Coalition of 17 patient charities · dotdotdash NZ, McCann NZ and FleishmanHillard NZ · July 2026
The Forbidden Pharmacy built a pharmacy in Auckland stocked with medicines New Zealand patients need but cannot obtain through the public health system.
Inside the installation at Shed 10, hundreds of treatments available in other countries sat behind locked doors. Every medicine represented a real illness, patient community and story of delayed or denied treatment. Visitors could see that the drugs existed. They simply could not reach them.
More than 1,500 people attended, including patients, healthcare professionals, politicians and New Zealand’s Minister of Health. They heard first-hand accounts from people such as Judith Ansell, who has metastatic breast cancer and has spent more than NZ$90,000 privately funding treatment.
The installation turns a complicated argument about funding, assessment and healthcare policy into one brutally simple experience: the medicine that might improve your life is right in front of you, but the system has locked the door.
Campaigns That Used Similar Tactics
Find Your David: to enter the belly of the beast
Please Arrest Me, created by Ogilvy for the Rit Foundation in 2020, sent an activist into an Indian police station to confess to marital rape, and officers told him no crime had been committed, making the law perform its own failure.
Home Is Not A Boxing Ring, from Wunderman Thompson in 2017, placed a domestic violence survivor inside the ring of a televised Muay Thai fight.
Victim Villain Juxtaposition: placing the system beside the survivor
Rape Tax, from NOVA and FCB, used survivors' hospital bills to show how the healthcare system charged people financially after sexual violence had already harmed them.
Fighting Knife Crime London, from TBWA, placed portraits of young victims beside the cuts to youth services that preceded their deaths.
The Question That Could Have Got You There
Where does the system normally deliver what people need, and what would happen if we rebuilt that place around everything it withholds?
