Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Associate Minister of Health: I move, That the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill be now read a first time. At the appropriate time I intend to move that the bill be set down for second reading forthwith, without being referred to a select committee. To begin I would like to thank all parties in the House for their help in bringing us to this point today. I have appreciated the great cooperation that all parties have provided in discussions around their positions and their considerations on this bill, and I think that we bring an amendment bill to the House today that the great majority of the House has indicated its willingness to support.

The bill does two things. It ends all interim product approvals and interim retail and wholesale licences, and it prevents information derived from tests on animals being used to support a product approval application. The remainder of the primary legislation remains in place, and it remains the most appropriate way of dealing with emerging psychoactive substances. The bill has a few other features to support those two main aims of removing all products from the market forthwith and restricting the use of animal testing. It provides that all products that have interim approval will be recalled, and that those who have had retail or wholesale licences removed must comply with the recall. The recall order will require all licence holders, including those whose licences are cancelled by this amendment, to tell the Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority what products they have and confirm how they have been disposed of.

The bill clarifies that the Crown is not liable for any damages or to pay any compensation as a result of the amendments. We know that some businesses will lose money as a direct result of these amendments. Our judgment is that the public health objectives outweigh those losses, and no compensation will be paid for that. It clarifies that the authority must not approve a product until regulations are in effect and unless it is satisfied that the product poses a low risk of harm. These regulations will be in place in the next few months.

When Parliament enacted the Psychoactive Substances Act last year, 19 votes to one, the legislation contained transitional provisions that allowed some products to stay on the market. These were products for which no serious adverse reactions had been reported. If serious adverse effects emerged later, the authority had the power to revoke approval immediately. It has used that power to remove 11 products from the market, most recently on Thursday, 1 May. Serious adverse reactions have been increasingly reported to the authorities including vomiting, seizures, and psychotic episodes. The problem that has become apparent is that it is often not possible to attribute reactions to a particular product. People call the poison centres or the centre for adverse reactions monitoring and say they took synthetic cannabis or legal highs. If the authority does not know what products caused the adverse effect, it cannot use its powers to intervene. So what we have are products that have not been tested and that are causing harm, and the Government having limited ability to intervene.

Last month Cabinet discussed this issue, not for the first time, and agreed that the Hon Peter Dunne would arrange for legislation to be drafted that would remove all products from the market immediately. It was always intended to allow only products that had passed rigorous testing and had been shown to pose only a low risk of harm. The interim period was intended to last only a few months while regulations were prepared. However, we still have the products on the market that have not been through any testing and it is clearly no longer tenable for this situation to continue, given that the serious adverse effects continue to be reported and that the authority is unable to respond quickly.

On enactment this legislation will revoke all interim approvals for psychoactive products. All products currently on the market will become unapproved products with heavy penalties for manufacturing and supplying them. It will also become illegal to possess these products, so anyone thinking of stocking up today should bear that in mind. This legislation will also cancel all interim retail and wholesale licences and begin a recall of all products that had interim approval. Let us be clear here: Parliament passes the legislation, the Governor-General signs the legislation, and then at 12.01 a.m. on Thursday it becomes illegal to sell, supply, or possess illegal highs, and those products must be off the shelves. At 12.01 a.m. on Thursday it becomes illegal to sell, supply, or possess illegal highs. The products must be off the shelf.

The other thing this legislation does is stop tests on animals being used to seek approval for psychoactive products. As the Prime Minister has said, one of the reasons why we have had the delay in getting the regulations prepared is that the Government has been reluctant to sanction animal testing for these products. I am sure all members will be pleased that the bill under consideration will effectively not allow products to be tested on animals. The bill prevents the Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority and the Psychoactive Substances Expert Advisory Committee from having regard to information from animal trials to support the approval of psychoactive products. They cannot use any information that has come from animal testing; therefore, there is no reason to do the testing. The only exception is this: the authority may consider information undertaken from an overseas trial if that information indicates that the product may not be low risk. So the authority can consider information from an overseas trial to protect the health of individuals. It cannot consider an overseas trial to support the approval of a psychoactive substance. No one will be doing animal testing to support an application here because it will not be able to be used for consideration.

The rest of the primary legislation remains in place. As we all know, the large number of substances and the ability of makers to rapidly change the make-up of products mean that traditional approaches do not work. In the long term, the Psychoactive Substances Act remains the best way of dealing with the problem of emerging psychoactive substances. I would like to thank all those parties in the House who have participated in this process and commend this bill to the House.

Perhaps it would be helpful to the House’s procedure, because the Minister of Health in his speech referred to the fact that at the appropriate time he would move a truncation of the process, to say that the Leader of the House moved that urgency be accorded the introduction and passing of the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill, so the House is then tasked with every stage, and any further motions to proceed with that truncation is not necessary.

Labour will support this Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. The two principal objectives of this bill are policies that Labour wholeheartedly endorses and supports. The first is to remove the transition provisions of the principal Act that have allowed for untested drugs to remain on the shelf and available for sale to the public. That is a position that, like other parties in the House, Labour came to in response to the overwhelming public outcry that untested drugs remained available and that their effects were unknown, and that their effects became apparent only when young people and other people using those drugs experienced the harmful side-effects of those substances. That situation really flew in the face of the principles behind the original legislation, which were that psychoactive substances would need to be tested first before they could go on the market for sale, and that the onus of proof that they were of low or no risk would lie with the manufacturers, not with the users in the community around them.

The other objective of this legislation is to ban all animal testing for psychoactive substances. This is a policy that Labour has supported since the principal legislation was debated in the House, and our party, along with other parties, supported the amendment in the name of Mojo Mathers to remove animal testing, right back when we were debating the principal legislation. That amendment was blocked by National, by United Future—actually, I think it was Peter Dunne, independent MP, at the time—and through the abstention of the New Zealand First Party. So we could have dealt with this issue of animal testing long before today, but we are very, very happy that it has been included in this legislation—again, because the Government has finally buckled to public pressure and the overwhelming pressure that has been placed upon it by Opposition parties.

It is never a positive outcome when a piece of legislation has to be amended in such a short space of time after it was originally passed. The Psychoactive Substances Act was passed in July last year. It received its first reading in April last year—a little over 12 months ago. At the time, after the first reading debate, there was a debate in the House around the shortened select committee period that Parliament was being given to consider the legislation. At that time, in that debate, I said I was concerned that we were rushing this legislation, that it was complex legislation, that it was novel, that no other country in the world had attempted this approach to regulating psychoactive substances, and that it was absolutely inappropriate for Parliament to be rushing the legislation.

