McLellan TraceyDr TRACEY McLELLAN (Labour—Banks Peninsula): Thank you Mr Speaker and thank you for the chance to rise in support of this bill the Drug and Substance Checking Legislation Bill (No 2) to take a call add a contribution and make two or three points perhaps a little bit clearer. The single broad aim of this legislation is again and I think we need to remind ourselves to minimise the harm by allowing checking services to operate legally in New Zealand within a permanent regulatory sort of system and I don't think we can lose sight of that. So there's three points that I just want to emphasise. Firstly the drug-checking Act was implemented obviously as many people have already said as a temporary piece of legislation to allow for drug checking to take place over this past summer. But as it is in its current form it's not best practice particularly because there isn't that access to oversight of the appointment decisions or oversight of the provider activity and there are no provisions for appointments to be revoked. So this piece of legislation is more robust and can address at least those shortcomings. I think as Minister Henare said the biggest difference between the current Act and this bill that we are talking about tonight is in the licensing system which provides much more oversight and gives us that mechanism to suspend or revoke a licence to test if the provider is not providing their particular service properly. The second point is that checking a drug or a substance allows a person essentially to make a lifesaving decision not to consume it should it turn out to be not what it says on the box so to speak. That's actually incredibly important and nothing to be scoffed at or taken lightly. It doesn't need to happen every day. It doesn't need to happen in every community. For every time that happens and a person is able to negotiate their way out of a potentially risky situation then that's worthwhile.As Minister Henare stated earlier it was common over this past summer—and I think we've all heard various permeations of it—for synthetic cathinones to be sold as MDMA and they're so much more risky. Although it's temporary the current Act has already been shown to have an impact. I'm just going to go back a little bit and talk about that Victoria University research and repeat: 68 percent of surveyed festival goers who used the drug-testing services reported—that's all right; self-reported. That's what a survey is. They reported a change in their behaviour as a result. The study never claimed to look at or demonstrate the safety of drug taking because guess what? Taking drugs isn't particularly safe. It wasn't providing evidence and shouldn't be slurred in that way in this House. The previous contributor" Simeon Brown—perhaps we should put that in quotes for the Hansard—who talks about false confidence smugly dismissed research for not being robust in an area or with regard to findings that it never claimed to make in the first place.Thirdly the permanent regulatory system for drug checking would help crucial harm education as my colleague Liz Craig talked about to be disseminated to people who are at risk of drug harm remembering that that is a very real risk. People who consume illicit drugs tend to be hard to identify and tend to be quite hard to reach within health messaging. So drug checking brings people who consume drugs into contact with people who have and can provide them with information and advice and potentially connect them to those broader health services as well. This is usually provided in a peer sort of situation so it has a much stronger influence generally than from official sources.Now it's also worth noting that there is often limited information about which drugs are currently in circulation in New Zealand. This makes it more difficult for police and health services to anticipate prevent or respond to drug harm particularly if it's from novel substances. I think given some of the contributions tonight it's probably only fair that Dr Fiona Hutton gets a bit of a name check here when she concludes that "The research detailed in this report and the international literature support drug-checking services and demonstrate the effectiveness of drug checking as a harm reduction measure." adding that "There is no evidence that drug checking increases drug use or encourages those who do not use illegal drugs to begin using them." In making this quote she cites international literature from various places overseas including the UK Portugal Netherlands Canada Switzerland and Australia.So in summary if the drug checking Act provisions are repealed which they will be in December 2021 we are left without a system in place. Drug checking will revert to that legal grey area which is not ideal. I don't think now is the time to go backwards on this issue. This bill is in line with Labour Party policy to treat drug use and drug abuse as a health issue and not a criminal issue and on that basis therefore I'm happy to commend this bill to the House."