Craig LizDr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. Every year in New Zealand young people are turning up in emergency departments because the drug they thought they were taking wasn't what they were taking at all. So what this bill does is it keeps our young people safe over this festival season because it allows drug-checking services to operate with legal certainty. Because the problem we've got at the moment is that drug-checking services and the events that are hosting them are at risk of prosecution under the current law and yet we've still got services like KnowYourStuffNZ providing those drug-checking services because of the harm reduction potential. They've got the capacity to save people's lives.If you look at the Drug Foundation website what they said is that in 2017-2018 over that festival season 20 percent of samples that people had tested weren't what they thought they had and a further 11 percent of samples were adulterated with other psychoactive additives. So what they found was that if people ended up with substances that actually weren't what they thought they were 52 percent said that they weren't going to take them and another 11 percent said they were thinking about it. I think when you present people with additional information they will make the safer choice and that can have a huge impact on young people's lives.What this bill does is it does two main things. The first thing it does is it enables the Director-General of Health to appoint a drug-checking service by notice in the Gazette. What that means is that that service has the certainty that it can receive controlled drugs and other substances it can test them it can pass them on to other laboratories for further testing or to the police and it won't be prosecuted under the law.Secondly what this does is it amends section 12 of the Misuse of Drugs Act so it's not an offence for festival organisers to host a drug-checking service. This is important because under the current legislation it's actually an offence to allow your premises to be used for the commissioning of an offence under the Act. And what this means is that if you're saying We can have a drug-checking service" it means that that organiser is knowingly saying "We will have people that are using an illegal substance at our event" and that puts them at risk of prosecution. So the problem with that is then it means that they don't allow a drug-checking service on site or if they do they don't make sure that young people are aware of its availability. What this bill will do will make it much much safer for those young people who have decided that they are going to go ahead and use a substance.But this bill doesn't do some things. What it doesn't do is change the status of any drugs or other substances. So it's still a crime for unauthorised people to possess drugs or to sell them to others. The other thing though is that by the same token we don't actually want to make it easier to increase prosecutions. So what this bill also does is it says that you can't use the results of this drug testing as evidence against a person who provided the drug and nor can you take a lot of personal information from those that are having their substances checked and retain that. So basically what it does is there's many things it doesn't change with respect to status quo.This bill is only a temporary measure and basically it will automatically expire 12 months after coming into force. But in the meantime the Minister of Health early next year is going to return to Cabinet with a proposal for a more detailed drug-testing proposal and that proposal will then go through the normal levels of parliamentary scrutiny. This is an important bill and it puts in place some urgent measures that are going to protect our young people over the upcoming festival season and it's going to give those providing drug-testing services and the festival organisers who host them that legal certainty they won't be prosecuted under the current law. I commend this bill to the House."