Sage Eugenie: Psychoactive Substances Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Psychoactive Substances Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 02 July 2013. Volume:691;Page:11575. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green):Tēnā koutou tēnā tātou e huihui mai nei ki roto i te Whare. E te Māngai o te Whare tēnā koe.[Greetings to you and to us collectively assembled here in the House and to you the Speaker of the House. ]I am pleased to take a short call today on the Psychoactive Substances Bill on behalf of my Green colleague Mojo Mathers. The Green Party and particularly Mojo Mathers has worked with thousands of New Zealanders to oppose unnecessary and unethical testing on animals which this bill still allows. The Green Party certainly supports the bill because we support minimising the harm that party pills cause and we want to have a modern proportionate and rational drug policy as Kevin Hague has previously outlined. But we do not want the testing to ensure that these psychoactive substances are safe for humans to be done at the expense of animals causing them pain harm and suffering.Many many New Zealanders support freedom from animal testing. We have seen that when in just 1 month 60000 people have signed a petition calling for animal testing of party pills to be ruled out. Many organisations put quite considerable time and effort into making submissions on this bill focusing on animal testing and that was based on good faith and on the advice of the former Associate Minister of Health Peter Dunne that that was the best way for their concerns to be addressed. So the democratic process was seen to be very wanting when the chair and majority on the Health Committee decided that those submissions were out of scope and returned them. The Green Party then organised a separate hearing so that we could listen to the evidence—and it was very good and relevant evidence—that the Health Committee chose not to hear. So I want to thank everyone who made submissions.On the basis of the evidence the Green Party through Mojo Mathers and her Supplementary Order Paper 260 is proposing an amendment to the bill. That amendment would ensure that any information from animal testing cannot be used in support of an application to register a psychoactive product. That would include information that came from overseas and that would have the force of law once the bill came into law. In the last 6 days more than 7700 people have emailed MPs asking for their parties to support Supplementary Order Paper 260 in Mojo Mathers’ name so we are very pleased by the level of support that is getting and we hope that parties in this House will also support that. Some have already; we hope others will follow suit.We certainly acknowledge the change in the bill in clause 11A as reported back by the select committee. It is a significant improvement particularly given the earlier decision around submissions. This new clause 11A would require that the advisory committee not rely on animal testing for psychoactive substances “if suitable alternatives exist.” and if those alternatives comply with the Animal Welfare Act. But the implementation of this clause would be very difficult to monitor so it provides absolutely no certainty that animals would not continue to suffer for human benefit and that they would not continue to be subject to pain and harm. Animal testing is notoriously unreliable and that is why the United States Environmental ProtectionAgency the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration have begun a process to replace all toxicology testing on animals with alternatives. That is because these alternatives produce results that are much more relevant to humans. Those alternatives include things like in vitro human cell line studies computer models micronucleus assay in vitro absorption tests and so on.When other countries such as the United Kingdom are so much further ahead of us and are putting a ban on animal testing for all recreational substances including alcohol and tobacco we must act. We are lagging. We are not ahead of the field here. Why do we continue to use animal testing in New Zealand? Because it is cheaper than non-animal testing. We should not be making decisions around the safety of these psychoactive substances to protect the profit margins of industry. We should be making them on an ethical basis and that ethical basis is to ensure that animals do not suffer pain and harm in order to protect humans. So we can vote for a modern ethical 21st century safety testing regime if we vote—