I warned that mistakes would be made. In fact, I went back and checked out exactly what it was I said, and I said: “I don’t want us to be back here in 12 months’ time, realising that we have made a mistake, and having to fix those mistakes up.” Here we are—

💬 Mike Sabin: You said a lot of other stuff too.

—apologies if it is not the exact quote—12 months later, admitting that we made a mistake.

💬 Dr Paul Hutchison: You supported the bill, though—119 to 1.

Paul Hutchison makes a very important point: 119 MPs supported this bill. I supported this bill. I sat on the Health Committee and considered the issues. One of the issues was whether we should have a transition period. The select committee decided that we should. That decision was made at breakneck speed because we were given just 2 months at select committee to deal with these complex issues.

We are the first country in the world dealing with this type of legislation, and the Government gave us one-third of the time that it would normally give a select committee to consider those issues. The Government will say, quite rightly, that we needed to have the legislation passed—

💬 Mike Sabin: What did the Labour Government do between 1999 and 2008?

—Mike Sabin, just be quiet and let me say what I have to say—by August last year, but because the Government failed to prioritise the Psychoactive Substances Act, the legislation was brought to the House only in February last year. If we had got started in February last year, that would have given us a little bit of time.

But what the Government did was sit on that legislation from February until April, and it gave the select committee even less time to consider the legislation.

💬 Mike Sabin: What did the member’s party do until 2008?

What the member’s party did until 2008 was ask the Law Commission to do a complete review of the Misuse of Drugs Act because we understood that the Misuse of Drugs Act was no longer capable of dealing with the number and variety of drugs that were available for supply in the 21st century. That is what the Labour Government did. We asked the independent Law Commission to go away and figure out what the best way forward was. The Law Commission came back in April 2011 with a comprehensive report, one chapter—just one chapter—of which is the precursor to the Psychoactive Substances Act. It took that Government 2 years to take the recommendations on psychoactive substances from the Law Commission—2 years to bring that legislation before the House—and then it said to Parliament: “I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to rush this.” That is why mistakes were made—because that Government did not prioritise getting these drugs off the streets. That is why Parliament made a mistake.

I am happy to say that I was one of the MPs who voted for that legislation, and it was the right thing to do because had we not passed that legislation, then all those drugs would still be out there—not 41 but about 300 different drugs would still be out there if we had not passed the legislation. But it was not perfect, and one of the main reasons it was not perfect was that the select committee was not given time to consider it properly, and the select committee did not have time because that Government did not make this a priority. That is a fact.

The other reason we are back here today is that having implemented the legislation, the Government then made an absolute dog’s breakfast of resourcing it, giving the Ministry of Health the tools it needed, and getting the regulations sorted out. One of the reasons we hear for why it has taken so long to get the regulations sorted out is that John Key was uncomfortable with animal testing. But it was National that blocked the amendments that would have stopped animal testing. So if we had gone back and got the legislation right in the first place, if National had voted for Mojo Mather’s amendment, then we would not have had to delay the regulation-making process because John Key would not have had to worry about animal testing.

The other thing the Government has failed to do is use the provisions in the current legislation to get rid of unsafe drugs. It got rid of five at the beginning of the year—well done; not bad—but then, after the announcement that the law was going to be changed, it got rid of another six. That just smacks of an under-resourced Ministry of Health, incapable of properly implementing the original legislation.

This has been a shambles from the National Government from the very beginning—its failure to respond to the Law Commission’s report, its slow response as to when one was finally coming, the rushed select committee process that caused mistakes in the legislation, and then the shambolic implementation of the legislation once it was finally passed. Make no mistake, New Zealand, the reason why we have got untested, unsafe drugs still on our streets is that National has made a hash of this from day one. And the reason for that is that it never prioritised this issue. It was never important to National. It has always been a rush job. Here is another rush job, and it is simply a reflection of the fact that making sure our young people are safe from drugs that have a high risk of causing harm was never a priority for this Government. That is why we are in the mess we are in today, and that is why we are having to clean it up.

Mr Iain Lees-Galloway tends to be a little shrill about a very complex matter of regulating drugs effectively, which the Labour Government certainly failed to do in 9 long years. No matter how much Mr Iain Lees-Galloway rants and raves, this is a complex area, and countries around the world are wrestling with the best and most effective ways of minimising harm from psychoactive substances.

I must say that when the Health Committee heard submissions on the Psychoactive Substances Bill last year, New Zealanders up and down the country came to the select committee saying how they were deeply concerned for the children of New Zealand and the adolescents who were using psychoactive substances, because of the serious adverse effects—none more so than the Mayor of Timaru, who came up to Wellington and said that it was the No. 1 problem in her community of Timaru and that the parents and the whole community were begging her to do something about it. After all, the aim of the original legislation was to minimise harm from psychoactive substances and protect the public health. It was regarded as highly innovative legislation, and a huge amount of thought had been put into it, but, as I said before, this is a very complex issue that no Government that I know of anywhere in the world has managed to get on top of.

I agree and accept that politically there is a very strong call for banning psychoactive substances. The reality is that under the circumstances where there is a danger that they will be driven underground—and it is a very real danger—there is a concern that we must have the infrastructure and services available to look after those people who have withdrawal problems. And it is important to resource the police.

There are several ironies relating to this legislation, the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. As John Roughan pointed out in the New Zealand Herald, it is somewhat extraordinary that one would ban cannabis and yet cannabinoids, synthetic cannabis, which is often many times more potent than the natural weed, was legal. So it is entirely appropriate that we are, indeed, addressing this issue.

One of the major tenets of this bill was that manufacturers are required to demonstrate minimal risk to humans who use so-called party pills or legal highs, and this legislation is about risk management. However, to demonstrate minimal risk in 2014 does require the possibility of some animal testing. We had huge debate in this House regarding that. The Psychoactive Substances Expert Advisory Committee was absolutely clear that, unfortunately, despite the rhetoric of the Greens and the anti-vivisectionists, in 2014 there are not substantive tests available that can demonstrate minimal risk. Professor Robson from the expert advisory committee, Professor Gluckman, and the Ministry of Health all acknowledge that to be the case and that it may be several years before we have alternatives that are effective to demonstrate minimal harm. However, in the meantime we are doing the appropriate thing in taking psychoactive substances off the shelves.

