Curran Clare: Psychoactive Substances Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: Psychoactive Substances Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 11 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:12003. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South):Thousands of New Zealanders are watching tonight wanting this bill the Psychoactive Substances Bill to pass because it is a really important piece of legislation. It is about getting a horrible toxic poisonous set of drugs out of our dairies out of our lives and dealing to an issue that I think everyone in this House acknowledges is really important.It is just such a contradiction to the previous piece of legislation the New Zealand International Convention Centre Bill. None of the Government members in this House today want to get up and talk about this important piece of legislation but they wanted to speak about the last piece of legislation which was about keeping another major problem in our community and making it worse. So on the one hand we are trying to take out toxic poisonous drugs from our dairies and on the other hand we are increasing another toxic problem in our society—that is problem gambling. Those members should be ashamed of that and they should be ashamed that they did not take a conscience vote a personal vote on that issue. It is a conscience vote and it just shows that the people across the House do not have a conscience.This bill is important. I am proud to be speaking on it. I am proud to be part of a caucus that has worked really hard on this bill. We have got some people on our side of the House—Iain Lees-Galloway and Annette King being two of them—who have worked really hard during the select committee process to make sure that this is a much better piece of legislation and who have made sure that we have made this bill a better bill and a better law that will go into our community and will take these drugs out of the community.I also want to commend the Greens for the amendment that they put forward on animal testing. We did support that amendment. We do not want these drugs to be tested on animals. National refused to give up animal testing but we in Labour are proud of the fact that our MPs were able to get the Government to agree to changes to the bill to ensure that there were alternatives to animal testing—that alternatives exist that cannot be used in the evaluation of these substances. Although Mojo Mathers’ amendment did not pass at least there will be some safeguards now around that animal testing.I have received emails all day today from people about this bill as well as emails about the other bill that passed its first reading in the House before the debate on this bill—as no doubt has every member in this House. They are emails from people who are raising the issues and are talking about the increased harm that is happening as a result of the taking of these substances. I am going to read to you one of those emails that I received this afternoon. It said: “I have ongoing concerns with people who use these drugs and who have future access to them increasing burdens on health care providers and patients suffering clinical effects related to psychosis withdrawal symptoms which can prevail for weeks and addiction. There has already been a noticeable increase over recent months but will most likely increase.”When I stood up in the Chamber in the Committee stage I showed members a report from the National Poisons Centre on the number of calls on these substances that had been coming inin the last year. I have got another table to hold up today which shows in red the number of calls for June. It shows that it has gone down very very slightly from May but there has been a huge increase in the last few months in the number of calls that have come into the National Poisons Centre about these psychoactive substances. The reason for that may be related to the increased publicity around this bill but health professionals are sending us warnings that as politicians we have to put in place legislation and along with legislation comes the need for increased resources in our health sector to deal with the effects of these psychoactive substances and in ourmental health sector and we also need to look at what is happening with the increase in crime related to the use of these substances.I will just read to you the latest report that has come in. It says: “The rates of calls to the National Poisons Centre have remained high”—and this is for June—“continuing trends since April 2013. Adverse symptoms reported in April and May notably acute kidney injuries seizures and acute psychosis have continued to occur during June with a further observation of an emerging trend of delayed seizures that are increasingly difficult to control.” These drugs are doing serious harm—harm that is not being seen done by other drugs. “Ongoing discussions and meetings with emergency departments medical centres and other health care providers also report increasing burdens on their services by users of these drugs. Rates of attending patients are continuing to rise—in particular patients suffering addiction and withdrawal effects. With the banning of all present designer drugs in July the National Poisons Centre anticipates this demand on health care services will continue to increase.”It goes on to say: “The National Poisons Centre continues to be concerned by the rates of reported adverse effects following exposure to these analogues. Although the introduction of the new legislation this month will ban present designer drugs being legally sold there will be ongoing burdens on health care providers with patients suffering adverse psychiatric effects which in some patients will be permanent and issues centred on addiction and withdrawal syndrome.”Throughout the whole of the discussion on this bill I have asked over and over again as have a number of my colleagues—we ensured that it was mentioned in the commentary to this bill—where the comparable resources are that are going to be put from the health sector into the need for what is going to happen after these drugs are banned and what we are seeing right now. The health professionals tell us that there is increasing need and that there are no more resources being put in. There is an increasing burden happening as a result of this. I ask the question again in the House today: where are the extra resources that will be put in?We support this bill. We know it is an important bill. We know that it has got a lot of measures in it that are changing the way that we are treating our attitude to drugs in this country. We are looking at it from a harm minimisation perspective which is a healthy and constructive and positive thing to do. I just want to quickly say that the purpose of going into a couple of those measures—and I know that my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway and other colleagues on the Health Committee worked hard on this on changing parts of the legislation particularly around the purpose which now reads: “The purpose of this Act is to regulate the availability of psychoactive substances in New Zealand.” That was what was originally said but they added the words “to protect the health of and minimise harm to individuals who use psychoactive substances.”Those are such important words—the minimising of harm. It is moving the effect of drug taking into the health sector. We need to be looking more across the spectrum of the drugs that are being taken in New Zealand and the harm that is occurring and looking at it from the perspective of harm minimisation. We need to be looking at other social harms that are occurring such as problem gambling. This Parliament today could have done a brave thing and it could have addressed problem gambling as well as psychoactive substances. Instead it has cancelled out more or less what we are achieving with psychoactive substances and is increasing problem gambling in New Zealand.