Dr John Jiggens is a writer and journalist who has published several books including The Incredible Exploding Man, Marijuana Australiana, The killer cop and the murder of Donald Mackay, Sir Joseph Banks and the Question of Hemp, and, with Jack Herer, the Australian version of The Emperor Wears No Clothes. Along with Matt Mawson, Anne Jones and Damien Ledwich, he edited The Best of The Cane Toad Times. As an academic, Dr John Jiggens has published several papers on estimating the size of Australia's heroin market and marijuana market and the cost of drug law enforcement. As a journalist, he has contributed feature articles to The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Rolling Stone, Penthouse, Simply Living and many other magazines. He edited The Cane Toad Times,The Westender and Brisbane Theatre Magazine. His Ph.D was �Marijuana Australiana: Cannabis Use, Popular Culture and the Americanisation of Drugs Policy in Australia 1938 � 1988�. The two volumes which derive from his doctoral dissertation are The killer cop and the murder of Donald Mackay and Marijuana Australiana.

TALK TITLE: How many cones? How many pills? How many lines of coke?

TIME: 11.30am � 12.30pm Sunday 5 May 2013

LOCATION: Nimbin Town Hall

ABOUT THE TALK: John presents an investigation sponsored by a coalition of groups including the Nimbin Hemp Embassy, Family and Friends for Drug Law Reform and Students for Sensible Drug Policy to investigate the size of Australia�s market in illegal drugs and its potential for raising revenue under a regulated market. "The illicit trade in drugs is worth tens of billions of dollars," says Dr Jiggens. "But how many billions? There are about 85000 drug offences prosecuted in Australia each year and 3000 Australians imprisoned for drug offences each year. How many hundreds of millions does this cost? Prohibition is a kind of negative tax that takes the form of police and justice system punishment, which falls largely on Australia's twenty-somethings. If we regulated drugs sensibly, how much money could be raised if we employed by a taxation regime similar to other goods? To answer this question, I estimate the size of the illicit drug trade to the nearest hundred million cones, the nearest million pills and the nearest million lines of coke."

Fiona Patten is the President of the Australian Sex Party and its Victorian senate candidate. She has been a lobbyist for 20 years and intimately understands the machinations of government and politics. Her advocacy work has included issues such as film censorship, internet censorship, HIV/AIDS, sex worker rights, disability rights and drugs. She is passionate about equality, drug law reform and reducing the amount of government involvement in people's personal lives. She is an atheist, a republicanist, a keen swimmer and an occasional inhaler.

FORUM TITLE: Enlightened Activism - How to be an effective campaigner and activist for cannabis law reform?

TIME: 12.30 � 2.30pm Saturday 4 May 2013

LOCATION: Nimbin Town Hall

Cate Faehrmann is a passionate environmentalist and social justice advocate. She has been a Greens Member of the NSW Legislative Council since 2010. During her time in Parliament, Cate has been a strong advocate for the environment, including working to protect national parks and marine protected areas, fighting for tougher pollution laws and campaigning around animal welfare. She fights hard for increased public transport investment, including light rail and cycling infrastructure. Cate has been consulting on, and campaigning for, dying with dignity laws since entering Parliament and plans to introduce a bill to bring about this much-needed change in 2013. Some of her recent achievements include winning support for a Greens motion in the NSW Upper House calling on the Commonwealth to support marriage equality and exposing hidden plans to drill for coal seam gas in St Peters, in Sydney's inner west. Prior to entering Parliament, Cate headed up the Nature Conservation Council of NSW, was a founding director of GetUp!, and a Board member of the NSW Environmental Defenders' Office. She has also managed Greens election campaigns and media strategies in New Zealand, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. Cate is passionate about building social movements and empowering communities to make positive change. One of her initiatives, Walk Against Warming, became Australia�s biggest community day of action on climate change, mobilising over 100,000 Australians to take action.

FORUM TITLE: Enlightened Activism - How to be an effective campaigner and activist for cannabis law reform?

