Alexander Marc: Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill (No 3) — Referral of S.O.P. 298 to Health Committee 
Alexander Marc: Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill (No 3) — Referral of S.O.P. 298 to Health Committee 
[Volume:621;Page:16829] 
MARC ALEXANDER (United Future) 
: 
 I will not take up the time of this House too much in the interests of speeding this debate along particularly as it is members’ day. One of the things I am interested in focusing on is that a lot of the debate that has taken place so far is a little bit premature and would be better addressed down the track. The core question right here is whether this Supplementary Order Paper should go to the Health Committee. I think there is fairly good support for that at the moment because there are a lot of issues that need to be dealt with. 
The real issue is how we decide the best way to regulate and develop a range of policies towards party drugs as well as aerosol sprays and all the rest of that stuff. We also need to consider solvent-abuse deaths and so on which have been faced already by the Wellington Coroner. The herbal highs are another segment altogether. They are currently legal and to some degree have legitimate purposes. But it is the abuse of these things that is at the core of a lot of the trouble we have. In March this year for example five young people were admitted to Dunedin Hospital with anxiety symptoms after taking such pills. The thing is we have to deal with the substances sensibly and also with the inhalants. 
Muriel Newman commented that we should not accept the proposed regulation which would allow restrictions to be placed on such matters as legal age to purchase retail supply and marketing labelling and so on. She is quite right in that we do not want to get into the absurd situation of having to label hairspray as a product that could kill. Every knife and fork in the kitchen cupboard could kill. Everything could kill. We do not want to go down that track. But at the same time we need to have a sensible debate about some of the things that are actually killing hurting and harming our kids. Obviously the message is not getting out and we have to deal with that. If Mr Anderton’s Supplementary Order Paper is a way to do so then I think we ought to be comfortable with supporting it and having a legitimate debate when it gets to the Health Committee. 
The regulations proposed will allow restrictions to be placed on the legal age to purchase retail supply and marketing and so on as I mentioned. They will also set out regulation-making powers with offences such as the offence to sell a restricted substance in contravention of an age restriction the offence to supply a restricted substance to a person in contravention of an age restriction and the offence to sell in contravention of the labelling restriction or labelling requirement. I do not want to see our country paralysed by warning labels on every damn thing we need to make our lives bearable. Hell one can die from eating too much candy or chocolate! Should we put warnings on those things as well? I do not think so. 
The point is that those kinds of discussions need to take place in the appropriate arena which happens to be the Health Committee. United Future believes that regulation should be commensurate with the harm a drug does. We would like to see a policy that is led by the police rather than an artificial device such as class A class B and class C drugs. One of the problems in going down that road is that methamphetamines for example took 7 years to be reclassified. I would much rather see the police leading the debate. There are a lot of issues that need to be dealt with. The Health Committee is the appropriate place for that and United Future will be supporting that debate occurring.