Tinny

In New Zealand a tinny, or tinnie, is a small amount of cannabis wrapped in tinfoil. It has sold for about NZ$20 to 25, depending on the region. Australians call the same thing a foilie. A tinny house is where it is bought, commonly a house that looks like any other on the street.

The word is short, local and practical, and that is its interest. It names a New Zealand way of selling cannabis, and it has become common in the country’s court judgments.

The tinny house

Researchers at Massey University defined tinny houses as homes converted for the “supermarket” sale of cannabis and other illicit drugs to anyone who turns up with cash. In 2005 Chris Wilkins and his colleagues used the 2001 National Drug Survey, which had interviewed 5,800 people aged 13 to 45, to compare those who bought from tinny houses with those who bought through friends and acquaintances.

	Tinny-house buyers	Other buyers
Number in the survey	145	342
More likely to	Buy weekly or more often, buy small amounts, smoke a whole joint or more at a time, use high-potency strains, be sold poorer cannabis than they paid for, know that their dealer sold other drugs	—
No difference in	How often they used cannabis, the price for the same weight, use of other drugs, pressure from sellers to buy other drugs	—
Who	More often aged 15 to 17, and more often Māori	—

The authors concluded that tinny houses drew younger and more Māori customers, but found no sign that they were spreading the use of other drugs.

The P panic

That conclusion mattered, because in the early 2000s the tinny house had become a political symbol. In 2003 a member of parliament issued a press release claiming that tinny houses were giving out free samples of methamphetamine, known in New Zealand as P. Stories along the same lines appeared regularly in the press.

In 2007 the New Zealand Drug Foundation went through the evidence. Only 2 per cent of methamphetamine users in a 2005 monitoring study had bought it at a tinny house in the previous six months; most bought it from friends, at agreed meeting places or in nightclubs. Some informants did say that tinny houses and cannabis dealers had begun to sell methamphetamine. But the Foundation could find no case of anyone charged with lacing cannabis with it or handing out free samples, and many of the claims came from police officers who were not named.

The police and the courts

Stuff’s 2018 Huntly investigation gives the word a visible material form. Christel Yardley’s photograph shows small foil parcels, including one opened to expose the cannabis. The accompanying report identifies 31 tinnies found ready for sale in a food pantry. The image documents this particular search; it does not establish that every tinny house had the other offences described in the investigation.

For the police, tinny houses are a target that can be counted. In 2011 officers in Counties Manukau, in south Auckland, executed 36 search warrants on suspected dealing houses over two weeks. They charged 37 people and seized 135 tinnies along with plants, harvested cannabis, some methamphetamine, cash and stolen goods. A senior detective called such houses hubs for “all manner of criminal offending”.

The word now turns up regularly in judgments under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975, which still governs cannabis. Since a 2019 amendment police must consider whether a health response would do more good than prosecution in possession cases; selling is another matter. A 2020 referendum on a regulated legal market was lost by 50.7 per cent to 48.4.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}