TIME: 12.30 � 2.30pm Saturday 4 May 2013

LOCATION: Nimbin Town Hall

Aidan Ricketts is a law lecturer at Southern Cross University as well as an experienced activist author and social change trainer.� Aidan�s� book �The Activists Handbook: A Step By Step Guide to Participatory Democracy� was published by Zed books in London in 2012 and has become a popular handbook for social movements Australia and abroad.� Aidan has experience in a range of social, environmental and justice campaigns spanning several decades. Aidan can be contacted via his website http://aidanricketts.com where you can also view his regular commentary.

FORUM TITLE: Enlightened Activism - How to be an effective campaigner and activist for cannabis law reform?

TIME: 12.30 � 2.30pm Saturday 4 May 2013

LOCATION: Nimbin Town Hall

Dr Alex Wodak AM was Director of the Alcohol and Drug Service, St. Vincent�s Hospital, Sydney (1982-2012) but is now an Emeritus Consultant. Dr. Wodak is President of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation, and a Director of Australia21 and was President of the International Harm Reduction Association (1996-2004). He helped establish the first needle syringe programme and the first medically supervised injecting centre in Australia (when both were pre-legal) and often works in developing countries on HIV control among injecting drug users.

FORUM TITLE: Enlightened Activism - How to be an effective campaigner and activist for cannabis law reform?

TIME: 12.30 � 2.30pm Saturday 4 May 2013

LOCATION: Nimbin Town Hall

FORUM TITLE: Is it Medication Time? Cannabis Medicine in Australia in 2013

TIME: 12.30 � 1.30pm Sunday 5 May 2013

LOCATION: Nimbin Town Hall

Sandra Heilpern lived in the Far North Coast for nearly 20 years and has recently moved back to Sydney.  She has a keen interest in social justice issues and has worked in criminal justice, child welfare, with Aborigines and in area of alcohol and other drugs.  She is looking forward to coming to the 2013 Mardi Grass and touching base with the Nimbin Community.

FORUM TITLE: Community Brainstorm � Imagining Nimbin after Cannabis is Legal

TIME: 2.30 � 4.00pm Saturday 4 May 2013

LOCATION: Nimbin Town Hall

Bill Bush came to drugs late in life. It was while he was working in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Canberra that he started putting in stints as a volunteer at a detoxification centre secreted in a cottage hidden behind the Department of Defence. What he saw, read and heard at the detox centre set him to asking questions but rarely finding satisfactory answers. One was how a drug like heroin came to be prohibited when it had been widely used medically, readily available in cough mixtures and was manufactured from poppy straw still grown in Tasmania in accordance with treaty concessions that he had had a little to do with setting in place while working in the treaties section of his department.

In 1997, Bill fell in with a local Canberra group formed earlier that year at a public meeting convened by Michael Moore, a local Legislative Assembly member and now CEO of the Australian Public Health Association, following an unprecedented 11 overdose deaths in Canberra before Easter. Families and Friends for Drug Law Reform was the fruit of that public meeting. The organisation offered limitless scope for Bill�s many questions and even more scope for prodding politicians and others in authority to apply rational standards of evidence and reasoning to the examination of a policy of prohibition which was a cause or an aggravating factor in all of Australia's most serious social problems.

Bill�s study of international law at the University of Cambridge endowed him with some competence to run the treaties section and finally the Antarctic section in the Department of Foreign Affairs before he retired to full-time absorption in writing submissions and otherwise stirring on behalf of Families and Friends for Drug Law Reform. He is encouraged by the prospect of doing himself out of a job.

FORUM TITLE: Enlightened Activism - How to be an effective campaigner and activist for drug law reform?

TIME: 12.30 � 2.30pm Saturday 4 May 2013

LOCATION: Nimbin Town Hall

FORUM TITLE: Community Brainstorm � Imagining Nimbin after Cannabis is Legal

TIME: 2.30 � 4.00pm Saturday 4 May 2013

LOCATION: Nimbin Town Hall