Curran Clare: Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 06 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17522. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Let us call it what it is. This Government got the Psychoactive Substances Act wrong. This Government got the law wrong. The Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill is an unprecedented U-turn—an unprecedented U-turn—by a shaky Government. Of course we support it. Of course we support it because we made the Government do it. We made it do it alongside the tens of thousands of people in every community around New Zealand the desperate families theCampbell Live show—yes John Campbell and theCampbell Live show—the radio stations and the newspapers including my own newspaper in Dunedin theOtago Daily Times. This is the result of community pressure. This Government got the law terribly wrong.When we voted for the original legislation we did so on the basis that it would rid our community of these substances. But what happened? They went out of the dairies but instantly a whole lot of new outlets—47—popped up. They got pretty much instant interim licences and many of them are now selling only legal highs. Eight of those were in Dunedin. One of those is in south Dunedin and it is situated next to SF Otago which is a community mental health facility. It has caused huge numbers of problems in the Dunedin community. [Interruption] I challenge the member across the House who lives in Dunedin to say that it has not. He laughs at the Opposition over here for raising this issue. It popped up a week after the Psychoactive Substances Act was passed and it has created a massive number of problems.What else have we seen? What have we seen since then? Attempts to try to get that facility closed have failed because the Ministry of Health said that it could not do anything about it. The Dunedin City Council said that its hands were tied. Meanwhile a Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority a very small group of people was formed in the corner of an open-plan office in the Ministry of Health to try to manage these issues—it is trying to manage them unsuccessfully. And what did it do? It gave licences to 47 outlets. It reduced around 300 substances to 42. It did not put in place a testing regime. Of those 42 substances that remained on the shelves in these purpose-built opened facilities with the interim licences from the Ministry of Health they had even worse substances that were given the licences to be sold.I want to show you the monthly report from the National Poisons Centre. In fact here is a colour version of the graph because it is a much better version for the people watching at home. The bar graph in red is the number of calls made to the National Poisons Centre in April of this year. It is higher than any number of calls that were made all throughout the last couple of years. From August last year when the Act was passed the numbers have consistently been high. What they show is that the substances that have been left on the shelves have been more concentrated have been more deadly and have had worse and worse effects on people in our community. We are seeing worse effects from withdrawal. We are seeing people vomiting for days unable to eat and unable to sleep. Psychiatrists are reporting that up to 40 percent of patients that they are seeing are related to legal highs.These are shocking shocking statistics. They are shocking concerns for our country. It was a shocking state of affairs to see the legislation pass through this House legislation from a Government that claimed that it was going to sort this problem out. We are now hearing that there are fears that the long-term effects of these psychoactive substances may be permanent and that there needs to be a lot more research done on this. There needs to be a lot more resources put into this. But what happened? What happened back in July last year when we raised these issues in the debate on the Psychoactive Substances Bill as it passed before the House? We raised the issues of theimportance of providing more resources to the health system and what happened? Nothing. Nothing happened.I will read to you what was said in this House by me during the second reading of the Psychoactive Substances Bill. I said: “I was invited to and attended a symposium in Dunedin at the Wakari Hospital which is run by the district health board and mental health services and it included people working in inpatient services community-based mental health services emergency psychiatric services specialist alcohol and drug services and others. … They said that synthetic cannabis was a clinical burden on health services that emergency department patients had cyclical vomiting and seizures from smoking synthetic cannabis and that many of the patients had experienced delayed seizures up to a day after smoking synthetic cannabis.” They said that there was an increased demand on the health services. We said and we had put into the commentary on the Psychoactive Substances Bill that there would be an increased demand on the health services.Where has the reponse been from this Government around dealing with that increased demand? What did it do? It created a small group of people who sat in the corner of an open-plan office in the Ministry of Health and could not deal with the situation that they had been left with as the result of the bill passing. We raised these issues back in August. The National Poisons Centre has told us that the incidence of severe effects is going up and up every single month. A report produced in a recent edition ofNew Zealand Doctor magazine written by LeoSchep who is the toxicologist at Dunedin Hospital and who is widely considered reputable and credible on these issues said that “The ease of access and legal availability of these products has … created a substantial increase in the numbers of patients attending emergency departments and medical centres … The National Poisons Centre … had more calls last year about synthetic cannabinoids than any other single drug of abuse category.” He went on to describe the effects which I have just read out but what he also raised is that there is serious concern about the risk of causing ongoingneuro-psychiatric effects. This is one of the reasons that we had to get the legislation right and we did not get it right. The Government did not get it right last year. We have to get it right this year.Where are the resources? Where are the resources that are going to be provided in our communities after this bill is passed? Hopefully it will be passed and it will receive the Royal assent late on Wednesday night or early on Thursday morning which will make every single one of these substances unauthorised—unauthorised—and they will need to be taken off the shelves. There will be 2 weeks for there to be inspections of all those licensed premises to ensure that the substances are gone. Where are the resources though in our health system that are going to be dealing with the effects? Where is the Government on this? Where is the Government saying that it is going to put increased health resources into the community? This is a no-brainer.There was a second U-turn this week—I know that my colleagues have talked about this—and that was in respect of the 46000 people over 48 hours who signed a petition to ban animal testing. That again is a no-brainer. This is a bill that we must pass. We must get it through this House this week but the Government needs to own up and say that it got the original legislation wrong.