Ryall Tony: Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRyall Tony: Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 06 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17509. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon TONY RYALL (Minister of Health) on behalf of theAssociate Minister of Health: I moveThat the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill be now read a first time. At the appropriate time I intend to move that the bill be set down for second reading forthwith without being referred to a select committee. To begin I would like to thank all parties in the House for their help in bringing us to this point today. I have appreciated the great cooperation that all parties have provided in discussions around their positions and their considerations on this bill and I think that we bring an amendment bill to the House today that the great majority of the House has indicated its willingness to support.The bill does two things. It ends all interim product approvals and interim retail and wholesale licences and it prevents information derived from tests on animals being used to support a product approval application. The remainder of the primary legislation remains in place and it remains the most appropriate way of dealing with emerging psychoactive substances. The bill has a few other features to support those two main aims of removing all products from the market forthwith and restricting the use of animal testing. It provides that all products that have interim approval will be recalled and that those who have had retail or wholesale licences removed must comply with the recall. The recall order will require all licence holders including those whose licences are cancelled by this amendment to tell the Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority what products they have and confirm how they have been disposed of.The bill clarifies that the Crown is not liable for any damages or to pay any compensation as a result of the amendments. We know that some businesses will lose money as a direct result of these amendments. Our judgment is that the public health objectives outweigh those losses and no compensation will be paid for that. It clarifies that the authority must not approve a product until regulations are in effect and unless it is satisfied that the product poses a low risk of harm. These regulations will be in place in the next few months.When Parliament enacted the Psychoactive Substances Act last year 19 votes to one the legislation contained transitional provisions that allowed some products to stay on the market. These were products for which no serious adverse reactions had been reported. If serious adverse effects emerged later the authority had the power to revoke approval immediately. It has used that power to remove 11 products from the marketmost recently on Thursday 1 May. Serious adverse reactions have been increasingly reported to the authorities including vomiting seizures and psychotic episodes. The problem that has become apparent is that it is often not possible to attribute reactions to a particular product. People call the poison centres or the centre for adverse reactions monitoring and say they took synthetic cannabis or legal highs. If the authority does not know what products caused the adverse effect it cannot use its powers to intervene. So what we have are products that have not been tested and that are causing harm and the Government having limited ability to intervene.Last month Cabinet discussed this issue not for the first time and agreed that the Hon Peter Dunne would arrange for legislation to be drafted that would remove all products from the market immediately. It was always intended to allow only products that had passed rigorous testing and had been shown to pose only a low risk of harm. The interim period was intended to last only a few months while regulations were prepared. However we still have the products on the market that have not been through any testing and it is clearly no longer tenable for this situation to continue given that the serious adverse effects continue to be reported and that the authority is unable to respond quickly.On enactment this legislation will revoke all interim approvals for psychoactive products. All products currently on the market will become unapproved products with heavy penalties for manufacturing and supplying them. It will also become illegal to possess these products so anyone thinking of stocking up today should bear that in mind. This legislation will also cancel all interim retail and wholesale licences and begin a recall of all products that had interim approval. Let us be clear here: Parliament passes the legislation the Governor-General signs the legislation and then at 12.01 a.m. on Thursday it becomes illegal to sell supply or possess illegal highs and those products must be off the shelves. At 12.01 a.m. on Thursday it becomes illegal to sell supply or possess illegal highs. The products must be off the shelf.The other thing this legislation does is stop tests on animals being used to seek approval for psychoactive products. As the Prime Minister has said one of the reasons why we have had the delay in getting the regulations prepared is that the Government has been reluctant to sanction animal testing for these products. I am sure all members will be pleased that the bill under consideration will effectively not allow products to be tested on animals. The bill prevents the Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority and the Psychoactive Substances Expert Advisory Committee from having regard to information from animal trials to support the approval of psychoactive products. They cannot use any information that has come from animal testing; therefore there is no reason to do the testing. The only exception is this: the authority may consider information undertaken from an overseas trial if that information indicates that the product may not be low risk. So the authority can consider information from an overseas trial to protect the health of individuals. It cannot consider an overseas trial to support the approval of a psychoactive substance. No one will be doing animal testing to support an application here because it will not be able to be used for consideration.The rest of the primary legislation remains in place. As we all know the large number of substances and the ability of makers to rapidly change the make-up of products mean that traditional approaches do not work. In the long term the Psychoactive Substances Act remains the best way of dealing with the problem of emerging psychoactive substances. I would like to thank all those parties in the House who have participated in this process and commend this bill to the House.