I do want to mention that there are some wider safety, scientific, and economic issues at stake around the passing of this bill, because there is no doubt in my mind that if New Zealand is to say that science is at the centre of Government and we are going to continue to have high standards around the medicines and drugs we use, it is fundamental to insist that these medications undergo rigorous testing according to best-practice scientific methods, which today, as I have said, does indeed require—to the best of our knowledge—animal testing. We hope that this can be replaced, and the legislation was very clear that it should be minimised if, indeed, it was needed. We hope that technology will advance rapidly and allow it not to be necessary.

But the erosion of these principles in the pharmaceutical and biological engineering field can lead to the erosion of standards and opportunities in the health sector, in the agricultural sector, in the biosecurity sector, and in the innovative sector. I remember well the debates around the Environmental Risk Management Authority and the hazardous substances and new organisms legislation some years ago where the Greens wanted to exercise the precautionary principle to the zenith degree, with the result that New Zealand’s capability and capacity in the area of biotechnology have been reduced. This does mean a reduced capability in the agricultural and biosecurity area. It is also ironic that the Greens talk about this precautionary principle for offshore drilling and, indeed, as I say, in the biological engineering area, but when it comes to party pills, they are not so worried about the standards that are used. These pills, or substances, are used on adolescents’ developing brains when they are at their most sensitive.

There is no doubt that this amendment bill is a practical response to the fact that ordinary New Zealanders up and down the country do not want psychoactive substances to be available legally. I feel very strongly that the House is supporting this bill, and it is an irony that the Greens are abstaining.

Labour will support the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill through all stages, and we have also today supported the urgency motion for the passage of this bill. You cannot say that you want action in a hurry and then not support urgency for this bill, but I think there needs to be a little bit of background about this bill before we get into the details of it. Last month a number of us—in fact, I believe, probably all the colleagues in the House—received a letter from the Hon Peter Dunne. It started off with “Dear Colleague”. The date of the letter was 15 April last month. He said he wanted to update us on the progress and the achievements of the Psychoactive Substances Act 2013. He went on to say that a blanket ban on yet-to-be-developed psychoactive substances would be very difficult to implement and to enforce, particularly as it will relate to products or substances that do not yet exist, etc., etc. He then went on to blame local government because the implementation had not occurred as fast as he would have liked, and he went on to say he knows there are pockets of frustration, but remember the Act is only 9 months old. That was on 15 April.

There was no intention by the Minister in charge of this legislation, Peter Dunne, who put the legislation through the House, to make any changes based on information and, I have to say, a very, very detailed fact sheet—a fact sheet that tells us what has happened since the Act came into effect on 18 July, what the Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority is doing, and the transition to regulations. In fact, under this part it said that the authority is operating a temporary system of controls called the interim regime, etc., etc.

What has happened here is that members on the back bench were putting pressure on Cabinet to make some changes—because maybe the backbenchers were listening to their constituents. That is something that was happening right across this Parliament. We were being told that we had got it wrong and that we needed to make changes. That went on for months and months. The pressure built. The pressure on the backbenchers built. Their constituents were telling them what the problems were, and the reports were coming out in the media on a daily basis. So from 15 April—

💬 Louisa Wall: And Todd McClay.

And Todd McClay?

💬 Louisa Wall: In Rotorua.

Oh, Todd McClay—a Minister—was probably one of the Ministers who did know what was happening. But the pressure was going on, in a very, very strong way, to the backbenchers. So then there needed to be an action, and this is where I find it rather difficult. When you read the letter, there is nothing about getting this changed at all. Then you hear from the Minister of Health that we have been discussing this issue last month—and we did it more than once. We did it several times. Minister, was it after 15 April, when we received the letter? The question that in Committee we can ask is whether Peter Dunne was in the loop. Why was he telling us: “No need for change. Everything’s going well. We’re pretty pleased with what is happening.”?

Then I read the regulatory impact statement that the Ministry of Health has put out. It is dated 4 May 2014, I think. The ministry wrote that after Cabinet was looking at this issue, so it did not actually give this advice to Cabinet before it made the decision. And the regulatory impact statement is very interesting. It says that we do not have all the information we need to fully assess the impacts of this proposal, we do not know the number or the proportion of people, we do not know the exact date the regulations will be made, we do not know the impact on other regulatory actions, we cannot say how much enforcement work is needed by the police, and, finally, we do not know what proportion of people use these products or what the effect will be, and there has been no formal review of this proposal planned. So in the Committee stage, Minister, I would like you to answer all those questions, because you have been working on it for a long time before you have brought this bill to the House, and we are going to have to trust your word on this.

It was very clear when the original bill was brought into this House and my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway warned that if we did not take time and care over this bill, we would get it wrong. He made that very strong warning in all the speeches that he made. He also said that we had the opportunity at the Health Committee to get it right and not to rush it. He asked for it not to be rushed, and there was no need to rush it, Minister, because it was back in October 2012 that you got the first regulatory impact statement from the Ministry of Health. It took until April the next year for the bill to be introduced—6 months later—and that original regulatory impact statement said this: “Current legislation has proved ineffective in dealing with the rapid growth in new psychoactive substances, such as party pills and other legal highs, which can be synthesised to be one step ahead of existing controls. Cabinet has agreed to new legislation to address this by prohibiting the sale of all”—all—“psychoactive substances unless approved by a regulator.” So, back in October 2012, this is what it said Cabinet had agreed to—that it would have new legislation prohibiting the sale of all psychoactive substances unless approved by a regulator.

It went on to say: “The new legislation will reduce risks to the public by removing untested and potentially harmful products from being sold …”, etc. That is dated October 2012. Six months later we got the bill, and it was rushed through the Health Committee, I believe, in about 2 months. So what we are seeing here is when the chooks do come home to roost. Sometimes, even if it is said by Opposition members and the Government does not wish to take much notice of them, maybe they ought to be listened to, because we are back here trying to fix something that maybe we could have got right in the original bill.

There was then an interjection, I believe, by one of the backbenchers over there of “Well, what did Labour do about it? Labour did nothing about it.” Well, I can tell you that Labour did do something about psychoactive substances. They had been around for about 15 years and they were legal. They were—[Bell rung] Sorry, Mr Assistant Speaker, I thought you were telling me my time was up, but I have got—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): No, 2 more minutes.

