Cannabis odd couple join forces to grow a budding industry

Added on 04 August 2023

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Cannabis odd couple join forces to grow a budding industry

Two medicinal cannabis moguls have joined forces to make the most of what they see as an industry on the precipice of a golden green age. Reporter Jonathan Killick takes a tour of their operation.

We’re already flying high, as we take off from Ardmore Airport for a secretive location where some of the country’s top chemists and botanists are growing high-potency cannabis.

Founder of medicinal firm Eqalis, Greg Misson, picks me up in his prop plane. The keen pilot has four aircraft and has restored another seven.

His hangar in Tauranga looks more like a workshop, with a Morris Minor he says he sometimes drives around the airport, and the former Hamilton mayoral car, a 1935 Packard Straight Eight.

We visit two high-tech grow facilities, both of them clandestine. One in a small Bay of Plenty town looks like a car mechanic workshop from the outside, the other is in a shed next to an old farmhouse now used as a break room.

Inside they’re filled with long rows of cannabis plants bursting with buds of all different colours and varieties. It’s a visual feast usually reserved for images of police busts.