who make the medical calls. The club handles everything around the medicine, and the doctors handle the medicine.
How the appointment works
- Fill in the questionnaire. History, symptoms, what you have already tried, what you are currently taking. It goes to the clinic beforehand so your appointment is not spent on paperwork.
- Book a time that suits you. Consultations are by video, so no travel and no waiting room. Handy if you are unwell, working, or nowhere near Auckland.
- Talk to a doctor for about fifteen minutes. A normal appointment. Expect questions about your symptoms, your other medicines, any history with cannabis, and what you are hoping for. Be straight with them, including about past use. You will get better advice for it.
- The doctor decides. If it is clinically appropriate they will write a prescription and talk you through format, strength and quantity. If it is not right for you they will say so, and that is a real answer, not a failed transaction.
- Order and collect. Your prescription sits on your club account. You order what it allows, Westmere Pharmacy dispenses, and you get it couriered, collect it from the pharmacy, or pick it up here at 19 Beresford Square.
- Follow-ups when you need them. Not on a schedule designed to generate appointments - for most patients, this means an appointment every 9 months.
Most people go from signing up to holding their medicine inside a couple of days.
Meeting the patient where they are
The design principle Abe keeps coming back to is that a prescription should reflect what someone actually uses, not what a form says they should use.
That means flexible prescriptions: rather than being locked to a single named product, members can choose across what is legally available, up to the limit their doctor has authorised. It matters because products go out of stock, suppliers change, and the thing that works for one person takes a couple of tries to find. Being tied to one product means paying for another appointment every time something changes.
It also means keeping the cost of getting and holding a prescription as low as possible. As Abe puts it, every extra dollar spent on administration is a dollar not spent on the medicine itself, and patients are operating on real budgets in a cost of living crisis.
Fixed margin, passed on
The commercial model follows from that. Calyx Club works on a fixed margin and passes the cost through, using bulk buying to bring prices down rather than to widen the spread.
Abe is direct about why that matters. When a provider makes more money from some products than others, there is a pull toward recommending those products, whether or not anyone intends it. A fixed margin removes the pull.
On CBD and THC
One of Abe's longer-standing frustrations is the framing of CBD as the responsible cannabinoid and THC as the irresponsible one. It is a gross oversimplification, and it is one that has shaped a lot of prescribing.
CBD and THC do different things. Some people do well on CBD alone, many do not, and for a large number of patients the products that actually work contain THC. Treating one as the safe option and the other as the regrettable one is not clinical reasoning, it is a hangover from prohibition. What to prescribe is a decision for a doctor and a patient together, based on that patient.
Empower, not dictate
Abe's closing line in the video is the clearest statement of the whole thing: Calyx exists to empower patients, not dictate to them. Education, choice and community.
Which is also why the three sit in one building. The museum is where people learn about the plant with nobody selling them anything. The clinic is where the medicine happens. The club is where patients organise. Same person, same reason, three different jobs.
Where to go from here
If you want the detail on prescriptions, costs and what to expect, we wrote a plain guide: How to get a medicinal cannabis prescription in New Zealand. If you want the history of how the law got this way, that is here.
And if you want to talk to a human, come and see us. Entry is free, we are open Wednesday to Sunday, and nobody will try to sell you anything. Plan your visit.
Whakamana Cannabis Museum is an education organisation and does not prescribe, dispense or sell cannabis. Calyx Clinic is an independent healthcare provider and all clinical decisions are made by its doctors. Medicinal cannabis in New Zealand is prescription only and is dispensed by a pharmacy.
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