—2 minutes. Legal highs were legal because the Misuse of Drugs Act bans only substances that are specifically listed in the legislation. Attempts were made under a Labour Government to ban, using the Misuse of Drugs Act, such things as benzylpiperazine, and they were replaced very quickly by a new product. So we did ask the Law Commission to undertake a comprehensive review of the Misuse of Drugs Act. It was completed and given to this Government in 2011, I believe, and then the Government took till 2013 to do something about it. It recommended that we did make changes to the Misuse of Drugs Act. The Government has chosen not to do that and put in place a very narrow bill, which now needs to be changed. I am pleased that it is being changed. I am particularly pleased for Trevor Mallard, who, with Mojo Major, went out to bat strongly against animal testing, and I have to give some credit to John Banks. I do not always agree with the language that he uses, but there is no doubt that he does have passion for animals, as does my colleague Trevor Mallard and Mojo Major—

💬 Hon Members: Mathers!

—sorry, Mojo—Mojo Mathers, who raised this issue on a number of occasions. So we are back here now to fix this problem. I would like to see it fixed as fast as possible, but there are some questions that need to be answered by the Government around the delay and around answers to the questions that have been posed in the regulatory impact statement of May, which was put out just a few days ago by the Ministry of Health.

I will be upfront. Today we had a difficult decision at caucus. This Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill has been difficult for us, because on the one hand the Green Party totally welcomes the Government’s U-turn on the animal testing of these drugs. In particular, I am thrilled that the Government has finally adopted in substance the amendment that I put up on the Psychoactive Substances Bill last year, which ruled out the use of information from animal testing to support an application. I note that the Government voted then against that amendment, and I know that thousands of New Zealanders are celebrating now because the Government has finally done a U-turn on this decision. But, on the other hand, we know that the other clauses in this bill around prohibition of the sale of these drugs will create a dangerous black market in these drugs. Later today my colleague, and health spokesperson, Kevin Hague will speak further on our concerns around these provisions. So, after careful deliberation between the two fairly different clauses in the bill, we have decided to abstain from voting, but we do want to affirm our total support for the Government decision to back down on animal testing of party pills and legal highs.

This decision is absolutely the right one. We are thrilled that the Government has finally listened to the tens of thousands of New Zealanders who raised their voices against the testing of these products on animals. The depth of public feeling on this issue was highlighted last year, when more than 60,000 people signed a petition calling for animal testing of party pills to be ruled out. People in their tens of thousands have marched, signed petitions, emailed MPs, and written letters, and finally, just over a year later, the Government has got it: animal testing is an issue that is not going to go away. The Government decision to rule out animal testing is morally and ethically the right one. It will ensure that thousands of animals will not be subject to the extreme suffering that is involved in toxicology testing.

I want to talk about the process that happened last year when the Psychoactive Substances Bill came up, because at that time many animal welfare organisations and people put in considerable time and effort to write substantive submissions on that bill, on the issue of animal testing. They did this in good faith on the advice of the Minister in charge of the bill, Peter Dunne, and Ministry of Health officials that the best way for concerns around animal testing to be addressed was via the submissions process. Unbelievably, after all this effort their submissions were ruled out of order, rejected by the chair of the Health Committee as not relevant, and returned to them. These people were devastated that their democratic right to be heard had been rejected.

In response the Green Party held our own hearings to hear the evidence that the select committee did not get to hear. The information that was presented at these hearings was well researched and directly relevant to the substance of this bill, and should never have been excluded. We wrote a report that we presented to the Health Committee that summarised these submissions, and we concluded that a clause should be added to this bill ruling out the use of information from animal testing to support an application. I put up an amendment doing just that.

Ruling out animal testing is the best decision in the best interests of both animals and people. The reality is that the results of animal testing are notoriously unreliable. Because of this, in 2008 the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration started a process to replace all toxicology testing on animals with non-animal tests, because these tests produce results that are more relevant to humans and therefore more reliable. They are able to do this because the technology and safety testing have come a long way in the last 20 years. Despite what a previous speaker said, the alternatives to animal testing are many and include in vitro human cell line studies, computer models, micronucleus assays, in vitro absorption tests, and so on.

We cannot claim to be world leaders in animal welfare when other countries are so far ahead of us. The United Kingdom has a ban on animal testing of recreational substances, and this includes tobacco and alcohol, on the grounds that such testing of recreational products is unethical and immoral. This ban has helped drive much of the development and research into non-animal testing of drugs. They have also confirmed directly with us that their ban will also apply to psychoactive substances when these drugs are intended for recreational use.

One reason why animal testing continues to be carried out for most toxicology testing in New Zealand is that many of the non-animal tests are more expensive than animal tests. For example, we heard at the hearings evidence from someone who wanted a product tested, and when they took it to be tested for safety they were told it would cost $10,000 to test it using animals. When she said she did not want to use animals, she was then informed it would cost $30,000 to test it using non-animal tests rather than those tests. So cost is the main driver of using animal tests in toxicology testing in New Zealand, despite what people will tell you to the opposite. Basically, our argument all along has been that decisions around safety testing should not be based on protecting the profit margins of the party pill industry.

Just prior to the Psychoactive Substances Bill being debated last year, someone sent me an undercover video of toxicology testing being undertaken on beagles in the United States. Although it was not the most gruesome animal testing video that I have seen, it was definitely the saddest. Seeing these beautiful, affectionate animals, barely out of the puppy stage, confined alone in bleak, stainless steel cages, forced to ingest drugs every day that made them feel sick, and then killed for dissection, was gut-wrenching and utterly heartbreaking. Make no mistake, toxicology testing on animals causes a really high level of suffering. Once you have seen what has happened to animals in toxicology testing you cannot un-see it. This video confirmed for me what I have always believed—that testing for trivial purposes is utterly and completely indefensible. I know that there are thousands of decent New Zealanders out there who share that conviction. This is what has driven us to march in the streets and drives our passion. The great thing about prohibiting animal testing of recreational drugs is that it will drive innovation and uptake of non-animal testing in New Zealand, something that needs to happen and is long overdue. The animals deserve it from us.

This is a surreal time in the history of this Parliament. If we were to close our eyes for a moment and think back 8 months, there was a clamour in this House to enable the importers and the retailers of these mind-altering chemicals to have an opportunity to go out and exploit the vulnerable, the poor, the lonely, and the dispossessed, and to sell them these dangerous, mind-altering chemicals for a profit, and watch them slowly and progressively, in front of their families and in their communities, go mad—go mad.

