Lees-Galloway Iain: Psychoactive Substances Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Psychoactive Substances Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 09 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:11775. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North):Just to clarify we are debating Part 1 beginning at clause 3—is that correct?The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): Yes Part 1.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: Right—very good. I am very pleased to be able to take a call on Part 1 the preliminary provisions. Let members not be led into any false sense of what the preliminary provisions part of the bill might mean. This is a substantive section of the bill. Each part of this bill actually is substantive in its own right and I think is worthy of considerable debate. I have got no doubt that there will be lengthy debate on aspects of Part 1.Part 1 covers the purpose the principles the interpretation the meaning of psychoactive substance which was something that we considered at length the establishment of the Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority and the Psychoactive Substances Expert Advisory Committee and indeed clause 11A which I have no doubt will be the subject of considerable attention which is the duty of the advisory committee relating to the use of animals when evaluating a psychoactive product for approval.I would like to start at the beginning of the bill—a very good place to start—and that is with the purpose. With what appears to be a small amendment I think the Health Committee has made a significant change to the purpose of this bill. The purpose now reads that “The purpose of this Act is to regulate the availability of psychoactive substances in New Zealand”—which is essentially what it originally said and we have added the words—“to protect the health of and minimise harm to individuals who use psychoactive substances.”This was the subject of many of the submissions that we heard at the select committee. I know that many members spoke in the first reading about the need to have this concept that this bill is about reducing harm right there at the beginning of the bill in the purpose because this is about a lot more than just regulating these substances. If we wanted just to regulate them we could have perhaps proposed to ban them. We could have come up with all sorts of very simple things. But really what this is about is reducing the harm caused by drugs. It has been the Government’s policy and it has been the policy of various Governments for a long time to take a harm-reduction approach to our drug regulations and the way that we approach drug use both in the legal framework and in the health and treatment response to drug use. However it has been missing from the legislation relating to drug regulation.I think it is a really important step that this new piece of legislation that relates to drug regulation includes this in the purpose; that the purpose of the legislation is in fact to reduce harm. I think a lot of people will probably hear this time and time again that this bill is a good step forward in terms of drug regulation and that it may prove to be a good template for how we might approach the regulation of other substances as well. This concept of harm reduction actually appearing in our legislation I think is one of the most important steps forward. It was disappointing actually that it was not in the original bill but it was clear from the outset that all members of the Health Committee thought that including that sentence about harm reduction in the purpose was important for us to do.One of the issues that we considered at length was the definition of a psychoactive substance. We had a range of different views at the select committee about whether or not there should be a definition of psychoactive substance and how we might define psychoactive substance. I know this was something that tested the officials as to exactly how we would define a psychoactive substance. I think what the select committee has done is exactly the right thing in terms of leaving the definition of a psychoactive substance sufficiently broad. The bill now says that “In this Act unless the context otherwise requires psychoactive substance means a substance mixture preparation article device or thing that is capable of inducing a psychoactive effect (by any means) in an individual who uses the psychoactive substance.”That definition that meaning of psychoactive substance is deliberately broad in order to capture all potential new substances or even devices that may have a psychoactive effect. This is a response to exactly the problem that this legislation is trying to deal with and that is the fact that the Misuse of Drugs Act which was perfectly adequate in 1975 but is utterly inadequate in the 21st century was very narrow in its definition of exactly what substances fell under the Misuse of Drugs Act. Therefore as time went on and the technology became available to develop the novel substances that this bill covers we constantly found ourselves in Parliament trying to add to the Misuse of Drugs Act to regulate all the new substances as they arrived. It was just impossible to keep up. So this meaning of “psychoactive substance” is deliberately broad to capture all of those new substances as they potentially come on to the market.I have been asked by a number of people whether people will be able to get around this bill by simply labelling a substance that could potentially be used or could be ingested by a person for psychoactive effect as something else like incense or bath salts or by labelling it as having some other purpose. The intention of this clause is to overcome that problem where there is a deliberately misleading name given to a substance that tries to distract from the point that it can be used as a psychoactive substance. It does not matter what people call something—this clause is designed to capture it. So anybody out there who thinks they can be a bit cute and try to call something by another name and everybody knows it can be used as a psychoactive substance and can be ingested by a human being as a drug for a psychoactive effect—this clause will capture it. It does not matter what they call it. The hope from Parliament is that that kind of workaround will not be possible given the broad nature of that clause.Probably one of the most vexed questions that will no doubt get some considerable debate today is exactly what information the expert advisory committee can receive from clinical trials and the nature of clinical trials that can be conducted. This all hangs off the issue of animal testing. I am quite sure that members from around the Chamber will address this issue at length but I want to make a really important point that I want New Zealanders to understand. The reason we have got ourselves into this position—where we are debating the amendment from the Greens—is the very very poor process from the Government and the National Party. They have done two things that have absolutely overridden democracy in the consideration of this bill. The first was to delay the introduction of the bill. Actually the introduction of the bill was delayed but then once it was introduced it remained languishing on the Table and did not receive its first reading debate for months after it was initially introduced. That goes to show the New Zealand public just what a low priority the sorting out of the regulation of legal highs has been to this Government. Because the Government wasted time and dithered it insisted that the Health Committee had a shortened period of time to consider this bill.Then when we got the numerous submissions on animal testing the National members voted not to hear those submissions on animal testing. That was not a matter of scope which is what Paul Hutchison is going to try to tell the Committee. That was not a matter of scope; that was a decision for the National members. The Labour Green and New Zealand First Party members voted in favour of hearing those submissions. The National members voted against it and blocked it. We could not hear all sides of the debate and that limited our ability to consider this issue properly. The second thing that the National members did in order to block this was to limit that debate. The first thing they did was not introduce the bill in time. The second thing they did was stop us from hearing those submissions.I was really pleased actually when it became clear that National would not support any changes on animal testing that the Labour Party members at the committee managed to actually get National members to reach a compromised position. It is not the position that we would like to have. It is not the position that we support; we support the Green Party amendment that would rule out animal testing. But in order to get National to move at all we worked with National members at the select committee. The clause that now sits in the bill that says animal testing can be used only in the event that no other suitable forms of testing are available is a long way—