Sabin Mike: Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSabin Mike: Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 06 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17521. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MIKE SABIN (National—Northland): Let us take a little bit of a history lesson with the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill and go back to the late 1990s when psychoactive substances—so-called legal highs—emerged in New Zealand. They were a very new entity and it took until 2008 forbenzylpiperazine or BZP to essentially be banned through use of the Misuse of Drugs Act schedules. Those legal highs were taken off the shelf but the manufacturers of legal highs had already worked out that they could circumvent the legislation by altering the chemical compounds of these drugs and already had a strategy basically to beat that legislation. They have successfully done so for many years since then in the cat and mouse game in terms of these drugs always falling outside the current legislation the Misuse of Drugs Act.In July 2013 the Psychoactive Substances Bill was Peter Dunne’s and this Government’s effort to say: “Let’s take away the ability for them to do that and put the onus on them to prove that these products are safe.” In my view that standard of proof should be a very very high one. Ultimately what it really resulted in was a situation whereby in order for psychoactive substances to be available they had to have gone through a rigorous process including clinical testing and tests on animals so that they could be passed through as a low-risk product at the end. It is my belief that the starting point should always have been—and it certainly has been in my mind—that we did not want these drugs out there but by reversing the onus it took away the ability for the drug manufacturers to hold all the tools.So we got ourselves into a territory through this new model where essentially we are blazing new territory in world drug policy. Everyone knows that and actually many people around the world are looking at New Zealand. So it is sort of if you like pioneering stuff. It is not an easy track to take. If people had the answers to this they would have been trotted out many many years ago. So we have gone down this track. Of course with the benefit of hindsight we can accept that the products that were allowed to stay on the shelf as part of the transitional regime were dangerous. We are dealing with chemicals compounds and combinations thereof that are virtually unknown to science. It does not surprise me that we saw this sort of level of harm emerge once the bulk of the other ones were removed. This Government has moved quickly to actually say that being the case we need to get those off the shelf and recalibrate. Part of that recalibration is accepting that removing animal testing raises the bar. I have no problem with that.If that means that some will go underground as a consequence of this then so be it because I say to members in this House and I say to members of the public that there will always be some who do not obey laws regardless of what they are but in the main laws are there to guide society and to guide people who do obey laws as to what is right and what is wrong. Therefore the laws are really about providing consequences to those lawless people who will not obey them regardless of what they are. Not making laws because the lawless will not follow them anyway is not what we should do. What we should be doing is intending to guide the law-abiding citizens and ensure that the direction that we believe is safe and appropriate is the track that they go down.Although there will be some unintended consequences in terms of the degree of use underground that will always happen regardless of what the drug is and regardless of what the law is because there will always be some who do not obey the laws regardless of what they are. This is not so much of a U-turn as it is actually responding to what is pioneering legislation and difficult legislation because we are trying to get ahead of the ability for drug makers to spin their chemical mixtures well ahead of legislative responses so it is pragmatic and it does respond to the concerns of community. I commend members in the House. I am actually disgusted that the Green Party is takingthe approach that it is in this particular debate given the harms that it is causing out here. But I commend this as being a solution to an ongoing and evolving problem.