Hague Kevin: Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Hague Kevin: Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:674;Page:20191] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 I will begin with some comment about clauses 4 and 6 of the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill. I reiterate the Green Party’s opposition to those clauses which relate to utensils. We will be supporting Iain Lees-Galloway’s Supplementary Order Paper 260 to remove clause 4 from the bill. In respect of clause 6 which relates to pseudoephedrine the evidence really points to the fact that the measure that is proposed in the bill will have little effect on its desired outcome but there will be considerable cost and inconvenience to many. 
The debate in this Committee stage has focused largely on the Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper and I want to make some comments about that. The Green Party will be opposing the Supplementary Order Paper but I will begin my comments about the Supplementary Order Paper by saying that we believe that it is ridiculous that psychoactive compounds without any kind of safety testing can reach retail shelves without any kind of control except for the provision that already exists in law for smokeable compounds to be restricted to people over the age of 18. That is absurd. I would think that probably everybody in the Chamber would agree with that. Therefore something does need to be done about this problem in our law. 
I also accept the point that Jackie Blue has just made that some of the synthetic cannabinoids in particular clearly do have harmful effects. There is an acceptance that there is some real harm. However I make the point that these compounds have in fact been on our retail shelves not just over the past few weeks but for years. So the urgency that the Minister is being praised for in this situation seems to be misplaced. 
There seems to me to be an opportunity to take a more considered approach which is what the Green Party favours. I accept the point that I think Iain Lees-Galloway probably made most strongly in this debate that the public has reached the point of wanting to see something done. I suspect that that is what lies behind the urgency here. Although it is important that we are responsive to public mood I am not sure that that is actually the most appropriate driver for this Parliament’s behaviour and decision making. 
The point that I made in the second reading debate about the Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper I think still holds true. Members may recall that at that time I challenged the Minister to table his Supplementary Order Paper then before the 2-week adjournment that this Parliament has just had. That would at least have enabled some form of truncated public process in order to enable members of the public to have a say about the Minister’s proposed approach to this issue. 
The reality here is that all of those who made submissions on this bill or perhaps chose not to make submissions could not possibly have had the expectation that this Supplementary Order Paper would now be included in it. Here we are about to make a very serious decision on the basis of public concern without giving the public and other interested parties the opportunity to have a say about it. That is poor process and it is one of the reasons why the Green Party will oppose the Supplementary Order Paper. 
The Minister is right that it is important to get this right. He is right about that. But we think also that the formulation of this Supplementary Order Paper is wrong. This is not the right way to go about that task. The Green Party may have supported an approach that enabled these substances to be classified as restricted substances according to the 2005 amendment to the Misuse of Drugs Act. However this approach is wrong in several aspects and I want to mention a couple of those. First of all in the Associate Minister’s comments in this debate he spoke about psychoactive substances and we have all approached this debate on the assumption that that is what we are talking about. That is not what the Supplementary Order Paper states. The Supplementary Order Paper talks about any substance; it is not restricted to psychoactive substances at all. For example there is the substance sodium chloride. That is a substance. It meets the definition in the Supplementary Order Paper. I think most scientists would agree that it causes harm. This Supplementary Order Paper enables the Minister of Health to gazette a notice to actually prohibit that from sale. Is that what we want? I guess we would say that sodium chloride is not psychoactive. There is a psychoactive substance called C2H5OH which is ethanol. Is it intended that the Supplementary Order Paper will be used for that? It certainly could be. Possibly it should be. 
I think there are some very real issues about the definition of “substance”. There are some issues around how the Minister will go about the task of drawing the line and of determining the risk or possible risk to individuals or society. This Supplementary Order Paper places an awful lot of discretionary power with the Minister with a political appointee rather than with say the expert advisory committee. Is that the appropriate approach? The Supplementary Order Paper also has no sunset clause. We think those are three fundamental problems with the Supplementary Order Paper. 
We do like the exemption that the Supplementary Order Paper contains for possession of small amounts. We believe that is a good start. 
I want to conclude by referring to the Law Commission’s report as others have done. I say that it is right that we take the appropriate amount of time to respond with all due haste to this. It may well not have been possible to fully respond to the report in the time available but it surely would have been possible in the time available to enact the commission’s recommendations about this particular problem and to place the onus on manufacturers importers and suppliers to establish safety before a product can be made available for sale in New Zealand. That is what should have happened in this case.