Reti ShaneDr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. It's a real pleasure to speak to this bill and I'd like to congratulate the member for the hard work he's done in getting it here and for having this drawn. This is very thoughtful and very thorough. We've all heard the intent that we all share around the House—it's just how we operationalise that and actually do something with it.I'll speak to three statements. The first statement is: increasing drug penalties acts as a deterrent. Secondly: this bill increases penalties for psychoactive drugs. And thirdly—in complete agreement with my colleague Stuart Nash's last statements here—undoubtedly education support and specialist rehabilitation is the complete package around drug support. This is indeed what we're seeing with Te Ara Oranga in Whangarei and their methamphetamine project.Effectively this bill quadruples the class C penalties that we currently have. I want to briefly talk to that classification system. I then want to talk to the tools we have to manage psychoactive drugs. I'd then finally like to come to the clinical consequences of psychotropics and maybe even the New Zealand Drug Harm Index if time allows.As I've mentioned this bill quadruples the current penalties under the Misuse of Drugs Act for class C medicines. If we can consider that—sometimes we can get them mixed up: classes and schedules. The class system actually developed in 1961. It came out of the UK and the UN. It came here to New Zealand and we ratified the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. Now the problem with that was that it was primarily around coca opium and morphine and as time moved on—certainly as we've moved into the late 1960s the early 1970s; the time of free expression if you like—that UN convention was no longer applicable in New Zealand. So in the late 1960s and early 1970s the Deputy Director-General of Health Geoffrey Blake-Palmer was put in charge of a parliamentary commission looking at how we might deal with new drugs that were coming into the environment.What they found was that in 1955 to 1963 there were only 40 people per year who'd been charged with drug offences but in 1972 alone there were 700 people who were charged with offences. It was the Blake-Palmer committee that recommended a harms-based classification schedule. We call it classes A B and C but it's also schedules 1 2 and 3 which you see in the back that actually define all the medicines—a harm-based classification system.The psychoactives appeared in the early 2000s in the Misuse of Drugs Act the 1975 Act that installed that classification system. It didn't really deal to that for one prime reason: because all of these synthetics are chemically unique and could not be considered as controlled analogues. I say again the Psychoactive Substances Act 2013 was initiated once we'd sort of fallen out of our decisions around 2007-08 around how we might manage these ever-changing psychoactives.Let's then come to the current regulatory environment—what tools we have for psychoactive substances. New Zealand's ratified three UN conventions on psychoactive substances. I won't go over them individually but they're the 1961 1971 and 1988 conventions. The Expert Advisory Committee on Drugs which is the statutory body that decides what classification psychotropics go into—interestingly the Smoke-free Environments Act also prohibits the sale of herbal smoking products such as synthetic cannabimimetic substances. There's also temporary class drug notices that can be introduced for misuse—so these are the tools we've got but they're clearly not enough. They're clearly not enough because as we're all aware we've got synthetic cannabinoids which have caused and are causing significant harm. How much more harm can you have than a death—20 of them at least prior to the end of the year. We have this class of drugs of which there are seven major categories these synthetic cannabinoids acting on CB1 and CB2 receptors—so similar to where THC acts but much more dangerous than we ever considered in certainly 1975 and in the 2013 Psychoactive Substances Act. We need more. Clearly we need more. I have seen many patients and many families who have had the consequences of psychoactives. It is not an easy challenge.I think if we were to frame the nature of the consequences the New Zealand Drug Harm Index—and I want to give attribution to Peter Dunne for propelling this lifting it back up and giving it some momentum—broke down the drug harms into economic consequences social consequences and for the very first time measured community consequences. It's a fascinating story when you say to someone How much would you pay to rehabilitate your brother if they were on drugs?" and actually giving it a dollar sum. It's well worth looking at the New Zealand Drug Harm Index.Anyway I've seen a lot of harm done from drugs in my clinical life. I do believe that increasing penalties will decrease the chances or the incidence of dealing and use of psychoactive substances. I do believe it's a deterrent and I think it needs to wrap around other mechanisms. Thank you."