It was TV3’s Campbell Live programme that, by instalments, showed every member of this Parliament the madness of the decision that was taken 8 months ago by 120 members of this House to give this social experiment a burl. It has been a failure. The process we are going through this afternoon is a time-honoured process of dead rat swallowing. We got it wrong. I voted against it, but we got it wrong. I said taiho, but we got it wrong. I said that it was a crazy thing to do, but we got it wrong. This Parliament got it wrong. It got it wrong. It got it badly wrong. Night after night on TV3 at 7 o’clock we saw the madness of what this Parliament did.

The greed-driven drug importers and retailers were making a fortune, and many of our young and vulnerable people were behaving like fruit-loops—like fruit-loops. So I say again in this Parliament today that we have got to get it right. We owe it to these young people who are lonely, depressed, out of work, out of hope, and looking for an opportunity to refresh their lives and give themselves some sense of worth. But taking drugs like mind-altering substances will not do it, and I am stating that on the record in Parliament today.

It is a bad idea to take these substances. It is a bad idea to drink far too much alcohol. It is a bad idea to smoke cigarettes. It is very expensive. In my long life I have never met anyone who has had an addiction to drugs, alcohol, tobacco, or to any mind-altering substances—I have not met one person in my long life—who has said that it has made a difference, that they feel good about it, and that it has changed their life for the good. Not one person has ever said that to me. So we should proceed with this bill, the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill today.

I suppose, on a lighter note, I can thank Moonbeam the cat—the Prime Minister’s cat. That beautiful animal runs around his home in Parnell in the centre of my electorate, and when the Prime Minister comes home from work each week he looks at that cat and says that he could not possibly allow that animal to be tortured to death in the name of, and at the altar of, a mind-altering drug experiment. Coming back, he said that it cannot happen to beagle puppies and that it will not, and that it cannot happen and should not happen to rabbits, and now it will not. New Zealand is now saying no to animal testing for these mind-altering fun drugs, which is exactly what I—and to be fair, some of my colleagues—begged this Parliament to do 8 months ago. The numbers did not fall our way and the Mad Hatter’s tea party began.

This Parliament should apologise to the young and the vulnerable, the sick and the poor, and those people looking for a high in life when there is so much low. We should be apologising to them today for giving them, and selling them, a fraud. Taking drugs to make you feel better is a fraud, and we in this Parliament should be role models and saying no to these mind-altering drugs. If these substances have to be tested to make sure that they are safe, and whether they are necessary—and they are not—then we should never, ever sacrifice any animal at the altar of an experiment to try to prove that they are safe. The bottom line is—and everyone knows this in this House—that these substances will never be safe. These substances will never be safe.

The original bill was well intentioned—I will gave that much credit to this House—in that it sought to ensure that psychoactive substances are safe, but it was deeply flawed—deeply flawed. All the assumptions were deeply flawed. Every single member of Parliament who voted for it should stand up this afternoon and say that they got it wrong. I am prepared, as a member of this House, to say that I voted against it but we got it wrong. So we can put it right. The Prime Minister took leadership on the weekend and said that the Government is going to get it right, so full marks to the Prime Minister. It is 8 months overdue, but full marks to the Prime Minister.

So what have we got here, in the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill? Animals cannot be tested in this country to prove that these things are safe. You will never prove that these things are safe as long as the cows start walking home, because they will never be safe. We should say in this Parliament today that these are dangerous substances and they will never be safe, no matter what experiment you use and what jurisdiction it comes from. They will never be safe.

As for evidence of harm—there is plenty of evidence of harm. We do not need to sacrifice beagle puppies on a gurney, with their ears stapled to the ground, and gas being pumped into them until they get to the LD50—half of them expire—to know that these substances are dangerous. We all know they are dangerous. The Assistant Speaker knows they are dangerous. Every member of Parliament knows they are dangerous. Our fine Minister of Health knows they are dangerous. We are taking them off the shelf. I know that there will be people out there who will say that it is their right to smoke this, to suck that, to inhale this, and to drink something else. But it is our responsibility to say to people that it is bad for their health and to be very careful—very, very careful.

This bill is a vast improvement, on the animal welfare front, on the original, flawed bill. We have not actually taken the opportunity to slam shut the door on animal testing, because animal testing done offshore that is detrimental to the safety of one of these substances can be used to turn that substance down. I ask the Minister and I ask the Government whether they would say “Let’s do that and go back from today—but not for the future—so, as of midnight tonight, these drugs that have been tested on hapless beagle puppies and proved to be unsafe is a reason for us turning them down.” But we should have said in this bill that no evidence from any animal testing from any part of the world will ever form part of a decision to give the tick for one of these dangerous substances. That is what I wanted, and maybe in 10 years’ time when I am back again we can revisit this legislation and do it again.

What I want to do is finish as I began. I am going to accept my part of the responsibility for the Mad Hatters’ tea party that we have inflicted across the country on so many of the participants. It has been a bad experiment, and this Parliament got it badly wrong. But today we are fixing the wrong, because we can all make errors of judgment and mistakes. New Zealand says to the rest of the world today that, first and foremost, we do not believe that there should be any animal testing on any product under any circumstances, unless it is for pharmaceutical lifesaving reasons, because we believe in respect for all animals. We believe in the sanctity and the dignity of all the animals—however big or small—that we share this world with.

That is the message from this Parliament—we are not going to sacrifice animals at the altar of mind-altering drugs. We are saying no to drugs today, and we are telling young people that taking drugs is a very, very risky business and that this Parliament’s responsibility is to try to help educate them on that front.

I stand on behalf of New Zealand First to take a call on the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. We all know in this House that psychoactive substances are a blight on New Zealand society, and, at long last, this legislation will take these products off the shelves. There is little doubt that Parliament—and we are accepting our role in this—made an error with the previous legislation. We should have included a safety requirement in the legislation that these substances be proven to be safe prior to being available for sale, and, of course, we should have had an animal welfare aspect in it as well. We are pleased that amendments have been made, and we are committed to ensuring that this bill passes through the House as soon as possible so that these products can be taken off the shelves and right away from young people.

Legal high manufacturers and resellers should definitely not be rolling in profits while the users are becoming a burden on our health system and experiencing dangerous withdrawals and terrible effects, and, of course, many of them are committing crimes in our neighbourhood so that they can continue to purchase these substances. It is just not good enough. None of this should ever have happened. This legislation should be right at this particular time, and we are very pleased that urgency has been accorded to this particular legislation.

