Swarbrick ChlöeCHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green): E Te Māngai tēnā koe. The synthetics crisis as was just referenced continues to grip this country and today I invite all members of this Parliament to live up to their rhetoric. There is consensus here at least as far as words go that we do not want to criminalise users. We want to see harm reduced. We want to stop unnecessary deaths. So let's prove that with action. I am calling on MPs across this House in all parties today to support sensible drug regulation that stops harm and prevents unnecessary deaths. If politicians aren't willing to do that then we cannot pretend that we are treating this as a health issue.Let's be honest with ourselves: increasing penalties the punishment pathway the war on drugs simply has not worked. In 1998 when I was four years old member States of the United Nations signed up to eradicate all drugs by committing to strong unsympathetic penalties. We told ourselves that if we played by this rulebook we would get rid of drugs on planet Earth by 2008. That was 10 years ago and drugs still exist. While we've been ratcheting up criminal penalties we've done nothing to reduce the harm that drugs are causing in our community. Drug use flourishes in the shadows providing billions of dollars internationally in funds for violence and organised criminal activity leaving destruction in its wake.Last year synthetic drugs were implicated in 27 deaths in Aotearoa New Zealand and this year the death toll has risen to at least 45 lives lost. If these deaths were caused by anything else anything other than those evil scary illegal drugs we'd be stepping in immediately to regulate harm. Instead we're stuck in this punishment feedback loop. We're seeing more of the same political thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.So I want to appeal directly to members' consciences on this issue. Every few months MPs in this House are asked by the media when they last smoked cannabis. There's a wee chuckle and a few ums" and "ahs" and then we all gaze off into the distance and refer back to our university days. But what about our fellow New Zealanders? What about those who weren't so fortunate to go to university? What if you can't choose to leave illegal drug consumption in the mists of time? What if those drugs had killed us? What if we were strapped with drug convictions? What if it took away our future? But it didn't for us and we're here a substantial number of us who have personally admitted to breaking the law and consuming illegal drugs and now we preside over that law which penalises people who engage in exactly the same behaviour for doing what we did. Some people are ending up in jail and now some people are dying but we are in Parliament with the ability to do something. So what are we going to do?We can of course continue to pretend that everything is fine with a criminalisation that is applied on an ad hoc basis and disproportionately against the poor against the young and against Māori. But what exactly is the purpose of penalising drug users? Is it that we want to stop people using drugs? Well if that's the case we're failing—big time. New Zealand is reported to have amongst the highest drug-use rates in the world according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Is it that we somehow think that illegality will spur people to access help for abuse and addiction issues? Well Ministry of Health data shows that 16.5 percent of New Zealanders who sought help for drugs couldn't access it for fear of law or the police. Is it that we think that we're somehow getting cost-saving measures out of locking people up who use these drugs? Well the evidence in independent fiscal modelling released today shows that criminalising drug users alone costs between $34 million and $83 million a year.I am calling on MPs across this House to move to support an end to punishment for people who use drugs and to provide them with resourcing and support because if politicians aren't willing to do that we cannot pretend that we are treating this as a health issue and we cannot pretend that we care about people who use drugs and the harm that they experience. If we continue to criminalise drug users we are condemning them—SPEAKER: Order!CHLÖE SWARBRICK: —for not living up to the moral standards that we ourselves admit that we are not able to meet. Kia ora."