Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill

I move, That the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Health Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time, I will move that the committee report the bill back to the House by 22 July 2019.

The bill amends the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975. The use of synthetic drugs is a major public health problem. Since June 2017, there has been a total of 50 to 55 deaths provisionally linked to the use of two dangerous synthetic drugs, 5F-ADB and AMB-FUBINACA. To address this problem, we need a public health response that focuses on prevention, harm reduction, and early intervention.

This bill makes three key changes. It will classify AMB-FUBINACA and 5F-ADB as class A drugs. It will reaffirm the existing police discretion and specify that when considering whether a prosecution is required in the public interest for drug possession and use, consideration should be given to whether a therapeutic approach would be more beneficial. This discretion exists for all drug offences. It will enable temporary drug class orders to be issued to better control emerging and potentially harmful substances.

This bill provides immediate measures to reduce the supply of drugs in New Zealand right now. Classification of AMB-FUBINACA and 5F-ADB gives police and customs greater search and seizure powers, meaning that they will be better able to disrupt supply and reduce the availability of these drugs to people who use them. Police already use their discretion when deciding whether to prosecute for personal possession and use drug offences. The bill reaffirms this approach, which is consistent with current operational policy and is supported by the police.

This amendment aligns with the Government’s intent to treat drug use as a health issue and help people stop their drug use. The synthetic drug market is rapidly evolving, with new drugs constantly emerging. Temporary drug class orders mean that we will be able to respond more appropriately and more quickly to potentially harmful new synthetic drugs. Temporary class drug orders are substantially similar to a previous provision, the temporary class drug notices, which operated well for several years prior to the passing of the Psychoactive Substances Act.

The bill will ensure that enforcement powers and penalties are focused on those who import, manufacture, and supply dangerous drugs, and not the people who use the drugs themselves. We want to make sure that those who are in the web of addiction are supported to give up the drugs that they are dependent upon. The report of the Government Inquiry into Mental Health and Addiction has recommended reforming drug policy and laws with a focus on minimising harm and promoting health while increasing addiction services. Our response is consistent with these recommendations, ensuring that people aren’t unnecessarily criminalised for using drugs and instead can access the health and social support services that they need. We’ve seen too many drug-related deaths and hospitalisations over the last few years. Action is needed to prevent and reduce further drug-related harm.

In closing, I want to thank Jenny Marcroft and Darroch Ball, the respective health and justice spokespersons for New Zealand First, and Chlöe Swarbrick, spokesperson on drug law reform for the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand. They’ve been highly willing and constructive contributors to this bill, and the bill is consistent with both of their parties’ coalition and confidence and supply agreements with the Labour Party of New Zealand.

This bill is important as we tackle drugs which have caused deaths and harm in our community. It is a response that we need to progress urgently but also thoroughly to ensure that the war on drugs approach, which has failed our communities and seen too many die, is not allowed to continue, and that instead we continue with an approach that gets tough on the suppliers of these drugs and puts them in face of the full force of the law but also treats compassionately those who are caught in the web of addiction to ensure they are given the support they need to beat the drugs that are bringing them down. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you for the opportunity to take a call on this bill. Finally, we’re getting into changing the classification of two drugs in particular around synthetics, which I’m sure everybody in this House will agree is an absolute scourge on our society and it’s time it was done.

I noted that the Minister talked about urgency. It’s a shame that, actually, they did block the third reading of Simeon Brown’s bill, because that would have actually made that happen today. So if that had gone through—

💬 Darroch Ball: No he didn’t.

Well, we took a point of order, Mr Ball, and we actually did call out for that third reading to happen today, and it was voted down by the Government. But if you’d like us to put it again, Mr Ball, we would really like to, because that would mean that it would be in straight away, and that’s important, because if we are talking urgency, we wouldn’t need to wait for that to go through yet another select committee process and go through a discussion. I think there would be immediate agreement in this House that those two drugs in particular should be made class A. We should be increasing the penalties that go alongside of that for those that are supplying this sick drug, quite frankly, that is killing our young people and others that are in a really desperate state to be taking something that’s so insidious and dangerous.

So we support that part of it—there’s no two ways about it. Twelve months is too slow. So we’re 18 months in; 12 months ago, they talked about making these changes. We now have to wait about another six to eight months for it to go through the House process. As I say, it’s a real shame that that third reading of the bill couldn’t come in. We’ll be bringing that in via Simeon Brown’s bill. It’s already been through the process, and I hope that it does.

I would also like to agree with the temporary drug class orders. So there are different drugs coming on the market all the time. Unfortunately, our suppliers and manufacturers make so much money out of it that they are finding different ways to actually manufacture it and use different chemicals. As such, I think it makes sense that you can have a temporary order that can come in, and, as a consequence, that means—it’s for 12 months, is the way I read the bill—that while they work through the process as to whether or not it should go into the system and be made a regulation completely, immediately the police can react to it. Also, I reckon it might help with some of those health aspects of it—that by identifying it legally and through the system as a temporary class, it also means it might help those medical practitioners that are dealing with people.

Now, I come to what I want to spend the bulk of my few minutes talking about and the bit that I have some issue with. It is important that we get the kind of actual wording of this right. But the Minister talked about the measures that are being introduced to address the harm being caused by synthetics, and addressing the other requires a health-based response rather than a punitive one so that people can access the health and social support services that they need. The actual wording for the bill is, from Part 1, clause 6, new section 5, “To avoid doubt, it is affirmed that there is a discretion to prosecute for an offence against this section, and a prosecution should not be brought unless it is required in the public interest.” So a prosecution should not be brought for those that are supposedly either addicted or just taking all classes of drugs. And that’s a big call, right? That is different than what the police currently do. In some respects, it might be all right as far as a health—it might be, actually.

So this is decriminalisation, in effect—this is decriminalisation. Let’s go through this. So, effectively, now, in law—so, actually, this is not normal, for this to be in law. Normally, the way that the police operate is not ever written in legislation like this, and particularly police having discretion around certain areas is not written in legislation like this. So this is completely different, right? Let’s not underestimate how different this is.

💬 Greg O’Connor: Anti-smacking bill—got through because of John Key.

This is different, and it’s in the same actual part of the Act as the anti-smacking. So that’s about what it is like, and it’s very rare, and it is not usual, and it means that Parliament is now instructing the police as to how they want them to act. And that’s all right. That might be where we end up—it might be where we end up, but decriminalisation of drugs is huge, and we’re talking all drugs.

Let me give you some examples of what that actually means. So in Portugal, for example—as many in this House will know—they actually decriminalised all drugs and have gone for a 100 percent health response. You know what, depending on which bit of evidence you want to read and which way you want to do your argument, there’s evidence for all sorts of different stuff, but for some, you’ve got to say, it’s working. What they have done, though—let’s be really careful—is they took eight years to bring that in—eight years. So they went through an eight-year process of making sure that they asked the right questions, had the right services.

They have set up what they call their panels throughout—sorry, they don’t call them panels, but they’ve got the whole treatment model, and what they have there is a referral that goes from police to those panels. It’s compulsory that people go to them. At that panel are three health experts that genuinely sit down with the person and look at their health needs and what they can do to help them, and whether or not it’s a one-off recreational or whether or not it is someone that has got a true addiction. They then make sure and back up that the right services are there for them over a two-year period as a minimum. We’re not proposing that.

We are proposing that a front-line police officer looks at someone who is either taking P or taking marijuana and decides whether or not they have an addiction problem or that this is a one or two - off recreational, whether or not they need full health assistance—they then might suggest them to them. There is not the back-up to make sure. Well, I don’t know what the regime is that is being proposed. It is a sentence in a bill that is absolutely important. We are talking about health and addiction and, actually, we do all care about that. All of us have actually had examples and extended friends and family and people we love who have been hooked on insidious drugs that have destroyed lives, but you can’t do it by putting a sentence in a piece of legislation that the country doesn’t understand, that hasn’t got health professionals actually making a call on, and that is putting more strain on our police officers in an area that they are not experts in.

So if decriminalisation is what the Government thinks this country should be heading down the path of, well, let’s talk about it. Let’s make sure we don’t put $16.6 million in; let’s make sure we put $100 million in, because that’s what it will take to actually even start to get to the length of care that some people are going to need when they’re hooked on this stuff. Let’s actually debate the real—because this, in my mind, could be more dangerous. This could actually see people not going up in front of the right experts and getting the right help.