Ironically, we heard through the select committee process for the original bill how difficult it was to remove all of the products from sale and off the shelves. We will not deny that this is not easy. It never is easy, but, at last, today we have actually done something in this Parliament. We are pleased that urgency has been accorded to this particular bill. We have had so many constituents coming to our offices almost daily to tell of their trials and tribulations with these products. We have heard from parents at their wits’ end, unable to keep their families functioning. It has been so sad.

New Zealand First believes that the Government now owes it to the people of our country to ensure that there are dedicated services for people whose lives have been negatively impacted by the presence of legal highs—addiction services and counselling for parents and families who want to get their lives back on track. This has been a terrible experiment. We guarantee that there is a need for these services back in the community. It is not easy for anyone, and it will not be easy for anyone until these addictive substances are out of the system of everybody who is taking them.

When the Psychoactive Substances Bill was passed in Parliament we all believed that it was going to prevent the kinds of harm that our communities are experiencing. We have been too slow, basically, in removing these products from sale, but we are pleased that the day has come when they are removed. To that end, we are very glad to be here today to fix the mess that has been created while we waited for the law to take effect. I was delighted to hear the Hon Tony Ryall say that from Thursday these products will not be available for sale in any shop in New Zealand.

We are absolutely rapt to hear that manufacturers have to prove that their products are safe, and that no animals are going to be unduly tested to ensure that the products are safe. “Low risk” is a subjective term that we do have some qualms about, and if that term is not changed, perhaps the legislation will be back in Parliament again so that we can change it. We cannot afford to again expose our people in New Zealand to products that are not safe. These products need to undergo a testing regime that is similar to the pharmaceutical regime—very thorough and very detailed. We also support the new laws that prevent any information from animal testing being used for recreational drugs. This should really set a precedent for the future, and alternatives to animal testing must be explored now, with this legislation.

In closing, we are very happy in New Zealand First to finally see some progress, which we hope will immediately benefit the people who are putting themselves in danger by using these untested psychoactive substances. New Zealand First has said very strongly right from the beginning that we believe that these products need to be banned. It is important for action to be swift. We are delighted that it is, and, hopefully, by the end of the day, we will know, and can rest assured, that from Thursday we will ensure that our communities and our people are safe right through New Zealand.

Let us take a little bit of a history lesson with the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill, and go back to the late 1990s, when psychoactive substances—so-called legal highs—emerged in New Zealand. They were a very new entity and it took until 2008 for benzylpiperazine, or BZP, to essentially be banned through use of the Misuse of Drugs Act schedules. Those legal highs were taken off the shelf, but the manufacturers of legal highs had already worked out that they could circumvent the legislation by altering the chemical compounds of these drugs, and already had a strategy, basically, to beat that legislation. They have successfully done so for many years since then, in the cat and mouse game in terms of these drugs always falling outside the current legislation, the Misuse of Drugs Act.

In July 2013 the Psychoactive Substances Bill was Peter Dunne’s and this Government’s effort to say: “Let’s take away the ability for them to do that and put the onus on them to prove that these products are safe.” In my view, that standard of proof should be a very, very high one. Ultimately, what it really resulted in was a situation whereby in order for psychoactive substances to be available, they had to have gone through a rigorous process, including clinical testing and tests on animals, so that they could be passed through as a low-risk product at the end. It is my belief that the starting point should always have been—and it certainly has been, in my mind—that we did not want these drugs out there, but by reversing the onus, it took away the ability for the drug manufacturers to hold all the tools.

So we got ourselves into a territory through this new model where essentially we are blazing new territory in world drug policy. Everyone knows that, and, actually, many people around the world are looking at New Zealand. So it is sort of, if you like, pioneering stuff. It is not an easy track to take. If people had the answers to this, they would have been trotted out many, many years ago. So we have gone down this track. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, we can accept that the products that were allowed to stay on the shelf as part of the transitional regime were dangerous. We are dealing with chemicals, compounds, and combinations thereof that are virtually unknown to science. It does not surprise me that we saw this sort of level of harm emerge once the bulk of the other ones were removed. This Government has moved quickly to actually say, that being the case, we need to get those off the shelf and recalibrate. Part of that recalibration is accepting that removing animal testing raises the bar. I have no problem with that.

If that means that some will go underground as a consequence of this, then so be it, because I say to members in this House and I say to members of the public that there will always be some who do not obey laws regardless of what they are, but, in the main, laws are there to guide society and to guide people who do obey laws as to what is right and what is wrong. Therefore, the laws are really about providing consequences to those lawless people who will not obey them regardless of what they are. Not making laws because the lawless will not follow them anyway is not what we should do. What we should be doing is intending to guide the law-abiding citizens and ensure that the direction that we believe is safe and appropriate is the track that they go down.

Although there will be some unintended consequences in terms of the degree of use underground, that will always happen regardless of what the drug is and regardless of what the law is, because there will always be some who do not obey the laws regardless of what they are. This is not so much of a U-turn as it is actually responding to what is pioneering legislation and difficult legislation, because we are trying to get ahead of the ability for drug makers to spin their chemical mixtures well ahead of legislative responses, so it is pragmatic and it does respond to the concerns of community. I commend members in the House. I am actually disgusted that the Green Party is taking the approach that it is in this particular debate given the harms that it is causing out here. But I commend this as being a solution to an ongoing and evolving problem.

Let us call it what it is. This Government got the Psychoactive Substances Act wrong. This Government got the law wrong. The Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill is an unprecedented U-turn—an unprecedented U-turn—by a shaky Government. Of course we support it. Of course we support it, because we made the Government do it. We made it do it, alongside the tens of thousands of people in every community around New Zealand, the desperate families, the Campbell Live show—yes, John Campbell and the Campbell Live show—the radio stations, and the newspapers, including my own newspaper in Dunedin, the Otago Daily Times. This is the result of community pressure. This Government got the law terribly wrong.

When we voted for the original legislation, we did so on the basis that it would rid our community of these substances. But what happened? They went out of the dairies, but instantly a whole lot of new outlets—47—popped up. They got pretty much instant interim licences, and many of them are now selling only legal highs. Eight of those were in Dunedin. One of those is in south Dunedin, and it is situated next to SF Otago, which is a community mental health facility. It has caused huge numbers of problems in the Dunedin community. [Interruption] I challenge the member across the House who lives in Dunedin to say that it has not. He laughs at the Opposition over here for raising this issue. It popped up a week after the Psychoactive Substances Act was passed, and it has created a massive number of problems.

