Lees-Galloway Iain: Psychoactive Substances Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Psychoactive Substances Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 09 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:11803. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North):There is a range of matters dealt with in Part 2. Can I say that it is excellent to be getting into some of the substance of the Psychoactive Substances Bill and some of the more constructive aspects of this legislation.Part 2 deals with the range of licences that various participants in the manufacture and supply of psychoactive substances need to acquire. It also deals with the process by which products can be approved. Further it deals with the register of products that are considered by the expert advisory committee. I would like to address each of those matters.The first—and it is somewhat at the heart of this legislation—is the process for approving products. This just quietly is the big step forward in drug regulation in New Zealand because up until now every time we have seen a new drug except for alcohol and tobacco we have wanted to ban it. Ban it ban it ban it—that is the only reaction the only response that our legislation over the decades has been able to come up with. It is a rather blunt approach and in the 21st century a less and less effective approach. So for the first time in our drug regulation laws there is a mechanism for approving a psychoactive substance.Why would we want to do that? A lot of people have said: “Oh just ban them—ban them. Get them out of the dairies.” which of course this bill does do—Denis O’Rourke: I say that.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: Well I am glad to hear that New Zealand First thinks that. Its members can get up and explain why they think that. People say: “Look just ban them. Get rid of them and that will make the problem go away.” That has been so effective for cannabis has it not! It was so effective for alcohol as well—it worked really really well! It has worked really really well for a whole range of other substances too! So the people who say “Just ban it and the problem will go away.” simply need to open their eyes and look around them to see all the harms that are actually caused by prohibition itself. I am not saying that prohibition is not appropriate for some substances but I think it is absolutely certain that prohibition is inappropriate for a number of substances.What this bill seeks to do is to create a legal regulated market for substances that have been proven to be of low risk. That is what clause 35 headed “Granting of approval” is all about. The most important of the grounds for approving a product is that the degree of harm that the product poses to individuals using the product is no more than a low risk of harm. Those final words are important. Nobody is claiming that any of these substances are safe. That is not the intention here at all. The intention is to create a process through which certain substances can be proven to be low risk in comparison with other substances and those substances those products can go on the market.What we know is that people prefer to buy their drugs from a legal market. There really is not a legal regulated market at the moment except for alcohol and tobacco of course. These so-called legal highs have existed in a legal and unregulated market. But what countless submitters came and told us at the Health Committee and indeed what I have learnt from going and visiting people who work in the mental health and addiction treatment sector is that people who use cannabis have been replacing that substance with these legal highs because they prefer to go to a legal market. They do not want to go to the gangs they do not want to go to the dodgy drug dealers who engage in criminal activity they do not want to have to interact with criminals to buy these products but they do still want to buy them. What we are creating here is an opportunity for people who do want to use psychoactive substances to be able to obtain those that are of lowest risk and those that have been proven to be of low risk. What that means is that instead of the current situation in which people are replacing cannabis with substances that are in fact higher risk than cannabis people can replace that drug with substances that have been proven through clinical trials which can now be undertaken to be of lower risk.That will be a significant improvement on the current situation. What we know right now is that our addiction treatment centres are dealing with people who were previously using cannabis—and that comes with a certain level of risk—and have replaced it with higher-risk substances because they are legal. We actually now know the mechanism as to why these substances are higher risk. They adhere at a much greater rate to the receptors in the brain that the active ingredients in these drugs adhere to and because they adhere at a higher rate the high occurs much more quickly it is much harder it is much faster and these drugs are far more addictive. Trying to get off these drugs is a far greater challenge to people and it is a far greater challenge to the professionals trying to support people who are trying to get off these drugs than it has been trying to support people who want to give up cannabis use. I think that is an important thing for us to be mindful of.One of the changes that we made to the legislation following submissions by many of the submitters is to the register of products. Originally this was going to be a register just of approved products so that people could see all the products that had been approved and what the active ingredients in them were. The significant change that we have made is to say that this will now be a register of all the products. Every single product for which a manufacturer applies to the authority for approval even if it is turned down will now appear in the register. That means that people can actually see the facts about the substances that have been turned down: the harms that may be related to them and the reasons why they were turned down. I think that just having that knowledge available to people will help achieve the purpose of this legislation which is to reduce the harm associated with psychoactive substances.At the beginning of Part 2 in clause 12 we deal with the licences that are available and the licences that it is necessary to hold in order to be a manufacturer an importer or a supplier of these substances. What I think was one of the glaring mistakes in the original drafting was that there was no need for a licence to be a retailer of these substances. You have to hold a licence if you are to be a retailer of alcohol. It makes absolute sense that you must hold a licence in order to be a retailer of psychoactive substances.That really achieves two things. The first is that in order to hold one of these licences you have to be a person of good character. Ultimately that is a subjective statement but it is analogous to the situation with the sale of alcohol for which someone has to prove that they like to act within the law they are a careful person who is mindful of the activity that they are engaged in. It is important that we have only the right people selling these substances to youngsters. The other thing is that hopefully they should actually know something about the substances that they are selling and they will be able to provide factual evidence-based information to the people who are purchasing these substances. That again is an important step in trying to achieve harm reduction.I think that is something that was missing from the original legislation that everybody on the committee instantly recognised needed to be included. Paul Hutchison the chairman indeed instantly recognised that there was a need to include licences for retailers. I think that also recognises around about where these substances lie in terms of relative harms. If it is appropriate for the sellers of alcohol to hold a licence then it is also appropriate for the sellers of these substances to hold a licence. I can say that on this side of the Chamber we wholeheartedly support those amendments to the legislation.