In Portugal, for example, there’s a certain amount that you can be carrying that means that police will not prosecute you because that’s personal use. What is the amount? So what’s the difference between someone that is supplying—and is manufacturing and supplying—and someone that is carrying for personal use? So we don’t have that kind of detail or anything in it. Actually, that is really important. It is really important. So where are the differences if you are going down a whole other regime of how we treat this?

As I say, I’m not against it and I think there is something in it for a health response, but it cannot be done by stealth. It cannot be done by two sentences in a health bill that is going through that is raising synthetics. The country deserves more. Our health people and our health experts deserve more, and certainly those people that are caught in addiction deserve more as well.

How are we going to get the police now making the kinds of calls on “A bit of heroin’s OK on you, but I’m carrying a bit and I think you might be supplying it to someone else.”? So that police officer will now make that kind of call, but they’re not sure because they’re put in such a very rare occurrence, having Parliament actually putting it in legislation. If we are, then let’s put up health panels. Let’s make sure we’re putting in the absolute tens of millions of dollars that are needed to provide the kinds of services that people will need, and it’s in that vein that I just can’t support this bill and the National Party won’t be.

E Te Māngai, tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare. I hope that I can address some of the concerns raised by the Hon Paula Bennett in my contribution to supporting this Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill. This Act is over 40 years old and it requires, quite frankly, a complete overhaul, which is something that I think both myself and Ms Bennett can agree with, because instead of reducing drug harm, what we’ve actually seen is a colossal increase in it.

I didn’t come to Parliament to advocate for drug law reform. To be honest, it wasn’t even really on my radar. I came in here to advocate for constitutional reform, because I was passionate about that. But then the Greens helped to form the Government, Julie Anne Genter became a Minister, and, as a backbench MP, I inherited her medicinal cannabis misuse of drugs amendment member’s bill. I began digging into the detail and the lives and stories of those who were affected by the Misuse of Drugs Act. I found that some people are prosecuted and other people aren’t. I found that different police use different criteria to decide to use their discretion. I found that different people use different drugs for different reasons. And I found that the war on drugs is disproportionately a war on the poor. Imprisoning drug users to bring about sobriety is like bombing for peace. It does not work. In fact, it actually makes things far worse; it causes irreparable generational damage.

I continued my research down the rabbit hole and learned about countries like Portugal, raised by Ms Bennett, which, 20 years ago, removed criminal penalties for the use and possession of drugs in response to a spate of heroin deaths. All negative statistics associated with drugs—overdose deaths, hospital admissions, problematic use, substance dependency, even youth usage—have gone down as a result. More than 50 people died in Aotearoa New Zealand as a result of using synthetic drugs last year. They were among the poorest and most vulnerable in our society. I spoke to those who work in housing the homeless and they estimated that this death toll is just the tip of the iceberg. In the meantime, politicians have bickered about going hard on drugs.

I participated in the debate because I felt like I knew the research and the evidence, and I knew that the Greens had an alternative rational solution for drug law reform that could save lives. And then Tyrone died. Tyrone Smith was an artist. He created a cartoon series called Happy Space, with characters like Peng Peng, the penguin strapped in a spacesuit and a jetpack that I have worn on my lapel for the past few months in Tyrone’s memory.

The coroner deemed Tyrone’s cause of death as pneumonia and pharmaceutical drug toxicity. He was 49 years old. He left behind a loving partner, friends, and whānau. We sung “Anchor Me” at his funeral. Tyrone used to joke to his siblings that all of his ducks had lined up. He didn’t mean what most people do when they say that. He had three ducks that he often spoke about: a problematic birth; dyslexia, meaning he found it difficult to engage in school and get his qualifications; and his dad’s death when he was 11 years old.

Tyrone first tried drugs—cannabis to begin with—at the age of 15. He said he liked the way it made him feel numb. He said it took away the pain. So he looked for harder drugs. Tyrone went through rehab after rehab. He was lucky and had unconditional love from his family, but the broken system and the stigma our society upholds with the mantra of this war on drugs saw Tyrone slip through the net, and as a result he left us too early. Tyrone’s story is not an anomaly. I want to thank him and his family for allowing me to tell it. This bill is for Tyrone and for other substance-dependent people and their whānau who don’t know where or who to turn to for help and cannot navigate a system that demonises and ostracises and doesn’t want to touch them.

Politicians have said for years and years and years that we have got to be hard on drugs. But what on earth does that mean, because what we have seen is more drugs and greater harm proliferation throughout communities across this country and, indeed, across the world. What we have seen is people die. What we have seen is our prisons clog up. And what we have seen is good money thrown after bad and the situation getting worse. What we’ve seen is that this hard on drugs line is nothing but a nice piece of virtue signalling. But worse than signalling virtue, worse than doing nothing, this moral posturing has cost lives and communities and generations of whānau and their well-being.

Yesterday, I was in Northland speaking to police and the district health board officials involved Te Ara Oranga. In conversation, we really tried to drill down into the reasons why decent but often downtrodden people get involved in drug dealing. It turns out, basically, that a lot of the time the gangs are offering our kids better prospects than we are. Put yourself in the shoes of rangatahi in a regional town that’s been ravaged by the retreat of economic opportunity. Maybe there’s been some trouble at home. Your future offers a fork in the road. On the one side you can grind, you can get a minimum-wage job, and try and scrape together enough to build a life. That is indeed the admirable path, and one that many take. But the other path is offered by the guys in cool clothes who ride up and down the street on flash motorcycles. They tell you that you can make money like they do, they recognise them, they’ll give you a place to belong, and they offer what feels like winning the lottery. Gangs are offering our kids a greater and more meaningful future than we often are.

Drugs aren’t just a justice issue; drugs are a social issue, they’re an education issue, they are a mental health issue, they are a housing issue, and they are a well-being issue. We know that police are using their discretion at the moment when they’re choosing whether or not to prosecute people who they find using drugs. Indeed, when they are choosing whether to prosecute those people dealing in small amounts at the bottom of the pyramid scheme designed to trap them, they choose not to. We can continue to shadow-box at the bottom of that supply chain for ever, but it won’t make a dent in supply or demand, and we know that because the evidence proves it. Our failure over the last 40 years proves it.

So we can demonise and alienate people like Tyrone, threatening them with a prison sentence or pushing them into so-called therapy that asks “What’s wrong with you?” instead of “What happened to you?” We can watch that system fail time and again and we can watch people die. We will not address the drug crisis until we address trauma, isolation, inequality, opportunity, health, and education outcomes. We can stand here in this fancy Chamber and fight with words because it is far removed from the reality of drug-ravaged communities and it is far removed from the victims of the war on drugs and their funerals through addiction that didn’t receive treatment, or gang violence that spreads like a virus when control is left to the black market.

This bill represents a tangible change that will save lives through taking prosecution out of guesswork and creating a formal structure around it. It focuses our resources at the top of the supply chain, where substances come across our borders and cruel, greedy people make money off the lives of our poor and vulnerable. It will focus resources on treatment for people who use drugs and recognise that they are people. But we need to go further, because, as has been raised already by the deputy leader of National, the Misuse of Drugs Act is broken. We can to continue with these carve-outs for things like medicinal cannabis, for the synthetics crisis, for festival drug testing, but we all know that it is broken and it will take a lot more to address any of this.

Finally, I want to just correct the record, because none of this—none of what I have said—is pro-drugs, because if it is the outcome of our respective approaches that is the measure of the terminology with which they are dubbed, then the war on drugs as a result of its outcomes is the biggest pro-drugs movement we have ever seen. The Greens and I are on the side of compassion. We are on the side of evidence-based drug harm reduction. We are on the side of well-being. I commend this bill to this House.

Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call in this reasonably passionate debate, and I certainly cannot fault Chlöe Swarbrick for her passion; but, equally, exactly the same speech, and word for word that speech, could have been given in opposition to this bill, not in support of it, because she criticises parties that promote some kind of tough on crime, virtue signalling rhetoric, and then supports a bill that does exactly that—that purports to get tough on crime. If the Minister of Justice would recall his interventions in the committee of the whole House, I think it was, or the second reading of my colleague Simeon Brown’s member’s bill, that does, effectively, a much better job at achieving the policy goals than this bill does, by taking the reality that all psychoactive substances are unlawful until they are licensed and made lawful, and then increasing the penalties to—I think, after it came out of committee—14 years. That’s tough on crime. That’s the same kind of approach as the Government is now taking.

