Woods Megan: Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 06 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17538. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): Sometimes this House has to do very important but very complicated and very difficult things. Tonight is one of those occasions. I join many of my colleagues who come with no joy to find that we are here rectifying something that we got wrong 18 months to 2 years ago when we last debated this issue of psychoactive substances. We debated and we put in place a regime that was the first in the world that was going to allow these drugs on to our market a regime that was all around the fact that they were tested and shown to be safe. As many speakers have alluded to in the speeches this afternoon and tonight this was all predicated on there being a regime for testing in place. It is with no pleasure that I say that we cautioned at the time that we were rushing the Psychoactive Substances Bill for an incredibly complicated piece of legislation. The devil was in the detail and how it was that we were going to show the safety of these drugs was always going to be an incredibly complicated and difficult path for us to traverse.It is not just a matter of walking into a laboratory throwing some substances under a laser light and saying that this is not safe or that that is not safe. The way in which we prove the safety or otherwise of many substances and compounds that we consume either as food or as medicines or in this case that were going to be consumed as recreational drugs is no small or easy path. It takes many years. It starts with people doing things in a laboratory. The traditional path is that it then moves on to animal models and then it moves on to human clinical models. Whether this is something that we are willing to permit for the use of recreational drugs is an important issue for this House to answer. I am very pleased that we are standing here tonight and are going to say no—we are not going to allow the testing of recreational drugs on animals.For me personally as a constituency MP this issue cuts to the heart of why it was that I was elected to represent my electorate of Wigram. I voted with my party as many members of this House did. In fact most members of this House voted for a piece of legislation that we thought we were doing the right thing with. We thought we were putting in place a piece of legislation that would actually reduce the harm in our communities around the use of psychoactive chemicals and drugs but this has not been the case. Like many of my colleagues I have spent too many hours listening to constituents telling me their stories about what these substances have done to their families. I recall one mother coming in and being absolutely distraught and I can understand why. Not only was her 14-year-old son no longer going to school; he was stealing from her and neighbours in order to finance his habit and she had had to call the police the night before because he had physically assaulted both her and the other children in the family.This is not something that you can stand idly by as a constituent MP and say it is OK. The regime we put in place was not working. It was not stopping the harm in our communities. I could not stand by and say to the people of Wigram: “Justtaihoeverything’s going to be OK.” because it was not. We also have some responsibility now and that is that we as parliamentarians have to ensure that the support is there for the people who are going to be having the addiction issues as these drugs are no longer available. We have to ensure as my colleague Annette King has suggested in earlier contributions that we have adequate funding for people to access addiction services and that district health boards are properly resourced to grapple with these issues and to be able to make sure that New Zealanders are getting the best service that they can as they come off these drugs. The regulatory impact statement for this piece of legislation makes it really clear that a lot of the people who are using these drugs are not going to be able to afford the trip to the general practitioner to get the referral to the addiction service. We have to make sure that that support is in place. We are here tonight to fix something that we got wrong 2 years ago and we need to make sure that we are putting it right and putting the best interests of our community at its heart.