Curran Clare: Psychoactive Substances Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: Psychoactive Substances Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 02 July 2013. Volume:691;Page:11570. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South):It is not every day that a young woman walks into your electorate office just straight out of a psychiatric institution where she had been hospitalised and was receiving intensive treatment for an addiction to and symptoms arising from taking synthetic cannabis. This young woman was very sick. She was 24 years old and did not have a history of drug taking. She had got herself into a situation where she had taken some synthetic cannabis and had quickly become addicted. She was very sick and she was very adamant that she wanted a law change as quickly as possible.That was in March this year. Subsequently my office has been besieged with a number of phone calls from schools from concerned parents and from other organisations around this issue.This is as we know a huge issue for parents for our children for our community generally for schools for the police and for our health services and there has been some very good work done in my community by our health services. We have a toxicologist at the Dunedin Hospital Dr Leo Schep who has been doing some very good work on this issue and some studies on this issue. His work is yet to be released but it will help with the treatment of addiction to these substances.Following those representations I visited dairies. I wrote to dairies—every dairy in my electorate. I visited them. I visited users in prison. I supported a petition in my electorate. I went back to those dairies that had said they were still selling it and I askedthem to cease. I spoke to the Dunedin police on a number of occasions and I met with organisations such as the Salvation Army.Two weeks ago 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. Here are some of the things that they said arising from that meeting. 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. A 22-year-old man had been in the emergency department 14 times with synthetic cannabis - related issues in the past 6 months. Thirteen percent of admissions to the acute psychiatric ward at Wakari Hospital in a 14-week period earlier this year were related to synthetic cannabis. In 2010 there were no synthetic cannabis - related admissions to that hospital. The average age of patients admitted was 10 years younger than in 2010.A community mental health nurse said that some of the synthetic cannabis manufacturers were using extremely clever marketing to target children that we were fighting a losing battle and that it was going to get worse before it gets better. This was said in the knowledge that this law was going to pass through Parliament. They said that patients were being admitted daily to the psychiatric wards to detoxify and that many of them had no prior history of mental illness or substance abuse.I could go on and on about this issue.Thankfully and as a result of the inputs to this bill particularly the work put in on this side of the House by the Labour members—and I would especially like to acknowledge Iain Lees-Galloway—there is in the commentary on this bill a section headed “Possible increased demand on health services” which states: “We acknowledge that with the banning of some substances currently available there could be increased demand on mental health and drug and alcohol services which health providers will need to make provision for.” In the Committee stage of this bill I will be putting a question to the Minister as to what provisions are being made in the health services for the effect of this bill and what this will mean for our communities such as the community in Dunedin which is no different from many other communities around our country where the significant effects of these drugs will not cease as a result of passing this bill in the House.As the police have said to me and my colleagues in Dunedin these drugs are likely to go underground. People who are addicted to these drugs will still want to try to get them. There will be increased effects from these drugs. We need to know how we are going to handle them as a community and in this House I think there has to be some responsibility taken by the Government for putting increased services into the services that are needed. Thank you.