But, despite that, the Minister of Justice stood in this House and said that that was a fundamentally flawed approach and that it should not be wasting the House’s time with it, and now we have the Government doing exactly the same thing, only slower. It’s going to take much, much longer to deploy the changes in the licensing arrangements and in the making unlawful, under the Misuse of Drugs Act, the sorts of new drugs that we know are going to come into the country once these derivatives become unlawful. So we will constantly chase our tails, whereas Mr Brown’s approach was to start from the presumption that those substances are unlawful and make the supply of them a very serious offence.

Now, I fear there’s a pattern emerging here, where the Minister of Health comes down with grand ideas but very little detail. That was certainly the case in the Misuse of Drugs (Medicinal Cannabis) Amendment Bill, when my colleague Dr Shane Reti came in with a vastly improved regime—the Misuse of Drugs (Medicinal Cannabis) Amendment Bill (No 2), it was. Indeed, that happened after the Government’s bill. Now the Government is coming in after another member’s bill—Simeon Brown’s bill—and is doing the same thing: taking a good bill and making it poorer. We could live with that. We could live with their approach if it wasn’t for the second part of this bill. This is the area where I have a considerable concern about the calls by Ms Swarbrick to have these conversations and to treat it as a health issue and to somehow decriminalise these substances in the minds of the user, and yet that’s exactly what we’re doing here. By a de facto process, we are instructing the police, in law, not to prosecute.

Now, this is a really interesting use of language, because the explanatory note and the words in the bill are quite heavily mismatched. The explanatory note talks about discretion and talks about the inconsequential nature of the offence as if it were the same as section 59(4) of the Crimes Act. Indeed, it’s not, because when we get to the actual words in clause 6 of the bill, there is no discretion. The words are very clear: “a prosecution should not be brought unless it is required in the public interest.”, and the public interest is not served if consideration “should be given to whether a health-centred or therapeutic approach would be more beneficial.” It would be hard to find a particular user of illicit substances that would not in some way benefit from a therapeutic approach or a health-centred approach.

There’s no reference here to recidivism, to the seriousness of the crime, to the fact that there may be other crimes committed around the possession offence—perhaps burglaries, perhaps disorderly conduct. I can’t imagine the police being confined to not prosecute here, but then going to much more minor offences and taking them before the courts. It seems absolutely ludicrous that they would now be forced by law to cherry-pick from a basket of offences that includes possession but not prosecute the possession. That just shows what a complete dog’s breakfast this is.

The Hon Paula Bennett talked about the fact that Portugal, which was mentioned by both her and Ms Swarbrick, took eight years to get to this point; it sounds and feels like the Minister of Health has taken eight minutes to get this point: “Let’s just apply discretion. They should not prosecute.”—as if that’s going to be the salve for all drug possession ills. A defence counsel worth their salt will drive a bus through every single Misuse of Drugs Act possession offence from now until doomsday, once this bill is passed into law. It will be simply impossible to say, for any other relevant matters, if consideration should have been given to whether a health approach should apply.

There is no diversion here. There is no requirement for that person to actually be sent to a therapeutic community or a health-centred approach or an addiction service—no reference to that—and the Prime Minister admitted today that there were going to be no more resources put into the health system as a consequence of this bill when it’s passed. So a heavily, heavily, under stress health sector is not going to be able to respond to drug possession referrals that don’t go before the courts but go before the health service. So we simply don’t prosecute. We are in a legal and policy limbo as a consequence of this very lazy piece of legislation.

I still don’t know now why on earth we’re having a referendum next year on the possession and use of marijuana, because with one fell swoop the Government is decriminalising that. We’re going to go through a whole charade, frankly, of trying to work out words in a referendum that is functionally obsolete once this bill is passed. What a waste of time—what a big load of virtue-signalling nonsense. Let’s have the conversation that Chlöe Swarbrick wants to have—that’s not what’s happening here. It’s as if we’ve had it and it’s all over, and that is a great shame.

It’s not surprising that the member who has just resumed his seat, Michael Woodhouse, didn’t take his full 10-minute call. He didn’t make it to the bell at eight minutes. What’s not surprising, unfortunately, is that every time that I stand up in this House on bills such as this and the likes of this, the first thing I say is that it’s quite obvious that the National Party are playing politics with this, and that is obvious for anyone that has been watching Simeon Brown’s bill go through the House and the speeches from the National Party on why everyone should be supporting Simeon Brown’s bill. And now they turn around and say they’re not going to support this bill.

Why? Well, there’s a choice that we’ve got here. Right now, the Government is putting a choice for the National Party. Does the National Party want the status quo or do they want change? Do they stand by what they have said over the last few weeks about how these psychoactive substances are such a scourge on society, or do they not? It’s been made quite clear in the first couple of speeches that it’s the latter. It’s unfortunate that if it’s not the latter, then they’re playing politics. They should have a look in the mirror. [Interruption]

I just had a comment from one of the backbenchers, I believe, from the National Party, and a couple of members who previously spoke from the National Party actually said it as well. They said that this Government didn’t accept the third reading and we should’ve gone through a third reading of Simeon Brown’s bill. Then the question is: why did Simeon Brown postpone the third reading of his bill in the first place? If that’s not the definition of playing politics, I don’t know what is. Then they stand up here and accuse this side of the House of virtue signalling, when they’re the ones that are doing the very thing. They’re the ones that are doing the very thing.

Before I go into the detail of what this bill actually does, what it will achieve, I want to address a couple of the things that previous speakers have said. It’s quite clear that Michael Woodhouse doesn’t know—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Refer to the member with the member’s full name and title, please. Thank you.

The Hon Michael Woodhouse doesn’t know what he’s talking about in regards to the current legislation and his own colleague’s member’s bill. He said that Simeon Brown’s bill makes it a presumption that they—“they” being the psychoactive substances—are initially illegal until they’re proven so. That’s exactly what the Psychoactive Substances Act does now—that’s what it does now. Let’s get this straight: there’s only one thing that Simeon Brown’s bill did. It changed one number. It went from two years, as a maximum sentence, to eight years.

💬 Hon Michael Woodhouse: It went to 14 in the end, didn’t it?

And why did it go to 14, Mr Woodhouse?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Order! Order! Can I just ask the member—we’ve traversed Mr Brown’s bill quite well, and I understand the arguments. However—

No, this is essential to this argument, Madam Assistant Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Excuse me, Mr Ball. You will not answer me back when I am making a ruling. I am asking you to return to the first reading of this bill. You’ve made sufficient arguments as to the difference between this bill and Mr Brown’s bill—

This is—Madam, Assistant Speaker—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): No, I am not asking—

I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. This is essential information of the pathway of why this bill was in this House in the first place, and the entire premise of—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): That is a debate. That has been a matter for debate, thank you, and I’ll ask you to return to—

💬 Chris Bishop: Oh, so Simeon prompted it?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Order! Order! I am making a ruling. We’ll settle down. This is an important piece of legislation. I’ll ask Darroch Ball to continue with his call.

Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. I would like to reiterate a few of the key points that this bill does achieve, and will achieve, once it’s passed through this House. It does, as some of the National Party members have mentioned, take two of the most deadly strains that have killed upwards of 60 people in our country, and put them into class A. It does it for a couple of very good reasons—which are not achieved in the current legislation, and would not be achieved if any other legislation, or changes to legislation, were put through.

First and foremost, it takes the maximum sentence for the dealers and suppliers to life in prison. How on earth the National Party—who are beating their chests about being tough on crime, and especially these drug dealers and manufacturers; just like the speeches on their colleague’s member’s bill—don’t want to come down hard on crime with it, I don’t know. I don’t know why they’re not supporting this bill. It takes two of those most deadly, and puts them into the Misuse of Drugs Act as class A. What that also does—and it is the reasoning and the logic behind why this Government wants to put them into the Misuse of Drugs Act—is it gives powers and resources to the police and the judicial system. It gives the police the ability to search and to surveil those who they suspect are dealing, and the manufacturers of this deadly poison. That is not occurring in the status quo, and that would not occur under their member’s bill. It is as simple as that. So, in turn, what the bill does is it actually gives the police the ability to stop the drugs getting on to the streets and into the hands of vulnerable people in the first instance. That is a key factor to this legislation.

