Turner Judy: Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee Third Reading 
Turner Judy: Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee Third Reading 
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JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of United Future to speak to the third reading of the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill (No 3). At this third reading I would like to take some time to reflect on why we are bothering to do this. There are those who believe that prohibition should give way to regulation and that prohibition is a lost cause and a flawed approach to managing drug use and drug abuse in our country. I have been accused of being obsessed with cannabis prohibition—and I suspect that it is true. Maybe I have just spent too long in New Zealand classrooms along with thousands of other teachers and tried to invest my time and energy in helping kids meet their potential. Maybe I have grown tired of seeing some of our brightest become apathetic and throw away good years in favour of risk behaviours that see them cut classes be inattentive when they are in class and achieving at decreasing levels that are well below their ability. 
They become vague late overly egocentric and insensitive to others. Their parents and friends see outbursts and mood swings. At that stage parents often believe they have a difficult teen. To those families we currently recommend harm minimisation. That sort of means that we will teach them how to work out what level of brain damage is right for them. 
 For a percentage of young people the situation will get a lot worse. Clinicians do not refer to this deterioration as addiction; they call it neurotransmitter deficiency syndrome. Authors Tom Scott and Trevor Grice describe it by saying: “If an individual’s vats containing the chemicals responsible for calm and moderation are nearly empty and at the same time the vats containing the chemicals for irritation and rage are full the chances of responding sensibly to a minor setback or a mild confrontation are much more remote.” 
So does the law send a message? Yes it does. Even if one chooses to ignore the message the law establishes a commonly held disapproval of certain behaviours. All law is ignored and flouted by a certain sector of society. That does not make it irrelevant. 
In a famous social experiment that was often referred to when I was at teachers college a group of university students were employed to help with an experiment unaware that their behaviour was the real subject of the experiment. They were put in white laboratory coats and asked to modify the behaviour of some other folk by way of an electric shock. They could not see their subjects but they could hear their responses. Not only were they required to administer the shocks but also they had to increase the voltage for repeated wrong responses—actors were responding appropriately. 
The outcome was that it was discovered that as long as this behaviour was sanctioned they would continue to inflict pain and they would even go to the level of taking somebody’s life. One or two did query whether they should continue but after they received affirming nods they kept going. 
I mention this because legal sanctioning does have consequences in people’s choices and behaviours. We must be very careful about the legislative messages we send. However I want to make it clear that United Future does not believe that prohibition on its own is the total answer or the single strategy that will work. We accept that we need a raft of health and education strategies—and parent education in particular—to address the tragic loss of potential that we currently have in our nation. 
Mr Tanczos claimed that cannabis does not kill. I want to tell members about a friend of mine whose funeral I went to not long ago. He was a very talented young man who did not stay around long enough to discover that he had just got straight As in his course at polytech. He was a talented artist. However with his talent he was mentally unstable and had some potential for mental health problems—very manageable ones if he had stayed off the alcohol and the cannabis. However he chose to ignore the support around him. For him cannabis was a gateway drug and he hanged himself in his parents’ garage. 
The open casket at his funeral gave his friends the opportunity for a bit of a joke. They put a cannabis reefer between his fingers. They were not my kids so I could not take it out but I was angry because they had overlooked the fact that one of the reasons we were there—one of the reasons he was in that casket—was cannabis. For me it is quite a personal issue because I have seen too many young people whom I care about deeply whose lives have been detrimentally affected. We as legislators need to make sure that we send a very strong message. We need to keep the human face of drug abuse before us all the time. 
I do not know whether this has happened to other members but I have talked to parents who were relieved that their child had been arrested—appalled that they had reached the state in which they wanted their child to be arrested. Parents have said to me that their child’s life was saved because he or she went to jail. That is an appalling feeling for a parent and having to sit through that with a parent is pretty appalling. 
So we must make sure that we do not shy away from our responsibilities—that we do all we can in policy and in legislation to make sure that young people who are our country’s future are protected from their own poor choices at times and from the pressure they feel to be part of a group. 
As I have said we support Governments having the opportunity through the Order in Council provisions to respond quickly to a crisis in the drug world and we are very happy about that. But as the Regulations Review Committee recommends we must use that mechanism sparingly. We were very clear that when a crisis is before us those provisions should be used. Downgrading a substance is not a crisis; it is a policy matter. We would like to see the public not just the Expert Advisory Committee on Drugs have a chance to submit on such matters. We do not believe that downgrading a substance constitutes the kind of crisis that would necessitate the use of Order in Council provisions. 
I have looked up the expert advisory committee’s actual advice on party pills because that has been a huge part of this bill. At the time when it made its recommendations the committee believed that there was no suitable schedule in the Misuse of Drugs Act. It believed that the Minister for Food Safety should be requested to consider the appropriateness of permitting the chemical benzylpiperazine to be sold as a dietary supplement. It recommended that the Minister direct the Ministry of Health to conduct further research into the potential harms associated with the use of benzylpiperazine and it recommended that the Minister direct the Ministry of Health to investigate the possibility of gathering prevalence data on benzylpiperazine via the introduction of routine toxicology screening by community laboratories. 
Lots of recommendations came out that need to be followed through on and we would be very supportive of seeing those recommendations followed up very quickly. We are keen to see the end of the legal nonsense that currently forces us through time pressures to regulate legal substances along with illegal substances. We think that this creates a whole lot of legal nonsense that will get us into trouble in the future. We are therefore very keen to see continue the ongoing work that is needed on this but we are happy to support the third reading of the bill.