What else have we seen? What have we seen since then? Attempts to try to get that facility closed have failed, because the Ministry of Health said that it could not do anything about it. The Dunedin City Council said that its hands were tied. Meanwhile, a Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority, a very small group of people, was formed in the corner of an open-plan office in the Ministry of Health to try to manage these issues—it is trying to manage them unsuccessfully. And what did it do? It gave licences to 47 outlets. It reduced around 300 substances to 42. It did not put in place a testing regime. Of those 42 substances that remained on the shelves in these purpose-built opened facilities with the interim licences from the Ministry of Health, they had even worse substances that were given the licences to be sold.

I want to show you the monthly report from the National Poisons Centre. In fact, here is a colour version of the graph, because it is a much better version for the people watching at home. The bar graph in red is the number of calls made to the National Poisons Centre in April of this year. It is higher than any number of calls that were made all throughout the last couple of years. From August last year when the Act was passed, the numbers have consistently been high. What they show is that the substances that have been left on the shelves have been more concentrated, have been more deadly, and have had worse and worse effects on people in our community. We are seeing worse effects from withdrawal. We are seeing people vomiting for days, unable to eat and unable to sleep. Psychiatrists are reporting that up to 40 percent of patients that they are seeing are related to legal highs.

These are shocking, shocking statistics. They are shocking concerns for our country. It was a shocking state of affairs to see the legislation pass through this House, legislation from a Government that claimed that it was going to sort this problem out. We are now hearing that there are fears that the long-term effects of these psychoactive substances may be permanent, and that there needs to be a lot more research done on this. There needs to be a lot more resources put into this. But what happened? What happened back in July last year when we raised these issues in the debate on the Psychoactive Substances Bill as it passed before the House? We raised the issues of the importance of providing more resources to the health system, and what happened? Nothing. Nothing happened.

I will read to you what was said in this House by me during the second reading of the Psychoactive Substances Bill. I said: “I was invited to and attended a symposium in Dunedin at the Wakari Hospital, which is run by the district health board and mental health services, and it included people working in inpatient services, community-based mental health services, emergency psychiatric services, specialist alcohol and drug services, and others. … They said that synthetic cannabis was a clinical burden on health services, that emergency department patients had cyclical vomiting and seizures from smoking synthetic cannabis, and that many of the patients had experienced delayed seizures up to a day after smoking synthetic cannabis.” They said that there was an increased demand on the health services. We said, and we had put into the commentary on the Psychoactive Substances Bill, that there would be an increased demand on the health services.

Where has the reponse been from this Government around dealing with that increased demand? What did it do? It created a small group of people who sat in the corner of an open-plan office in the Ministry of Health and could not deal with the situation that they had been left with as the result of the bill passing. We raised these issues back in August. The National Poisons Centre has told us that the incidence of severe effects is going up and up every single month. A report produced in a recent edition of New Zealand Doctor magazine, written by Leo Schep, who is the toxicologist at Dunedin Hospital and who is widely considered reputable and credible on these issues, said that “The ease of access and legal availability of these products has … created a substantial increase in the numbers of patients attending emergency departments and medical centres … The National Poisons Centre … had more calls last year about synthetic cannabinoids than any other single drug of abuse category.” He went on to describe the effects, which I have just read out, but what he also raised is that there is serious concern about the risk of causing ongoing neuro-psychiatric effects. This is one of the reasons that we had to get the legislation right, and we did not get it right. The Government did not get it right last year. We have to get it right this year.

Where are the resources? Where are the resources that are going to be provided in our communities after this bill is passed? Hopefully it will be passed and it will receive the Royal assent late on Wednesday night or early on Thursday morning, which will make every single one of these substances unauthorised—unauthorised—and they will need to be taken off the shelves. There will be 2 weeks for there to be inspections of all those licensed premises to ensure that the substances are gone. Where are the resources, though, in our health system that are going to be dealing with the effects? Where is the Government on this? Where is the Government saying that it is going to put increased health resources into the community? This is a no-brainer.

There was a second U-turn this week—I know that my colleagues have talked about this—and that was in respect of the 46,000 people over 48 hours who signed a petition to ban animal testing. That, again, is a no-brainer. This is a bill that we must pass. We must get it through this House this week, but the Government needs to own up and say that it got the original legislation wrong.

It is my intention to take just a short call on the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill in the name of the Minister of Health, the Hon Tony Ryall. In doing so, I am pleased to note that as of 8 May at 12.01, the products that are currently on the market will become unapproved products, that there will be heavy penalties for selling or supplying them, and that it will also become illegal to possess them. That should be an adequate warning to anyone who is considering stockpiling.

I say that 20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing; 20/20 foresight, however, is a far more rare and unusual thing. It amazes me that the previous speaker from the Labour Party, Clare Curran, could stand up and regale the House with her version of history and her version of what she thinks is the truth when she and her party voted to support this legislation, as did every other member in the House, with the honourable exception of the Hon John Banks, the member for Epsom. When he was speaking earlier on in this debate, he said we collectively got it wrong, and we probably did. We did collectively get it wrong, and the mistake we made was to apply a transition period to these drugs. We thought, as a collective House, that that was the right thing to do. It turns out that it was not. These are complicated issues. They are not just complicated issues for this Parliament, for New Zealand, and for New Zealanders but they are complicated issues for the entire world.

Just a week or two ago in Time magazine I noticed there was a very good and comprehensive article about how the Americans are trying to grapple with this exact same issue. The article said “The most complicated drug problem in the world right now isn’t meth or cocaine or heroin. It is synthetic drugs,”. I want to make just a single point before sitting down and commending this bill to the House. It has got to do with the Greens’ position on this bill. Many of us put in a lot of time and effort to convince a lot of voters and put forward compelling cases as to why we should come to this Parliament to represent our constituencies and the people who put us in this Parliament. To come to Parliament and then as a caucus make a united decision to abstain on a hard piece of legislation is the ultimate parliamentary cop-out. The Greens to come to this House and sanctimoniously lecture members of the House about their positions on a whole range of issues, yet when they come to a hard decision, simply not to take it and not to make it is, as I say, the absolute, ultimate cop-out. I am sure that Green supporters all around the country are watching that lack of decision on their part.

There is an old proverb that says that when you reach a fork in the road, take it—when you reach a fork in the road, take it. My invitation to the Greens is that they should reconsider their cop-out position and that they should reconsider their decision to abstain from this legislation. They should actually come out, make a decision, and show that maybe one day in the future they could potentially be a fit and able coalition partner for a future Government many, many years away from today. But right now they have shown and proved completely and conclusively that they are not fit to make any kind of hard decision and that they do not do so on the hard issues of the day. I commend this bill to the House.

