Lees-Galloway Iain: Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Lees-Galloway Iain: Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:674;Page:20208] 
IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North) 
: 
 Part 2 of the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill contains clauses 12 and 13. These clauses deal with amendments to the 2005 amendment to the Misuse of Drugs Act. Essentially clauses 12 and 13 amend section 31 of the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Act 2005 by repealing “Paragraph (b)(v) of the definition of substance” so that hazardous substances as defined in section 2(1) of the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996 are no longer excluded from the definition of “substance” for the purposes of the 2005 amendment Act. That essentially means that at the current time a substance cannot fall under both the Misuse of Drugs Act and the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act but this change allows substances to be able to come under the purview of both Acts. 
I suppose to be honest this was not a part of the bill that attracted an awful lot of attention from submitters to the Health Committee. In fact only three of the submitters at the select committee referred to clause 13 and nobody referred to clause 12. One was in favour of clause 13 and two were opposed. Those who were opposed to clause 13 were concerned that this provision would give the Environmental Risk Management Authority the ability to regulate substances listed in the schedules of the Misuse of Drugs Act. Submitters were I suppose concerned that the Environmental Risk Management Authority lacks expertise in this area and would apply unduly strict criteria with high barriers to entry which would mean that no legal products would meet the requirements to be approved as being safe. 
I suppose that is very much part of the debate we have been having about how to actually determine that a product is safe and how new substances are to be determined to be safe. However that is not actually what this change does. Clause 13 does not propose to give the Environmental Risk Management Authority the ability to regulate psychoactive substances. Rather the clause seeks to remove the exclusion that a hazardous substance cannot also be a restricted substance under the Misuse of Drugs Act. I suppose given that that is the case in fact what is actually occurring is probably in line with what the submitters would have liked to see. Essentially the provision just smoothes the path for substances to be able to come under the purview of both of these Acts. 
Under the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act a substance is “any element defined mixture of elements compounds or defined mixture of compounds either naturally occurring or produced synthetically or any mixtures thereof:” and I suppose that is exactly what Kronic Dream Spice and the other synthetic cannabis products are. They are products that are made up of both synthetic and naturally occurring substances. From that point of view that is the sort of thing that some submitters were concerned about: that in trying to establish whether something like Kronic is actually safe to come to market if it had fallen under the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act then that might not have been the most appropriate way to determine the safety of such a substance. Of course that is not what clause 13 does. The submitters can rest assured that that is not actually how the system will work. In fact we do not know exactly how the system will work at the moment but that is for the Minister to work on hopefully with some speed to come up with a solution to that question.