We also are creating a temporary classification of class C1, which is, by the way, also a maximum of up to eight years in prison, which is equivalent to what Simeon Brown’s bill was doing. I, for the life of me, do not understand why the National Party is not supporting this bill. Now, one key point that it sounds like the National Party is going to harp on about for the rest of the passage of this bill is this ridiculous notion that this is semi-decriminalisation. If it is anywhere near decriminalisation, then how on earth do the police still have the power to prosecute?

💬 Hon Michael Woodhouse: They don’t. Read the bill.

The police have the discretion.

💬 Hon Michael Woodhouse: It’s not discretion.

The police have the discretion that they use now, and that’s another key point. The National Party think, or they’re spouting and trying to convince the public, that this legislation is bringing this brand new concept that the police are going to start using discretion and putting down a health pathway, and there’s not the possibility of prosecution, like they don’t do it already—like they don’t do it already. Those members over there know that. They’re experienced enough to know that. They were in Government when the police were doing exactly the same thing. The police want this in legislation to remove any doubt as to what their role is—because it is solidifying in legislation what the police already do.

Now, that says one of two things: one, like I said before, the National Party are playing politics with this; or, two, they don’t listen to the police. They don’t know what the police want, because police want the certainty in legislation of what they are already practising—what they are already practising. This is about giving the police what they want, which is certainty in legislation—certainty in legislation.

The important note under this topic is the fact that under current laws, synthetics and other dangerous drugs are killing people. They’re fuelling crime and devastating our communities. The status quo would not solve that problem, nor would Simeon Brown’s bill.

There was a question asked by the Hon Paula Bennett about how a police officer would know who was dealing, and who was supplying, and who was using—where would that limit be? It’s in legislation already—it’s in the Misuse of Drugs Act already. The irony of it all is that the current legislation, the Psychoactive Substances Act, doesn’t have the limits. So the argument that Paula Bennett is making is moot. She’s actually arguing against the status quo, because the police have no idea and no measurement whatsoever on who’s using, and who’s supplying, and who’s dealing in regards to quantity. Bringing it into the Misuse of Drugs Act gives that certainty to the police.

I am disappointed and a little bit surprised, to be honest, that the National Party isn’t supporting this bill. By the sounds of it from the two speeches that have already gone through, they are in support of the vast majority of the bill and they only have a question around one sentence in the bill, or one piece of the bill that they believe is ambiguous. If that was the case and if they stand behind what they’ve been pounding on about, about psychoactive drugs and the scourge that they are in society, they’d take it through to select committee. I challenge any member that’s going to stand up today in this first reading to give a clear answer about why that’s not going to occur—why the National Party won’t take it through to select committee to debate it, to listen to the experts, to listen to those who have been affected by this, to listen to the families. Come up with a straight answer.

New Zealand First will continue to support this bill, and we’re happy to support this bill, because it’s a bill that not only targets the dealers and manufacturers of this poison but also brings some certainty into legislation about the role of the police and how we can treat those who are affected by this poison differently. Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. It’s a pleasure to stand and take a call on this, the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill. If I could just start by debunking a myth—and I want to acknowledge the Green Party member Chlöe Swarbrick. She made a genuinely passionate speech in this House about the bill, but there are a couple of things that she raised. The first one: when we talk about the failure of the war on drugs—I just don’t accept that. The war on drugs is tough and it was here last decade, the decade before, and the decade before that, and we’ll be continuing to deal with the issues that harmful substances and drugs bring to our communities. It’s something that is not going to go away overnight. That is a fact. It’s not a war that’s been lost; it’s an ongoing war. It’s difficult, it’s hard; it doesn’t mean we throw up our hands and say, “It’s too difficult. We’re just going to turn this into a health issue now.”

Of 9,000, or 10,000, there’s about 25 people in our prison system at the moment that are there, predominantly, because they have been caught with class A drugs for personal use. So the amount of people languishing in our prison service—because we keep hearing from the Government that this is a big driver of the legislation, and the changes that are being made relate to people languishing in our prison system because they’re being captured for personal use of drugs—just does not stack up. The facts do not support that. It is not true. The fact of the matter is most people are in our prisons because they’ve committed violent offences, they’ve committed property-related offences, they’ve committed multiple offences with, normally, a long line of victims lining up behind them. It’s true: a lot of that offending is created through drug use. The use of drugs—methamphetamine, especially—you could probably tie back into a lot of the violent-type offending that we’ve seen in our communities in New Zealand at the moment.

This bill makes such a fundamental change. I hope that the last speaker, Darroch Ball, because I think that he is genuine about wanting to make sure that New Zealand is a safer place and that we don’t actually introduce more harm into our communities, really looks and really studies this bill, because the funny thing is that 90 percent of the bill—actually, the bill is pretty good when you’re dealing with psychoactive substances, without a doubt. We’ve seen way too much harm, we’ve seen way too many deaths, and actually it sends a positive message that I think the whole Parliament would support in terms of we’re going to get harder on dealers, the manufacturers, organised crime, the gangs, the ones that are peddling this stuff. They’ll look at that and they’ll say, “Yeah, OK. Parliament’s getting tougher.” You know, they’ll note that.

But the one thing they’ll really note—do you want to know they’re really going to have a look at? They’re going to have a look at clause 6 and they’re going to say, “Right, our customer base—what does it mean for the people that are actually buying the drugs off us?” What it means, if this bill passes, is this Government is going to send a very clear message that it’s going to be much harder for our front-line police officers to be able to arrest someone that is using or in possession of a class A drug.

Fundamentally, as a country, we’ve said that methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, and loose-leaf cannabis are actually harmful. We don’t want people taking them. We don’t want people using them, so we’ve made laws to send a very clear message to us as a country. And you know what? For most law-abiding citizens, most law-abiding Kiwis, that’s enough. Just being told by our Government, by our Parliament, by our country that they’re dangerous and you shouldn’t take them—that’s enough. But what we are starting to say here, what we’re starting to say in this bill, is that, actually, the threshold now that the police have to reach is much higher.

Let me read new section 7(5) in clause 6 again: “To avoid doubt, it is affirmed that there is a discretion to prosecute for an offence against this section”. The police have always had discretion, right? To say that you need to standardise that, that’s a stupid proposition, and I’m sure that I’d get agreement from my colleague on the other side. When I was policing in central Auckland, I used a very different type of policing style to when I was policing in Ruatōria on the East Coast in New Zealand. Those powers of discretion will be used in a different way. To try to say you need some ridiculous statement about standardising those through legislation, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard in a long, long time. You cannot do it. Every district commander around this country will have their own plan and they’ll be dealing with their own issues that relate directly to that area that they’re policing.

It says that a “prosecution should not be brought unless it is required within the public interest.” It says that it should not be brought. Then it goes on to say, “(6) When considering whether a prosecution is required in the public interest, in addition to any other relevant matters, consideration should be given to whether a health-centred or therapeutic approach would be more beneficial.”

So let’s think about that. I can’t think, in my own 14 years—actually, I’d go broader and say 20 years—in law enforcement, both here in New Zealand and overseas, of ever having dealt with one case of drug use where a health-based or therapeutic approach would not be beneficial. It’s ridiculous. So what are the defence lawyers in New Zealand going to see? They are going to see that this Government here has just given them a free licence. You’ve just handed them a ticket to get it into court, to defend the case, and say, “Actually, officer A and officer B, they didn’t consider a health-based or therapeutic approach for our client.”

This is setting the bar so high now, in terms of a front-line police officer being able to take action and use their powers of arrest that we’ve given them, that I believe, and I think this will happen, that it’s going to become tougher and tougher for them to deal with these cases on the front line. What the dealers are going to say, what the people that are manufacturing are going to say to their clients, their customers—the ones that they want addicted to their product—is, “Don’t worry about it, guys. The Parliament’s just given you a free ticket. They’ve set the bar much higher now for you to be arrested and charged with possession of a class A drug, with methamphetamine.”

That’s what we’re saying. That’s what we’re doing. And if we’re not, then I’d like someone to stand and take a call and actually address that and prove me wrong and tell me why that’s not going to happen, because if you read clause 6, that’s exactly what this bill is proposing. It is quite simply proposing that now the New Zealand police, the front-line police officers, should not bring a prosecution unless it’s in the public interest, and their decision should be based on whether they can take a health-centred or a therapeutic approach.

Someone get up and give me one example where you couldn’t say you could take a health-based or a therapeutic approach to someone that’s got—give me one example. That’s the threshold that you’re setting.

💬 Darroch Ball: Nonsense.

