Hague Kevin: Psychoactive Substances Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: Psychoactive Substances Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 27 June 2013. Volume:691;Page:11399. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green):Could I begin as others have done by congratulating and thanking other members of the Health Committee who considered the Psychoactive Substances Bill. I believe that we collectively did a pretty good job. As Iain Lees-Galloway has said we worked very collegially apart from I think on one issue which I will come to later on. I also want to thank the officials from the Ministry of Health and other departments who worked with us on this bill. We were given a tight time frame to work in and they worked very well under pressure.In the first reading debate I praised the bill for a variety of things. It is world-first legislation. It provides a framework that bases our response to these substances on health effects. It is a framework that makes the regulatory response proportional to the harm that is being prevented. It is a framework that sets the bar at low risk not no risk. So it is not a prohibition-based response to these substances which I think is practical and visionary recognition of what works and what does not work in regulating such substances.We are a country that has been very much at the forefront of this debate. We were pretty much the first country to experience the wave of psychoactive substances with the benzylpiperazine products. We were the first country to go into the failed regime of temporary prohibition notices. Now here we are the first country to be developing this kind of framework which is modern proportionate and rational drug policy. Accordingly the review that we do of this legislation in 5 years’ time—and I am very pleased that the Government has built that into the bill—is going to be very important. It is going to enable us to learn from it and it is going to enable the rest of the world to learn from it too.In my first reading speech I indicated a number of areas that needed improvement. I want to run through those very quickly. Others have touched on some of them. I said that improving health had to be clearly stated in the purpose of the bill. Improving health and reducing harm are now very clearly stated as others have pointed out. I said that the bill needed to define what low risk constituted. The bill does not do that. I have to say—and this is I guess the strength of our select committee process in New Zealand—that I changed my mind. Submitters to the bill changed my mind on that issue and I agree that actually it is better for practice to inform that definition and that is what is going to happen.I indicated that a number of the measures that are used in the control of alcohol and tobacco ought to be brought over and used in this bill also to add to the suite of tools available for regulation of psychoactive substances. We looked at controls of locationhours sponsorship advertising labelling and price in relation to each of those substances—alcohol and tobacco—and on most of those fronts we have now added in the possibility to regulate those matters.Iain Lees-Galloway has mentioned the reasons that we have not moved on excise tax at this time. Like Mr Lees-Galloway I also was convinced by submitters on that point. I was initially a fan of plain packaging and I changed my mind about that too. I changed my mind on the basis that unlike tobacco the psychoactive substances that we are dealing with are not all ones that uniformly cause harm. In fact the ones that we are allowing through the gate with this bill are ones that by definition carry low risk so the same level of response that we have on tobacco is not appropriate. Also these substances are not all the same. Unlike a cigarette or a pouch of tobacco which is more or less the same thing regardless of who the manufacturer is these substances are actually different; they do different things. So plain packaging is not appropriate.In my first reading speech I called for a shorter transition period and that has been adopted. I also called for the licensing of retailers and that has also been adopted. I think that is a very good development. Overall what we see with this bill is I think the beginning of a convergence of the way that we approach the regulation of substances that cause harm but none the less as a society we say that a person ought to have the right to use that substance and to engage with that harm. I think that convergence is a very good thing and certainly one of the things that I look forward to in the future is further convergence of the regulation of these kinds of substances.Back in the first reading speech I expressed the hope that we would offer the world a model that would be worthy of being world-leading. I think that with a couple of exceptions we have done that. I just want to come to those exceptions now. One is around the possession offences. There has already been some discussion here today. The bill contains an infringement offence for possessing an unapproved substance. I think that that should be scrapped and I really hope that the Minister—and I appreciated his words today—will consider doing that and that the House does in fact have opportunities to do so.The result of possession offences in the Misuse of Drugs Act has not been to see more people treated it has not been to see less consumption and it has not been to see less harm and there is no reason to suppose that any of those would be the effect of including a possession offence here. Instead what it mainly has done is it has tied up police time and punished people. I do not know that that is really consistent with the objective that we now have for this bill. There have not been possession offences in the temporary prohibition notices and not a single person has been clamouring for there to be such possession offences. So the non-existence of such offences under those notices has not been a problem and if there is not a problem we do not need to provide a solution for it.As Mr Lees-Galloway has mentioned the idea of infringement notices is to provide an on-the-spot response to a minor offence. In fact in this case an on-the-spot response is not possible because the testing to determine whether this is an approved or unapproved substance takes months. So it is out of kilter with infringement notices—the rubric upon which those are based—it provides no real benefit and there is significant harm. I do not believe on balance that it is worthwhile. The minority report refers to the under-18s issue and we are going to be watching that closely because we believe that that is likely to be used more to harass young people than to actually result in their receiving treatment.The other issue that I address in the minority report—and it has to be addressed I believe by this House; and my colleague Mojo Mathers will speak more about it—is the animal testing issue. The fact is that the previous Associate Minister of Healthencouraged people to make submissions about animal testing. The committee did receive advice from the Clerk of the House that amendments that absolutely ruled out animal testing per se would be out of scope. We received no advice that those submissions were out of scope. So the chair was wrong to rule those submissions out of scope. The National majority was wrong to not hear those submissions.How it stands now is that a whole bunch of New Zealanders have been effectively disenfranchised from their opportunity to have a say about this bill. The only people now to have actually read those submissions—and we provide a little bit of flavour in the minority report demonstrating how there are suitable alternatives to animal testing to establish safety—are the Green Party members because we held our own hearings to hear those submissions.That is not how the process ought to work. It is not how the process ought to work. We must adopt Mojo Mathers’ Supplementary Order Paper 260 in the Committee stage in order to have that world-best practice—that model for the rest of the world. Thank you.