Kia ora, Mr Assistant Speaker. Thank you very much for giving me an opportunity to participate in the first reading of the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. I do so as a member of the Health Committee, which considered the original piece of legislation. I want to acknowledge the 119 of us in this House who voted in support of that legislation. I was one of those people. But I do want to highlight a couple of learning opportunities for us as a Parliament. The first learning opportunity was the manner in which that bill was rushed through the House. The reality is we had a truncated process to meet a deadline that the Government knew about. It forced us as a Parliament to rush through a piece of legislation we are now here having to correct. The reason we are here to correct it is that the people of New Zealand collectively have come out, they have marched, and they have shown that democracy in this country works. I also need to pay tribute to John Campbell and the Campbell Live programme for allowing the content of our community to be seen and for allowing the large number of people in communities around our country who have huge problems with these substances to have the forum, have the platform, to then influence this Government.

As a member of the select committee, I thought it was very interesting that the transition provisions—you are right—were put into the original legislation because we did not want blanket prohibition. That was the reality. We recognised that there were products in the country that needed to be regulated. We did not want prohibition, so what we did was say that if the products had been sold within the last 3 months, that was the qualification for them to be sold. But the major flaw in the bill that we as a collective group of parliamentarians enacted on 18 July last year was that we were to develop regulations around the approval process for psychoactive products. What the public of New Zealand needs to know is that the Ministry of Health was empowered with that responsibility. It was the responsibility of the then Associate Minister of Health Todd McClay to implement that piece of legislation.

What I have just found out through one of his own press releases is that on 21 March this year the Ministry of Health concluded its submission process. So, in fact, the Ministry of Health at this point in time has not developed the approval process, which is actually the biggest flaw in the Act that we are now aiming to address. That is absolutely the fault of the Government. The Government is trying to say it is the fault of Parliament. Actually, it is not; it is the fault of the Government.

What I want to do is acknowledge our local councils, because we did empower our local councils to develop local approved products policy. What I know is that in my community of Manurewa, my local board organised a meeting on 14 August last year so that my community could participate in a process to develop our local approved products policy. Local councils like Napier City Council and Hamilton City Council were on to it. Our councils, our elected local board officials, were on to it. This Parliament was not on to it. We are all here tonight rushing this bill through because of the implementation of the primary piece of legislation, which that Government absolutely has to take responsibility for, because unless you have developed a regime—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

I thought it was appropriate after the dinner break to talk about why this Parliament voted for the Psychoactive Substances Act. It became a problem for us as a country because on 1 August 2013 there were temporary class drug notices that were going to expire. That would have enabled 30 substances in 50 products that we had deemed unsafe to go back on to the market. So it was with some urgency that we rushed the legislation through. For those people listening, Associate Minister of Health Dunne introduced the bill on 26 February 2013. The first reading was on 9 April, the second reading was on 27 June, the Committee stage was on 9 July, and we passed the legislation on 17 July. So my primary point before the dinner break was that on 18 July, when the Psychoactive Substances Act became an Act of the New Zealand Parliament, no regulations had been created. The importance of those regulations was, in fact, in the development of a psychoactive products approval process. In fact, one of the reasons we are here today is that the Government to this day has not implemented a regime that would see us engage in a process that could deem products to be safe and fit for human consumption.

One of the wins I believe we had on the Health Committee was ensuring that the purpose of the Psychoactive Substances Act—and I am going to read it—was “to regulate the availability of psychoactive substances in New Zealand to protect the health of, and minimise harm to, individuals who use psychoactive substances.” So as a House, as representatives of communities right across the country, we did recognise that we had to do something. So I want to acknowledge the Ministers who have been involved in this piece of legislation. Initially, it was the Hon Peter Dunne, then it was the Hon Todd McClay, and now we see the Hon Tony Ryall leading the passage of this Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill through the House.

But one of the major issues of contention, I guess, has been around section 66 of the Psychoactive Substances Act. As a member of the select committee, we were really clear that we wanted to empower local communities to develop local approved products policy. What we saw was a very mobilised, energised community and local government sector, which undertook that task earnestly. So we saw Napier City Council come out in early January 2014 with a comprehensive local approved products policy, but the problem that we had was that the regime that should have regulated whether or not products were safe for consumption by New Zealanders was not implemented, and to this day it is not implemented.

I do want to highlight, as a member of the select committee, that we were not able to hear submissions about whether or not psychoactive substances should be tested on animals. I would like to acknowledge Mojo Mathers for the leadership that she showed in actually holding her own hearings and getting a lot of New Zealanders to make submissions outside of the select committee process. In fact, my colleague the Hon Trevor Mallard has been engaged in a process just recently that has led to 48,000 New Zealanders being very clear that they do not want to test these products on animals.

I just want to clarify for the record the position of the Hon John Banks. On 27 June in the second reading debate on the Psychoactive Substances Bill he said: “If you cannot prove your [new-found] drug of choice is safe without putting animals in abject misery, you cannot sell the drug.” So the emphasis for the Hon John Banks was, in fact, about protecting animals. I understand that, and I commend him for that position. But when we look at his vote against that bill, it was not because he did not want these products to be sold; he just did not want animals used in the testing regime to determine whether or not those substances were safe.

I think we were all very clear as a Parliament that prohibition from a central government perspective was not the solution. We unfortunately have been flooded in terms of the market for these products. But what I would like to highlight in my final few minutes are two issues that I think are going to be really important going forward and that the Minister will have to oversee. One is around enforcement of the products. So at 1 minute past midnight on Thursday when this legislation has Royal assent and becomes the law of the country, we have to make sure that police are empowered with the resources to ensure that a black market does not develop. In fact, that was one of the compelling reasons why we as a select committee approved this bill, because we were worried about the products that were in the country.

The second issue is the health and well-being of addicts. Because these products have been allowed to be sold in our communities, we need to ensure—and Minister, this is, I guess, directly under your responsibility—that people who have addictions, people who have mental health issues, and people who need support, through no fault of their own, can access support, whether it be counselling or other forms of support to help them through this process. Obviously, none of us want people to transition from these drugs to other, illegal drugs. They need support, so that will be one of the critical follow-ups. My colleague Iain Lees-Galloway who holds this shadow portfolio—

Order! The member’s time has expired.

Bill read a first time.

Second Reading