That’s the threshold. You haven’t thought this through, Mr Ball—you have not thought this through. Give me one example where that threshold would not be met for a police officer that’s trying to make decisions on the ground at the time. So I’m willing to hear if you can give me one. I don’t think you’ll come up with one.

I certainly, in my experience, have never seen where there’s someone that wouldn’t benefit from a health-based approach. We all want a health-based approach for people. When they come into our prison system, we want to make sure that they get the therapy, the support that they need to get them off their addictions, to get them back into the community, and to be, you know, integrated back into the communities they came from. But stand up and give me one example where that wouldn’t apply, because that’s what you’ve said in this bill. So they’re going to fail—they’re going to fail—right from the start, which means the suppliers of these drugs have now got a whole lot of customers that you have just given immunity from prosecution.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! Order! Don’t bring me into it.

Sorry, Mr Assistant Speaker. Mr Ball, by supporting this bill they have got, effectively, immunity from prosecution. It’s to be a great marketing tool for them. They can go out and say, “Come and buy our methamphetamine—come and buy our methamphetamine! The Parliament have just legislated that the police now have got a much higher threshold that they have to try and get past to actually arrest you. So it’s far less likely that you’ll be caught and it’s far less likely that you’ll be prosecuted.” So it’s a great marketing tool that you’ve just provided to the people that actually manufacture this stuff. If you don’t agree with me, stand up, take a call, and explain to me why that won’t happen. It’s perverse. You’re creating a perverse outcome in the bill that you’ve brought to this House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! Again, please don’t bring me into the debate.

Sorry, Mr Assistant Speaker, you’re right.

So anyway, this is just the start of the debate. Unfortunately, it’s gone to the Health Committee, but, you know, the Hon Michael Woodhouse will do an outstanding job with that team. There’s a big justice part of this. It’s been quite clever, the way it’s sort of been slipped through with, you know, a clause in here that is going to make a massive fundamental change in the way that our police are able to actually police not just Class C drugs but Class A and Class B drugs as well.

I think, just finally, the point that the Hon Paula Bennett made was we’re not ready for this. Get up and explain to us, if they’re going to refer them to health services: where are they going in our communities? There is nowhere for them to go. Actually explain to us how that’s going to work. It’s a bad bill for that reason, and we’re not supporting it.

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to rise and speak in support of this bill, because of the huge impact that synthetic drugs are having in our community. Having worked in A & E in the past, I was just reflecting on a story from Radio New Zealand in October last year. What they were talking about was the struggles that Christchurch Hospital was having in dealing with synthetic drug admissions. They interviewed an emergency department specialist, and he was just describing what he was seeing, you know: patients coming in with seizures, some of them needing CPR on arrival. He was talking about patients being in trance-like states, and just the agitation and how, you know, on occasion they’d have to call the police in to deal with that agitation and that behaviour, and also the impact that that was having not only on patients and their families but also on emergency department staff. He also talked about the fact that, at the time of the interview, they had had a couple of patients there in ICU, in intensive care, and they’d already been there for two weeks and they were still seriously unwell.

The problem we’ve got is that, you know, since mid-2017, we’ve had at least 50 to 55 deaths from synthetic drugs. Basically, this has to stop. What this bill does is it provides that balanced approach, because what it simultaneously does is it provides greater enforcement and penalties for those who are importing, manufacturing, or supplying dangerous synthetic drugs. These drugs are wreaking havoc in our community.

It also takes a health-based approach, because what it does is it affirms police’s ability to have discretion, when they’re considering whether to prosecute, if a health-based approach would be better. I think when you listen to the stories of people talking about their experiences with getting hooked on this stuff and just the huge impact—once they’re addicted—it has on their lives, and what they have to go through to fuel and fund their habits. This is a really, really important balanced approach to a very significant issue.

I just want to go through a little bit of the three key things that this bill actually does. The first thing is it reclassifies the two major synthetic drugs that have been linked to these recent deaths as class A drugs. For those not really familiar with the classification of class A, these are the drugs which pose a very high risk of harm either to individuals or to society by the impacts that they cause. So by classifying them as class A, what it’s going to mean is that police and customs have much stronger search and seizure powers, so they can intercept the drugs before they hit or cause harm in the community. It also means much tougher penalties for those who are supplying or manufacturing the drugs, and that’s up to life imprisonment. So this is a very significant enforcement in terms of those that are bringing this stuff into our community.

The other thing, though, is that these drugs are always evolving, and so what the bill does is it creates a temporary drug classification called class C1 for new and emerging drugs. What it means is that once something’s classified as C1, police can come in and they’ve got the search and seizure tools that they need to interrupt the supply. That’s particularly important where we’re seeing, you know, clusters—some of the cases we’ve seen where you get clusters of hospital admissions or deaths—allowing people to come in and take that health approach and to interrupt that before we get further severe harm to our community.

How it works is it allows the Minister, by order published in the Gazette, to specify any substance as a temporary class drug if they’re satisfied that the substance poses, or may pose, a risk of harm to individuals or society. The undertaking is that that will only be a temporary classification so that it lasts for up to one year. The understanding there is that in that meantime, the Minister will go away and he or she will seek further advice as Minister on what the final classification of that drug should be, so that eventually it may end up being classified as A, B, or C as appropriate. If they need more time, then you’re allowed one extra renewal of that. That’s critically important as we start to deal with, you know, emerging threats within our community.

The thing that people have been talking about a lot is the health-based approach and the fact that what this bill does is just affirm what is happening in the community already, and that police should have discretion in terms of prosecuting or not prosecuting someone if they’ve got drugs for personal use. So the understanding there is that if there’s no public interest in prosecution, then we shouldn’t go ahead, but that when they’re weighing that up, it’s important to consider whether that health-based approach would be more appropriate.

As I was saying before, a large number of people were talking about the sheer addictiveness of these substances and the lengths that they’ll go to to acquire these substances, to the detriment of their own and their family’s lives and well-being. So, as part of this as well, this is why the Government has talked about putting extra resourcing into addiction treatment services but also extra resourcing in terms of those emergency surge responses, if we are indeed seeing these clusters of hospitalisations and deaths occurring in the community. So, basically, the wording is: “When considering whether a prosecution is required in the public interest, in addition to [anything else, they should be considering] whether a health-centred or therapeutic approach would be more beneficial.” So this is not decriminalisation by default; what this is is just affirming the discretion that’s already happening in the community. It’s affirming that in the legislation.

The other issue, though, is to avoid that perverse incentive that may be created by making people switch from one class or group of drugs to another in terms of thinking about that discretion of prosecution. This will apply to all drugs, not just the synthetics, and I think that that’s important in terms of making sure that we’ve got a balanced approach. But, as I say, it’s about reaffirming the existing discretion that’s already there. Police can still prosecute if they think that that is necessary.

So, just summing up, this is a huge issue in our community—it affects many, many families—and what this bill is doing is taking that really balanced approach. By classifying two of these synthetics as class A drugs, it’s giving the police a lot more ability to, basically, search and seize, and also it’s imposing much heavier penalties on those involved in the manufacture and supply of these drugs. But, from a health perspective, it’s actually channelling people much more to that health service delivery in the context of addiction and treatment services. So I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Mr Assistant Speaker. This is a shocker of a bill. It’s the bill that you get when you actually really want to decriminalise drugs but you’re just not quite sure where the public is at on it and you’re not going to go quite that far. So, in other words, we’ve got this totally inadequate halfway house where they can look like they’re cracking down on the suppliers and the users of drugs—or the suppliers at least—in the first part of the bill, and then we’ve got the sop to the Green Party in the second part of the bill, which claims to affirm that the police have discretion around prosecution for individual use and possession. So it’s a kind of halfway-house bill. It’s a very strange beast.

Darroch Ball’s speech actually summarised exactly how strange this approach is, because, on the one hand, we had Chlöe Swarbrick, in her contribution, heralding the brave new world of drug decriminalisation and how this is part of a sea change to the way in which New Zealand deals with drugs, and the war on drugs is a failure, and the Green Party are at the vanguard of this health-based approach that the Government’s going to adopt—all very powerful words, some of which I happen to agree with. But then, if you listen to Darroch Ball’s speech, that was a speech in which he was at pains to play down that this bill does anything. He kept saying over and over again, and quite contemptuously towards National Party members, that the police already have discretion. “What are you talking about?” he said. “This is just the status quo.” He kept saying, over and over again, “There’s nothing to see here—nothing new. This is just the police. They already have this power. They already have this discretion.”

