King Annette: Psychoactive Substances Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeKing Annette: Psychoactive Substances Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 09 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:11779. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon ANNETTE KING (Labour—Rongotai):I was looking forward to this debate because I had thought that apart from the Psychoactive Substances Bill being a very interesting and different bill for us to have handled and to handle in such a short time in the Health Committee there has been across this bill very good cooperation. But Dr Hutchison wishes to take it to a lower level so if that is what he wishes to do then let us have a look at how long we waited for a bill that we are now told is so important. Perhaps I would like to just tell Dr Hutchison that it was in 2007 that the Government invited the Law Commission to review the Misuse of Drugs—Hon Dr Nick Smith: What were you doing for 7 years?Hon ANNETTE KING: For the benefit of the Minister who is chirping over there I say that in 2007 a year before the election we asked the Law Commission to undertake a review of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 and respond to the concerns about the new psychoactive substances.Hon Dr Nick Smith: Seven years of doing nothing.Hon ANNETTE KING: So the Law Commission put out its first-principles review with a mandate to make proposals for a new legislative regime Dr Smith in February 2010. The National Government has had this since 2010 so when it finally responded to it it was 2011.Hon Dr Nick Smith: Nine years did nothing.Hon ANNETTE KING: There were not substances like this 9 years ago Dr Smith so get up and get with the programme. In 2007 the Law Commission did a proper review in 2010 it reported in 2011 the National Government responded in 2013 we finally got a piece of legislation and now we are told that it is really urgent. Well it has been urgent for 2 or 3 years Dr Smith and we know it is urgent from the impact it has had on mental health and the impact it has had on violence in society. It was something that we needed.So I am disappointed in Dr Hutchison’s comments because we did work hard on this bill in a very short time frame and quite significant changes to improve the bill have been made. I suppose the one real sticking point was around animal testing and I will get to that in a moment. But I think we struck it right when we looked at what the purpose of this bill is all about and that is “to protect the health of and minimise harm to individuals who use psychoactive substances.” That principle and that purpose should run right through the decisions that we make within this bill. There are some conflicts I have to say and we will no doubt get on to those a little later but I think that we got the purpose absolutely right.Then we need to look at what the bill is actually going to do. We know that it is going to ensure that before people use them psychoactive substances will have gone through a process—a process to ensure as much as possible that they are of low risk. The evidence goes on showing they are low risk before somebody consumes them and uses them which is a quite different approach from what we have now where they use them we have problems and then we try to fix the problem up.I think one of the important clauses in this part of this bill however is around requiring the Ministry of Health to conduct a review of the policy and the operation and we have changed it to be no later than 5 years. It was originally to be after 5 years but we changed it to no later than 5 years after the commencement of this Act. I think that is a very sensible thing for us to be doing because we are not altogether sure that everything in this bill is right and that it is going to work. It is really at this stage suck and see because it is so new in terms of legislation. I totally support the idea that we would review we would look at how it worked and we would see what changes we would make to make it the best possible legislation that we could.Another area in this bill that I think is important to mention in this part is also around the setting up of the Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority—and that regulatory authority is actually the Director-General of Health—and the Psychoactive Substances Expert Advisory Committee. This expert advisory committee can be made up of up to six members and this committee is going to have the functions of evaluating with regard to the results of pre-clinical and clinical trials the psychoactive products to assess whether they should be approved for individual use to advise the authority about whether a psychoactive product should or should not be approved and to increase public awareness of the advisory committee’s work in relation to the psychoactive substances by releasing reports and so on.I think those are two very good parts of this bill which put the braces and belts around what we are trying to achieve. So we have got the authority and we also have the expert advisory committee.I do want to move on now to the issue of animal testing. This probably was the most testing part of this bill. There were very strong views about animal testing. I think it was a shame that the submissions on this were not able to be heard. That is something that has already been raised by Iain Lees-Galloway and I know that Kevin Hague felt very strongly about it. It was ruled by the chair that the submissions on animal testing were not within the scope of the bill. In fact we did find out later from the Clerk of the House that they could have been in the scope of the bill. [Interruption] Had the chair—yes—decided so to rule they could have been within the scope of the bill.What I believe happened was not necessarily the chairman’s choice. I would say the chairman had Hobson’s choice. I believe the directive not to hear the submission on animal testing was not one made by him but one where he was given a directive that there would not be submissions heard on this and that came from the top. It came from not the new Associate Minister of Health—I believe the new Minister came in after that and tried to find a resolution around the animal testing—but from the former Associate Minister and from Cabinet. They did not want to hear submissions on animal testing. I do not know why. It would not have mattered. In fact it would have enhanced our decision making and we would not have had this wrangling about animal testing. It would have given us the opportunity to have heard also those who supported animal testing and the scientific reasons that they put forward.What we did was we looked at how we could change the bill to put as much protection around animals as possible and it is true that at the select committee all members said that this was a good compromise. We now have Supplementary Order Paper 260 from the Greens that bans it and the Labour Party will vote with the Greens on the Supplementary Order Paper. Then if it is not passed we will support the amendment that the Associate Minister finally put forward at the last moment.We believe that there could have been a much much better process around this. It is not like the chairman to have run a process like this because actually he is a pretty good chair I have to say—one of the better ones in the National Government. But in this area he did make a mistake. He made a mistake or he was told that he should not hear those submissions.So for this part there are some very good things in it. We have made some significant changes to this part of the bill to improve it and I think with the exception of the animal testing this part is in better shape than it was when it came into the House.