Lees-Galloway Iain: Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 06 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17527. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): Labour continues to support this legislation the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill because it does remove untested drugs from the shelf and it also precludes animal testing from being used to prove that psychoactive substances are either low-risk or no risk. Those are two policies that we wholeheartedly endorse.There has been a lot of debate this evening about who voted for the original legislation the Psychoactive Substances Act and why people voted for it. This bill should not be misinterpreted as overturning the original legislation. This bill amends the original legislation. It takes the transitional provisions out of the Psychoactive Substances Act and it precludes the use of animal testing which was already somewhat restricted in the principal Act due to a compromise position that was able to be reached at the Health Committee. This bill should not be interpreted by the public as somehow overturning the overwhelming vote in favour of the original legislation the Psychoactive Substances Act.I just want to respond to John Banks because he seems quite tickled with himself that he was the one MP who voted against the original legislation. He then went on to say that somehow or another voting against the legislation meant that he was saving youngsters from using these drugs saving them from the perils and dangers of these drugs. Well let us be really clear here. If Parliament had followed John Banks’ lead on this legislation all the drugs that were out there before this Act was put in place and all the ones to which temporary ban notices had been applied would still be out there—something between 200 and 300 different products. We had so little idea about what was out there. We do not even know how many drugs were on the market and we haveno idea how many stores they were being sold from. It could have been 3000 or it could have been 4000.On the day that the Act was passed we went down to 47 drugs on the market and we went down to around 160 licensed retailers. That was the impact of that Act. So imperfect as it was and as much as we are back here as we predicted 12 months after the first reading trying to fix it up it was a vast improvement on what we had before. For John Banks to get up and crow about how his vote against the original legislation was somehow protecting the youth of New Zealand I think is bunkum and it needs to be called for what it is. John Banks seems—Louisa Wall: He loves animals.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: Look John Banks loves animals and he prioritised the protection of animals over the protection of kids but in fact there was more than one way to deal with this issue. Although National blocked the amendments that would have dealt with animal testing at the time those of us in the Opposition who actually cared about protecting our youngsters from high-risk drugs said we would pass the legislation regardless and we would find other ways. Trevor Mallard offered a Supplementary Order Paper to the Animal Welfare Amendment Bill and that is one mechanism by which we have been pursuing this. Today we are finally going to get there with the mechanism in this bill.The principles behind the Act are still sound. It is just the implementation in a lot of ways that has been poor. We have talked about how it has taken a long time to get the regulations in place and therefore the untested drugs have stayed on the market for much much longer than I think Parliament really anticipated. When we passed the Act we were being told by the Government and by the advisers that this was going to take the high-risk drugs off the market. We were told that the transition phase would be short and that it would be dealt with before now and that—getting the regulations sorted out—has been one of the biggest failures which of course we discovered in part because of the Prime Minister’s discomfort with animal testing could have been dealt with if National had voted for Mojo Mathers’ amendment in the first place.The other question that is now in front of us goes to implementation and resourcing as well. We have heard about how there are half a dozen people in the Ministry of Health trying to deal with all the licence applications trying to deal with writing the regulations and trying to deal with the complaints about different substances. Half a dozen people simply have not been enough to implement this legislation properly.But there is the other question: how well-resourced is our addiction treatment sector to deal with the potential for a large number of people coming off these drugs? I am going to be honest. We do not know what the impact is going to be. Some people might be able to come off these drugs and have no need for addiction treatment services. There may be a flood of people accessing addiction treatment services. There is no way the Government is going to be able to step those up to respond to that crisis because we simply do not have the trained people out there and addiction services do not have the resources and will not be given the resources to respond should there be a flood of demand on those services.The other thing that has been missing in all of this is information—information for families information for users. I was talking to someone in my electorate the other day who works for youth justice who was telling me that the young people whom she deals with were telling her which products were the bad ones and what the effects of them were. She said: “We’ve gathered all this information.” I said: “What did you do with that information?” and she said: “Oh we didn’t really know what to do with it. We haven’t passed it on to anybody.” She did not know—this is someone working for a Government agency—that what she should be doing is passing that information on tothe Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority so that it could be making decisions about which products needed to be recalled. That is how poor the information has been from the Government on how to make this Act work properly.It is important as we go through this next phase that the Government ensures through the district health boards that families have information on how to support people coming off these drugs and how to support people who are addicted to these drugs. That information simply has not been available and that has been a lot of the cause of the community outrage. People have not known what to do. The Government has not run any programmes. There have been no social marketing programmes to tell people how to report the harmful effects of psychoactive drugs. There has been no programme to teach people what low-risk use of these substances is.It was not enough to pass the legislation. It had to be implemented properly. Our Ministry of Health had to be resourced properly. Our district health boards had to be resourced properly. Our addiction service treatment centres had to be resourced properly. Our public health services needed to be resourced properly. None of that has happened. That is another reason why this Act has had a really unfortunate start and that is why we are back here trying to tidy it up again.We support the amendments in this bill. We think they will tidy up some aspects of the Act but the Government needs to do a lot more. It is not just about passing legislation. It is actually at the feet of the Government to make sure the resources are available to make this legislation work properly.