Well, both statements can’t be true. It can’t be, on the one hand, the brave new world of drug decriminalisation, in which New Zealand’s in the vanguard of adopting a health-based approach to drug policy, and simultaneously the status quo, in which nothing is changing and the police just have exactly the same power and exactly the same discretion as they had before. Both can’t be true, and it’s incumbent upon Government members to sort out exactly what’s going on here. Is this the brave new world, or is this just what we have always done, which is to allow the police to prosecute in the public interest? Because Darroch Ball kept saying it’s exactly what we have now; there is no change.

It’s a curious thing, isn’t it, when you have to legislate to affirm something. Parliament doesn’t actually do that. Clause 6 in this bill is very strange: “To avoid doubt”—and Parliament does that sometimes because Parliament wants to make very clear, but it doesn’t often say things like this: “To avoid doubt, it is affirmed”. It is affirmed? No, Parliament legislates to do something. Parliament legislates a change to the law. Parliament legislates things that are not currently the status quo. It puts the later state into being—that’s what Parliament does. Parliament doesn’t, in a separate piece of legislation, affirm an existing law. It’s a very peculiar phrase. So maybe Darroch Ball’s right; maybe it is actually just the status quo. Maybe we’re just affirming the status quo. Maybe he is right. But then, of course, we get this other phrase: “prosecution should not be brought unless it is required in the public interest.” We’ve had this interesting discussion between Mr Mitchell and Mr Woodhouse about exactly what change that will create. Then, of course, we get new section 7(6) around “health-centred or therapeutic approach”.

Well, this bill is going to go to a committee. We’re going to invigilate and investigate those issues very closely at the select committee, because, on the one hand, we may be making a massive change—certainly what the Greens think we’re doing—and on the other hand, apparently, we’re just not doing anything. Apparently, we’re just putting in place what exists right now.

Darroch Ball says the police want this. Well, I draw him to the remarks of the Police Association. Now, the Police Association represent police members. Well, he might say the police want it—well, police top brass might be OK with it. I suspect that’s actually not true. We’re waiting for the advice on that. But I’ll read to you the statement of the Police Association: “[This] has an air of drug reform on the fly, rather than a more considered debate and informed legislation. I am worried that by codifying police discretion the Government is potentially asking officers to be the spearhead of decriminalisation.” I note a former Police Association president over the other side of the House, and I suspect Mr O’Connor agrees with every single word I’ve just said, because, let’s face it; what the Government is doing is subcontracting out, to police officers, decriminalisation.

My message to the Government is: if you want to have a debate about drug decriminalisation, and if you want to have a debate about making sure that people who are addicted to heroin are not prosecuted, OK, maybe there’s a role for that debate. Maybe there is a debate we need to have about that. But to do it in this dishonest, halfway-house solution, where you put police officers at the front line of drug decriminalisation—frankly, police officers who are under-equipped and ill-equipped to deal with the hard, vexed decisions around this—then you are mistaken.

I haven’t even mentioned, as my other colleagues have, the lack of support out there in the community around community treatment and addiction services. Jacinda Ardern was asked “Will there be more money in the Budget on Monday?” by Jack Tame. She was asked “Will there be more money in the Budget for these much-needed services?”, and she refused to commit to it. So what we’ve got is a situation where the Government is going to subcontract out to police their attempts to decriminalise drugs, and they’re not even going to provide the services to make sure that all the people who aren’t going to be prosecuted, and all the people who are going to be referred to these drug services, are going to have the necessary treatment and support that they need. It is a disgrace. This Government should be honest about what it’s actually trying to do and have the legitimate debate, rather than try and subcontract it out to the police.

This is a split call—five minutes.

The hyperbole—the disaster that is coming our way—is breathtaking. Let us just for one moment talk for a small moment about the discretion that our very able Police Force currently have. The discretion sits in law and also in operation—it is a normal process. Let us also look at what it should refer to—personal use. It is the personal use of drugs—the smallest amount of drugs that a person might be found with—in which this description applies. Let us not talk about these huge and amazing things. This is what the police do on a daily basis, as we well know. This piece of legislation very clearly ensures that the police know that they have that ability to do that. So whether they are actually making a decision or not is based on what they always do, but this makes it very clear.

Let us go back to the purpose of this bill. The purpose of this bill is around the health of people. It is around a compassionate approach. It is important that we don’t continue to make this huge issue about someone who is caught with a small amount of illegal substances. They are actually needing help as opposed to being prosecuted. So as a consequence, I commend this Government, and the Minister of Health, for changing the conversation—which the Opposition has tried to switch back—from penalties and punishment to viewing addiction as a health issue.

However, this legislation proposes to get ahead of a very fast-moving drug manufacturer industry. Let’s be clear—let’s be clear about the harm that these drugs do. Let us be clear. None of us—none of us here in this House or across the country—believe that these are good things or things that we should continue to support. Interrupting the supply chain is so important, and it is a really important part of this bill that we do that.

Before I speak to the bill in detail, I thought I would discuss, from a perspective of someone who’s worked on the front line, around working with women who came to our Tauranga Women’s Refuge and who had been impacted by synthetics. Remember the time when legal highs occurred and we had a plethora of men who switched from marijuana to synthetics? What happened was we had a floodgates situation occur. We had women flocking to refuge in abject fear—the paranoia that was around the poverty driven by the purchasing of these legal highs. Then, of course, it became illegal again, and the addiction remained.

We know that there has been purported to be about 55 deaths from this—this filth, let’s be honest—filth, this disgusting and, I guess, soul-destroying drug. A scientist friend of mind told me that using this drug is like huffing flyspray. It’s poison that’s spread on weeds, and it’s pressed into drugs.

Make no mistake, while our Government is absolutely focused on enabling people to break their shackles of addiction, we are very clear that people who profit from such misery must face those consequences, and this bill, therefore, supports and does both. It’s not a mismatch. It’s not that we are not clear about this process. It is about, on one hand, a health response, a well-being response, and a response of compassion and addiction and, on the other hand, stopping the scourge that is manufacture, import, and supply. I commend this bill to the House.

I call Matt King—five minutes.

Thank you very much, Mr Assistant Speaker. This bill, it’s the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s good in one respect, but why is it before the Health Committee and not the Justice Committee? It’s all about criminality, drugs, and giving police codifying instructions. It should be before the experts on the Justice Committee. But, for some reason, they’ve slipped it through into health.

But the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good part of it—the good part of it is Simeon Brown’s contribution to this bill about psychoactive substances. That’s the scourge on society, that’s the killer. So that part of the bill we support, so don’t get us wrong.

The part of the bill that I have concerns about—the bad part of it—is the way that clause 6, inserting section 7, has been snuck into this bill. This should be a stand-alone part of it, and I’ve heard speakers from the other side of the House talk about how the police have discretion—and, yes, we do have discretion—but what this is doing is it’s creating a document that a defence lawyer is going to pull out in court and point to and get every one of his clients off. It’s going to be a defence lawyer’s dream, and I am dead against that—I’m dead against that.

So what we’ve got is a bit of legislation here that is de facto decriminalisation. It’s a poorly thought-out law. I’ve seen a few poorly thought-out laws brought before this Parliament by this Government. A 500-page Supplementary Order Paper after select committee, just before we decide what the bill’s going to be—I mean, this is crazy. So this is the sort of thing they’re doing. So it says here, “affirm the existing discretion to prosecute for possession … for all drugs”—for all drugs. That is de facto decriminalisation and, hey, if that’s where we’re going, where’s your mandate? This is a big deal. Take it to the people and have a referendum on it. But this Government is just sneaking this through, and this is going to have unintended consequences. Dealers are going to roll around town—because dealers and users are interchangeable—and they’ll have small amounts in their possession to avoid prosecution. The police will not be arresting—it will get around amongst people that the police won’t arrest for possession of drugs, basically. It’s going to be de facto decriminalisation. It’s wrong. We don’t support it. The consequences haven’t been thought through. I advise caution.

I sit listening to this debate and politicians on either side of the House, and I think there’s no one who’s participating in this debate, whatever their political hue, who doesn’t want to do the right thing. I think those of us who are MPs would have to walk around with our eyes closed not to see the effect of drugs on the day-to-day lives of so many of those who we represent.

