Little AndrewDRUG AND SUBSTANCE CHECKING LEGISLATION BILL (NO 2)Third ReadingHon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Health): I present a legislative statement on the Drug and Substance Checking Legislation Bill (No 2). ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website. Hon ANDREW LITTLE: I move That the Drug and Substance Checking Legislation Bill (No 2) be now read a third time. This is a drug harm reduction bill. It is about people being kept safe. People who might use substances—even illicit substances—and they're not sure of the true nature of that substance will now have the opportunity to have that substance checked without putting themselves at legal risk without putting the host of the event they're at at legal risk and without putting any drug-testing service at legal risk. We know that there are people in our community a lot of young people who may experiment with drugs and illicit substances—they do that; that is a fact of life—and many are taking a risk in doing so. Many purchase those substances from sources the integrity of which cannot be assured. Therefore it is important that if they are experimenting and if they are taking these substances we do what we can to keep them safe. So this bill sets up a regime now. It's sort of a continuation but a refined and an improved version of what we legislated for roughly a year ago on an interim basis. So that will now become permanent. The regime is that the Director-General of Health can now issue licences for services who meet certain conditions to receive a licence to offer drug-checking services. Once a licence is granted and one of those licence holders runs a drug-checking service there are conditions that they have to meet and one of those conditions was actually usefully inserted through the select committee process and that is that they are required to provide harm reduction information—educative material—at a time that a person surrenders substances to be tested and/or when those substances are handed back. So this addresses a need that is in the community. When we set this up on a temporary basis about a year ago it was very much targeted at the summer music festival sort of market and the orientation week sort of market but the reality is that these services needed to be available to some members of the community who are users of substances but who are not attenders of music festivals and orientation weeks—people who might live on the streets or people who live in constrained or deprived circumstances but who are users of these substances. So we needed to make sure—and this legislation will allow it—that services are to be available to those people. There will be members in this House who will remember the synthetic cannabis crisis or crises that we've experienced where there were substances parading as cannabis but sprayed with other substances. People were consuming them not knowing what they were consuming and in some cases dying but in many cases putting their health severely at risk. So this gives us a chance to prevent that sort of harm from happening once these sorts of services are set up. By doing this we are joining a number of countries around the world. There are some countries in Europe who have been doing this for decades. We join that group of countries who focus not on some sort of a moral judgment about a person who uses illicit substances but on what it takes to keep them safe and also on what it takes to create an opportunity to educate somebody who would use these substances and otherwise put themselves in harm's way. So this allows that sort of regime to be put in place. Now it was interesting in the debates in the House how some members—particularly opposite—try to inveigh these kinds of moral concerns as in Isn't this just a licence for gangs?" and "Won't these services be set up in front of schools?" Of course the answer to both those questions is no but you know we can predict it'll be trotted out this afternoon because they don't have much to go on at the moment and trying to beat those old moralistic drums to try and stir up some old-fashioned sentiment I suppose goes down well in some tearooms for some folks. But actually most of New Zealand wants to know that young people going through the ordinary vicissitudes of life—which includes for some young people experimenting with drugs and substances—can be kept safe. That's what New Zealanders mainly want and they want a regime to do that and this will allow that to happen. The Government has indicated that it will provide some financial support—$800000—for those organisations offering these sorts of services. That $800000 will be used for training people who would be carrying out these services and also for the creation and preparation of some educative material to go with it. So this is an important step. It's an important part of the panoply of protective measures that you would expect in a health system that thinks beyond just rescuing people when they are sick or unwell or harmed but is actually trying to prevent un-wellness and trying to prevent harm in the first place and that's what this bill does. So on that note I commend the bill to the House."