Hague Kevin: Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 06 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17551. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green): I want to begin by as others have done thanking the Minister of Health for consulting the Green Party on his draft bill the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill last night. Again I record that the Green Party will be abstaining on this bill. I know that others have been puzzled by that but the simple fact is this. This bill does two things. One of those things we strongly support and the other we strongly oppose. It leaves us with no other respectable position.I want to continue from where I left off with my second reading speech. In the second reading I spoke about some of the reasons that lay behind the widespread community concerns about the availability of these substances and how those were based on incorrect understandings of the law and of the situation around this wide range of substances and my concern about the failure of the Government to respond to that misinformation with leadership and proper information. In this speech I want to focus not so much on that issue as on the response of the Government to the current situation.This bill reimposes prohibition. The Law Commission the Ministry of Health the New Zealand Drug Foundation the vast majority of submitters on the original bill the Health Committee the Minister of Health and this Parliament were all right—prohibition does not work. It seems bizarre to me that I need to be making the argument for that case since so many members of the House in fact made that point and madethose arguments in the various debates that we held in the House on the original bill. I will not quote members tonight. But the fact is that that is the approach that the Government is now imposing in the interim.I am just going to run through some of those arguments. The thing about prohibition is that it does not suppress demand. It may reduce it very slightly but the fact is that demand still exists and the market will still respond to that demand with supply. In a couple of months’ time if theCampbell Live programme takes its camera crews out to Naenae maybe from about 10 o’clock at night through to maybe 1 o’clock or 2 o’clock in the morning and instead of going to the shop it goes to the alley behind the shop it is going to find demand being met by supply.Prohibition takes supply out of the hands of regulated controlled retailers and instead puts that supply into the hands of criminal gangs or other illicit suppliers. Unfortunately what that means is that the drug dealer on the street in the alleyway behind the shop at Naenae and the drug dealer in the tinny house are not subject to those same controls. Those people supplying the demand that will not go away as a result of this bill tonight will not be checking people for their ID or for proof of age. We should expect that supply to people under age will increase as a result of this bill. Those people will not be making a distinction between those products that are low risk and those products that are high risk.We should expect that the supply of products that are high risk will increase as a result of this bill. Those people those illicit drug dealers will in addition to having a range of psychoactive substances—those currently legal and those currently illegal—have in another pocket other drugs like methamphetamine. So the product of this bill will be that the demand which will not go away as a result of this bill will also be met by the increased supply of currently illicit drugs. We are going to be seeing a significant increase in harm.As the prohibition on cannabis has proven demand is not suppressed by prohibition. Cannabis is absolutely prohibited and yet most adult New Zealanders have smoked cannabis. It has not suppressed the demand. Further this bill which is going to be passed tonight—and I respect the fact that the Green Party speaks in a minority on this bill—undermines the very Act that it amends because what will happen as this bill is passed is that it will set the platform for illicit chains of supply for psychoactive substances and those chains of supply will still exist when the bill takes full effect. So rather than a managed transition in which we move from having a completely unregulated market through to having a regulated market we do our best in the passage of this bill to undermine the regime that we are trying to impose.Others have spoken about the need for treatment services to be put in place because one of the consequences of this bill for any people who do have some degree of dependence on any of the substances that currently exist is that they will find that they suddenly have no access to a legal supply of the substance on which they are dependent. So that is one of the problems around supply. I welcome MrRyall’s comments about the preparations he has made but I note that none of that actually increases the supply of treatment services. None of that actually deals with the withdrawal that we fully anticipate—which Dr LeoShep has spoken about—with this bill.There is another matter related to access to treatment services. With the passage of this bill those people who wish to access treatment services or who have a need to access treatment services will find those treatment services harder to access and that is for a couple of reasons. The first is that there will no longer be information at the point of sale or on the products about how to access treatment services. So that is one of the reasons. The other reason is that in order for people to be able to access treatment services once this bill is passed they will need to admit to criminal offending. That willbe a significant barrier for many as it is for those who require treatment for dependence on other currently illicit substances.Finally I want to speak about stockpiling and there has been some reference to stockpiling in this debate tonight. One of the consequences of this bill and of the Government’s approach to this bill is that there will be stockpiling—there has already been stockpiling—and the consequence of that is twofold. On one hand it actually increases the supply of these substances to fuel the illicit trade that we should fully anticipate will take effect from tomorrow night and on the other hand it also means that individuals will have much larger quantities of these substances that will become illicit. That means that they will be more subject to crime. Also that larger supply of these substances is inherently more dangerous. So I am very disappointed that rationality and evidence-based policy are the casualties of this bill tonight.I was proud of the quality of the debate of the maturity of the debate that we had around the original bill the Psychoactive Substances Bill and I think it is unfortunate that probably most members of this House understand that the bill that we are passing tonight will make the harm from these substances worse and not better. The Green Party will be abstaining on this bill.