It causes me to think about my own time in the police in particular, and I acknowledge my two ex-police colleagues Matt King and the Hon Mark Mitchell. I sit here thinking “What in my time in police”—and I challenge those two members to do the same thing—“has really made a difference at any stage to the amount and use and the effects of drugs in our time in police?” Actually, there were two things that did make a significant difference. As a younger police officer, I policed in Wellington here. We had a major heroin problem, and that manifested in a large number of overdose deaths. That’s generally when you know you’ve got a heroin problem—it’s pretty much measured by the number of overdose deaths.

Wellington had a major problem here in the late 1970s—I’m showing my age there slightly—and there was considerable change to the legislation. It became life imprisonment, the effect of being caught dealing with that, and there were considerable powers given to police to deal with it. None of those things made any difference. The only thing that made any difference was actually when the Mr Asia syndicate collapsed, which had become a very successful international conglomerate at that stage. They had become so efficient at bringing heroin into New Zealand that all the opposition had gone, and then when they did collapse, when their supply lines collapsed, there was no heroin in New Zealand. If you had an addiction in New Zealand, basically you had to go cold turkey or you got on a plane and went to Australia, which is the time when we got a bad reputation in Australia as New Zealanders.

The second thing that made a difference—this is probably a little bit more pertinent to this debate—was in about 2011 or 2012, when we did have a major problem with synthetic cannabis. I was, as has been mentioned by one of the previous speakers on the other side, the president of the Police Association at the time. We were being inundated by complaints, particularly from youth aid officers around the country who were concerned that they were unable to do anything about this drug—what it was causing, the problems it was causing, particularly with young people. Parents were coming to their offices, saying, “You’ve got to do something about this.” It was actually pretty much legal at that time. It was legal and it was being supplied legally.

Virtually all the supply of synthetic cannabis at that time was through local dairies, local legal-high shops, and you could actually get hold of it legally. As a result, when the Psychoactive Substances Act went through, it was actually, in the short term, incredibly successful. Those who were supplying at the time were legitimate people—people who didn’t want to fall foul of the law, although they had perhaps been legally adventurous up until that time—so they got out of the business, and, actually, my phone stopped ringing. It was actually, in the short term, for about a year, not an issue. It became an issue again. My understanding is that the Christchurch earthquake and the influx of people down there who were seeking to avoid drug-testing at the time brought about the increase again, and a market that had virtually collapsed was reinvigorated, and that is the market we have now.

It’s just important to remember what the difference with synthetic cannabis is, because that is one important difference with it. It is a class of molecules that bind to the cannabinoid receptors in the body, which essentially means it’s a chemical that does the same thing as cannabis. It does it, and, without going into the medical details, it actually is a considerably more potent drug. It causes many more issues—unknown issues, because it hasn’t ever really been properly studied, despite the fact it was actually invented by a scientist in, I think, South Carolina, who actually did it.

So those are the only two times that anything we’ve done has actually made a difference. Actually, I do remember the big debate that took place when heroin was being made—the life imprisonment for dealing it. There was a considerable debate, if you look at Hansard at the time, and, really, I have to say, as a police officer at the time, it made no difference.

That brings me to now. When we look at the situation we find ourselves in today, particularly with synthetic cannabis, no one—and, again, I come back to the fact we all hear “No, we have a problem.” There’s probably no electorate here that hasn’t had a death or someone seriously impaired or impacted on by the drug, so we really do want to do something about it. I think that if we’re honest with ourselves—again, I would invite the Opposition to think about this: do they really believe that anything that only deals with the sentencing option of it is going to make any difference? I have to say, I don’t. I’m not saying that sentencing, good use of the courts, and good use of prison are not actually good tools in dealing with these things—sensible use of the same.

This is what brings me back to this discretion argument. I can understand some of the concerns being expressed on the opposite side of the House around this discretion argument, but what discretion does allow—and I’ll take you back. The Hon Paula Bennett mentioned that nowhere in any legislation are police given this sort of discretion. Actually, she’s wrong, because it is in the anti-smacking bill. I know from my personal involvement in it that the Rt Hon John Key was responsible for allowing that bill to get across the line, because he introduced as an amendment the whole discretionary part of it. It’s that discretionary part of it that has actually allowed that bill to work, because what it means is that when police do take a case into court, the courts know that it has already passed a threshold test and that they would not be there unless it was serious.

What discretion allows is that police still can use—and, look, believe me, there are those who believe that the courts are terrible. Actually, the good use, the sensible use of sentencing—the sensible use of imprisonment, even—can actually be a very good tool, because what it does is gives leverage. So where the warnings haven’t worked, where someone has gone through a system where they have been not prosecuted and continue to do so, if they then end up in court, the effect of that is the court will understand that we’ve got a case that we can deal with seriously, that it has gone through some sort of threshold system on its way to where we are. Now, you may say that in other systems that have been introduced, there have been pre-charge warnings, diversions, and various other things. These are, actually, simply other versions of the same thing. What it does, particularly with drugs, those that we’re dealing with—so, often, having an encounter with the police, having an encounter with the authorities, is enough to deter people from what they will do.

Look, just think of this addition to the Act, or the bill as it stands at the moment, as something that actually does give a tool that if used properly—look, I can understand those that would be afraid that it may be misused. But, actually, what it does—and those two members opposite who have been in the police will understand that the most effective interventions that they—and I know, myself—have been able to employ are often those that involve considerable discretion. I personally am opposed to prescriptive sentencing. I think we should leave much more discretion to our judges, because prescriptive sentencing, which hasn’t worked overseas—I look at those that go to the Northern Territory. See what happened when they brought in mandatory imprisonment for property offences, and see how long that lasted and the perverse outcomes that that actually brought about.

What I would say in relation to this is that this is something that so much else of what we have done hasn’t worked. I mean, we have a major P problem. Again, as someone who has been and watched and been part of seeing that P problem increase, and seeing now the involvement in organised crime—nothing that has been done along the way, unfortunately, has made any difference. One thing that didn’t make it, that was reclassified: we banned pseudoephedrine sales. There’s been attempts—genuine attempts—on the way to actually try and reduce the impact of methamphetamine on our society, and I have to say it hasn’t worked. Even Matt King, in his own electorate—when we had a seizure of hundreds of kilos of methamphetamine on the beach in the Far North, it made no difference to the price and availability of methamphetamine on our streets. That’s how rife, how rampant, our methamphetamine problem is.

Essentially, I would have to say that nothing anyone has done or suggested has made any difference. The time comes when we do have to look at alternative methods, because simply, I have to say and persuade the Hon Mark Mitchell, saying the war on drugs—look, to sit here and say it has worked; I’m afraid that we may disagree on many things, but that’s something that I don’t think anyone looking at it would say that that has worked. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. It’s a pleasure to speak to this bill, and I am wanting to, in this contribution, speak to three points. The first point would be the aspects of the bill that deal with synthetic cannabis, and in that respect I think across the House there is a large degree of common thinking. Personally, I’d like to acknowledge Simeon Brown for the work he’s done, and I believe that the contribution he’s brought to this discussion has been substantive in many areas and very thorough—indeed, more thorough than parts of this bill.

The second point I’d like to talk to is the way that this bill starts with synthetic cannabis and then morphs to cover all drugs in various parts of the bill. We were very happy to be supportive of synthetic cannabis, but it’s over embracing with encompassing all drugs that makes that a problem for us. As my third point, I too would then like to talk to section 7 in clause 6 and this issue of discretion—the ability for police, or, more specifically, that police should not prosecute for possession and use in three instances: when a health approach might be beneficial, when a therapeutic approach might be beneficial, or with what the legislation says, “any other relevant matters”. I’d echo the point: when would a health approach not be beneficial? I can’t imagine any circumstance like that. When would a therapeutic approach for someone who has possession and use not be beneficial? I can’t imagine a circumstance of that type and this very nebulous “any other relevant matters”. So it’s very easy to see why we can consider this as decriminalisation—I mean, those are all the arguments why you would not prosecute, and there’s no instance, therefore, when we would not prosecute. That is decriminalisation.

But it actually gets better, because in the regulatory impact statement it confirms that this is decriminalisation. So let me move on to that. Let’s look at, sort of, how well-crafted this bill is and whether it achieves its objectives. In the very first point in the regulatory impact statement is the quality assurance summary, which says, “The panel considers that [these] Synthetic Drugs Response Regulatory Impact [statement] … does not meet the Quality Assurance criteria.” Well, what a great start to a bill like this, to have its own internal assessors saying that this impact statement doesn’t meet the quality assurance criterion.

