Chadwick Steve: Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Chadwick Steve: Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:626;Page:21474] 
STEVE CHADWICK (Labour—Rotorua) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a call in the second reading debate on the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill (No 3). I thank the members of the Health Committee. This was a very complex bill that came before the committee. I think its complexity comes from the fact that we are dealing with a drug-regulating regime that was established in 1975 by the Misuse of Drugs Act and subsequently amended by the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Act 1978. That is 30 years ago and we are now finding that we do not always have the right framework in current legislative provisions to deal with the issues that we are dealing with in this bill. 
The committee was quite happy with the amendments in the bill which address matters like presumption of supply levels being amended by Order in Council. We spent a lot of time on that. We looked at thresholds for presumption of supply in relation to methamphetamine. It was of great concern to us that although the drug had been reclassified in a previous amendment to the Act the thresholds had been set at the wrong level so we needed to reconsider the threshold. We did not have any problem with this. 
The bill also strengthens the provisions for offences of importing and exporting the horrible precursor substances ephedrine and pseudoephedrine that are now used in manufacturing P. That problem has caused us a lot of concern. 
The trends we have seen in pill shopping at pharmacies have changed and we needed to move our eye to the importing and exporting of precursors. We needed to make a shift to strengthening the powers of the Customs Service in the monitoring of importing and exporting. 
Supplementary Order Paper 298 added a new Part 3 to the bill which relates to benzylpiperazine. I note that this Supplementary Order Paper came in on 9 November. This legislation is not a knee-jerk reaction to a new substance on the market. The media said we were rapidly pushing it through the House; we have not done that at all. We received the Supplementary Order Paper in November and here we are in June debating the second reading of the bill. 
We had a lot of issues to grapple with over the current construct of the Misuse of Drugs Act and what we could do about a substance like benzylpiperazine. We also asked about some other substances out there unregulated that are causing concern because they are being used for their psychoactive effects. These include substances like “nos”—nitrous oxide. We even looked at things like nail polish remover and hairspray—products in the commercial market that are now being used for their psychoactive effects for heaven’s sake! We had to grapple with how we could regulate these substances. 
Everybody on the committee realised that a social problem with benzylpiperazine is emerging rapidly and we also knew of problems with other products. So we were looking at a framework for dealing with these substances as restricted substances. I thank the committee for its work. 
The concern was raised—which Judy Turner talked about—that we needed a stand-alone restricted substances bill but we were advised that simply to get officials to work on developing a stand-alone bill and to get advice and look at the policy of such a bill would take about 6 months and we were aware that we just did not have enough time for that at this stage of the political cycle. I was really pleased that in the end we agreed to do our best to get benzylpiperazine put on a restricted substances schedule. I thank the committee for that. I think it was a very pragmatic decision which supported the Minister’s intention to show that we are going to manage the substances that are out there being used now and that we need to do something about. 
So we went back to expeditious scheduling which I think was put in the original bill for the very purpose of enabling us to respond quickly rather than have to amend standing legislation. We did not support the recommendation to develop a stand-alone bill. 
I believe that now we have the framework in place it will allow us to add substances to the new schedule. I am very happy that the legislation is robust. We put all sorts of restrictions in the bill about sale and regulatory provisions that will make it a lot stronger. When we get to the Committee stage we will consider those aspects of the bill.