Craig LizDr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thank you Madam Chair. It's an absolute pleasure to follow on from Chlöe Swarbrick in terms of my Supplementary Order Paper 175 which also takes a health-based approach to this issue. What it proposes is that a judge can adjourn the proceedings at any time after someone's been convicted of an offence but before imposing a sentence to find more information about the opportunities for rehabilitation and that's either in custody or in the community and also where the offender is in need of health—including mental health—services to look at whether those services are best delivered in custody or in the community.I actually agree with the intent of this bill which is to reduce the huge impact that synthetic drugs are having in our community but if we're going to be doing something about it and taking this whole process through Parliament we've actually got to make sure that any intervention we put in place actually works and the problem we've got here is one where you've got somebody who may be a dealer but simultaneously is actually using synthetic drugs and then has become addicted to those drugs and then has become involved in the supply side in order to fund their habit. We're not going to have any impact by just increasing penalties if you're dealing with an underlying addiction.I just want to talk about the story of Emma. Her story appeared in the New Zealand Herald in September last year. Emma—I don't think it's her real name—basically said that when the whole synthetics issue started she hated everything about it. She said she was very anti the drug and would never use it. Then suddenly she found that her and her partner were using up to an ounce a day. She said The first time I tried it I didn't actually like it." but then over time—she wasn't actually aware when the addiction actually started. But once it had started and kicked in it was really really hard to stop.So in a short time Emma and her partner were addicted and were spending about a thousand dollars a week on their combined habit. To fund that they started selling synthetics because she said they had to find some way of paying for their addiction. So within a month her partner went from just using it to running a business 24 hours a day seven days a week. Basically Emma decided that she couldn't face that addiction any longer and she went cold turkey and stopped but it took her partner another eight months to actually stop using synthetics.I think that at the time this story was written in the New Zealand Herald Emma had been free of drugs for about two years but she said that every day she lived with that guilt about what she'd put into her community. So I think in cases like this what we're dealing with is actually an underlying addiction. I don't think that tougher penalties are going to turn that situation around. So this is why we need to take that health-based approach that Chlöe was speaking about—CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): Order! The member's proper name thank you.Dr LIZ CRAIG: —and what it does is it allows the judge to consider where an offender is in need of health or mental health services what options are available to that offender and whether they're best served in custody or the community. So I really encourage the member in charge of this bill to consider that health-based approach as we move forward. Thank you."