It goes down into limitations and says that one of the limitations is that the range of options was limited to taking a health approach - only to drug use. Well, remember, the bill talks about three approaches: a health approach, a therapeutic approach, and an “other relevant matters” approach. But this bill, the regulatory impact statement, only looked at one of them. The summary then goes on to say, “The Panel considers … that the [regulatory impact statement] does not provide sufficient information for Ministers to make an informed decision about the regulatory proposals.” So again, the Government is looking at itself saying that, well, you don’t actually have enough information to make a decision on this, but the bill appears here in the House.

Now, there’s been some discussion across the House whether it is decriminalisation or not. We believe it is. Some of our colleagues across the House have said it’s not. I draw their attention to page two of the regulatory impact statement that says, “This will go some way to achieving the Government’s objective of not criminalising users.” That is decriminalisation. Let me read it again. “This will go some way to achieving the Government’s objective of not criminalising users.” This is a decriminalisation bill. The tragedy is the bill does it very poorly. We know that, because later down the impact statement says, “The [regulatory impact statement] is not convincing that emphasising discretion will be sufficient to avoid criminalising users.” So the intention is there to decriminalise, but the bill does a very poor job of it.

Other risks, while identified, are insufficiently addressed, and this question of possession and use, whether the bill also picks up supply, is highlighted in the risks. An option that included setting a very high presumption of supply in order to target importers and manufacturers could have been considered—oh yes, it could have been considered, but clearly it wasn’t.

I also want to point to the consultation around this bill, and, as the regulatory impact statement points out, other than Government departments, the only other NGO or community organisation that was consulted was the Drug Foundation, and the regulatory impact statement says, “Broader public consultation might have gained feedback from experts in health and social services, for example.” What a poor bill. How embarrassing, when the Government’s own team—the Ministry of Health, in this case—are saying that yes, this bill’s about decriminalisation; but, sorry, it does poorly.

Secondly, we haven’t identified all the risks. It doesn’t meet the quality assurance criterion, and, by the way, the only group we’ve consulted with is the New Zealand Drug Foundation, and you really should have spoken with health specialist and social services.

So it is really hard to support this bill, and it looks like the Ministry of Health have really struggled to support it, as well. So we’ll see where this progresses. But for any number of reasons, which I’ve outlined here, we won’t be supporting this bill.

Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. Tēnā tātou katoa. I rise to speak in favour of the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill. I want to highlight as the chair of the Health Committee that we are delighted to receive this bill. Why are we delighted to receive this bill? Because, actually, it takes a harm-minimisation, treatment-prevention approach to what has been an issue that has traditionally been dealt with by our criminal justice system.

I want to, firstly, also acknowledge that this whole process started in July 2018. I want to acknowledge the Chief Coroner at that time, who reported that between 40 and 45 people had died as a result of taking synthetic cannabis. The Acting Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Winston Peters, actually asked the Ministers of Justice, Corrections, Police, and Health, and officials, to consult and to come up with solutions to this problem. So I want to acknowledge his leadership, and also that the process that outlined the current approach was not working. So this piece of legislation is a direct consequence of that.

I also want to acknowledge Simeon Brown, who does have a bill in the ballot. His solution is just to increase penalties, and that sellers should go to jail. From our perspective, that isn’t a solution, but he did bring that kaupapa to the House and I want to acknowledge him for that. So this whole definition of who is a seller is an issue. Currently, if you have more than 56 grams, which is the threshold, you’re deemed to be a seller. But what we’ve discerned through the process, in fact, is that 56 grams isn’t a lot for a heavy user of these drugs—actually, it might last them only a couple of days. So from our perspective, having a response that will enable the police to use their discretion is absolutely the intention of this bill.

The other intention of this bill is to provide the police with the tools so that the manufacturers and distributors of these drugs actually pay the penalty. They’re the ones we want to see in prison, not those who have health issues. So the police discretion to prosecute, which people have talked extensively about tonight—I want to fiercely highlight that the police currently do have a discretion about whether or not to prosecute, and I particularly want to focus on a programme or an initiative called Te Ara Oranga, which is based in Northland. So I’m hoping that the people who represent our constituents in those areas understand that there is a current programme based in Northland that has seen the police refer 257 people to the district health board for addiction treatment.

So this is an existing recognition within our system that we need a different response, other than putting people through the criminal justice system. We actually need a health response, and so far this year an organised crime operation in Auckland has resulted in 32 referrals to addiction services—again, as opposed to going through the criminal justice system. Why might we want to do that? Because, actually, people going through the criminal justice system and ending up in prison costs us $110,000 per annum, per prisoner. That is not an investment. It’s not an investment in those individuals or their whānau. What we’re trying to do is absolutely, completely reorient the system to make sure that people who are caught in possession of these drugs get the help and support that they need.

We need look no further than the alcohol and other drug treatment court, and I bring this up at this time because that has been—I’ll call it—a disruption in the system. What that process did—and I want to acknowledge Judge Lisa Tremewan and Judge Emma Aitken—was, in fact, provide a mechanism within our justice system to support users who want to break their addictions.

I want to highlight what that particular kaupapa was called. It was named by Dr Pita Sharples, and I’ll give him a bit of a shout-out. They called it Te Whare Whakapiki Wairua—the house that uplifts the spirit. I actually think what this piece of legislation is, and I’ve just decided to title it myself as “Te Pūnaha Tuma Tau”—sorry, I can’t even read my own writing—“Te Pūnaha Tūmā Tānui Whakapiki Wairua”, is the public system that uplifts the spirit.

So I think this is actually the beginning of addressing issues such as unconscious bias, and why do I label it unconscious bias? Because what we have found out from a lot of the research done in this area is that those most affected by incarceration and engagement in the criminal justice system are Māori. One of the things I want to highlight is that of those people who are captured within the criminal justice system, if you are Māori and aged between 17 and 25, you make up 37 percent of those convicted of the possession and use of illicit drugs. So this piece of legislation is, fundamentally, going to change the trajectory of those individuals. What we are attempting to do is to provide a health recourse for people who are found to have possession of drugs, as opposed to putting them in the criminal justice system.

Just some context for people: in the 2016 New Zealand Drug Harm Index, our investment in the health system to provide people who needed treatment and addiction support was $78 million. Our investment in the justice system, which includes police, customs, courts, and prisons—as I’ve already highlighted—was $273 million per annum. If we can shift those two figures around we can actually provide an investment, because what we know from our alcohol and other drug treatment court is that 60 percent of people who have gone through that process don’t reoffend. It works. For people who have drug and alcohol addiction issues who get treatment, it works.

So we want that for everybody who is currently captured within a drug and alcohol addiction phenomenon, for whatever reason that may be. I know from my own community experience that that’s a lot of people who are homeless, people who have mental health issues, and people who have got unresolved abuse issues, and one of the things that we’ve never admitted as a country is why people end up using drugs and alcohol and become addicted. A lot of them have never had an opportunity to be supported, and so they take these drugs and alcohol and live in the situations they do because that is their existence. That has been their only life outcome.

So what we’re trying to do is shift the emphasis out of the criminal justice system, and—I want to say explicitly and specifically—for Māori. People have talked about the disproportionate number of Māori in the criminal justice system, and I actually think that the reorientation that this bill is going to implement through the development of, for example, guidelines that the police and the Ministry of Health will work on together—so it’s not going to be random. The Opposition have made a point of saying that everybody’s going to get off being prosecuted, but that is not true, because part of the process will be what services do these people need—these individuals who are caught with drugs—and how responsive is the system to meet those needs. But, as I said before, it’s also going to help reorientate what currently is a non-investment.

Putting $273 million into a justice system that incarcerates people is not an investment. What this bill is is an investment, but it also—as I’ve highlighted—is starting to address why so many Māori and so many young Māori get trapped in these cycles of coming in and out of prison. I mean, the most disgusting figure that I’ve seen is that after five years, if you’re a Māori, 80 percent of you are back in prison. So what’s the solution? This: keep them out of prison in the first place. I challenge the National Party to actually have a closer look at this bill, because if that’s what this bill does, your not supporting it is actually treachery, because you’re assigning people to a life—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! Please don’t bring me into the debate.

—of misery. Kia ora.

on behalf of the Minister of Health: I move, That the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill be reported to the House by 22 July 2019.