Swarbrick ChlöeCHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green—Auckland Central): E te Māngai tēnā koe tēnā koutou e te Whare. It's probably quite useful to zoom out a little bit and to talk about what we're talking about when we discuss the regulatory approaches that we can take to substances in this country and when I'm referring to substances or drugs kind of writ large I'm also talking about things like tobacco and alcohol which are licit or legal substances at present. That regulatory spectrum on the one side of things looks like complete prohibition. That is obviously what the National Party appears to be advocating for because it's worked so well for the past 40-plus years when we've seen the proliferation of more drugs more drug harm and otherwise! The other extreme end of the spectrum is a complete free market. If you look at the mountains of evidence that we have accumulated over the past few decades on those two approaches—one end of town which we've taken by compounding criminal prohibition and the criminal penalties inherent in that; the other end of town enabling things like advertising glamorisation and glorification of substances like alcohol—both of those ends of the spectrum are where you end up with the maximisation of harm. The reason for that is that in both of those extreme ends of the spectrum—on the one side you have an entity criminal organisations; on the other side you have an entity corporates particularly monopolistic behaving corporates—you have entities which are incentivised to exploit vulnerable communities in order to make a quick buck. The way that you deal with that is bringing the issue into the light through a mechanism that should be pretty well known in this House: it's regulation. That is where when you talk about something like alcohol or you talk about something like tobacco you say Hey we can better regulate and control that to provide people with better information about what they're deciding to do with or put into their bodies." On the other side when we're talking about the likes of prohibition we have to recognise that the National Party can bang their fists on the table as much as they like but the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 has been a demonstrative failure in that we have consistently seen more drugs on the street harsher substances on the street and increased problems in our communities. The best way to deal with that issue is to tackle that reality because the reality is that we have unknown people in unknown places consuming unknown substances in unknown places to unknown effect. The very least that you can do is inform people about what they're doing and the evidence shows us that people make better decisions when they have that information.So to the bill in front of us tonight: as has been outlined by other speakers it makes permanent the amendment to section 12 of the Misuse of Drugs Act. Section 12 of that old piece of legislation that terrible piece of legislation the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 in its original writing makes it illegal to knowingly provide a place where people consume substances. That provided technically the ability to prosecute practically actually any bar club or music festival in the entire country bar the fact that they feigned ignorance that this stuff happened. But by virtue of the introduction of a harm reduction measure which you could argue makes them knowing that people are consuming these substances—and actually therefore that we have far less hospitalisations; to the point made before by the Hon Simon Bridges we have evidence from 2016 out of the UK that shows us that there was a 95 percent reduction in hospital admissions at festivals by virtue of the implementation of drug-checking services. If you provide people with that information and you put them through the system the likes of which has been provided on the smell of an oily rag by a ragtag phenomenal group of volunteers led by Jez and Wendy at KnowYourStuffNZ for the past several years—and I know that there are members in this House from both sides who have been into this tent so I really really want to question the supposed consensus of the National Party on this issue—what you'll see is that Jez and Wendy and their volunteers will provide you with the starting point that consumption of illicit substances is not something that you should probably do and it's dangerous and there is no way to safely engage in this behaviour but hey if you are going to do this then here are ways to minimise that harm and we're going to let you know whether what you have is something that you thought you had. And hey presto what all of the evidence shows of the past several years as reported on knowyourstuff.nz—I hope the National Party are taking notes; it's "knowyourstuff.nz" that was being asked for before by the likes of Simeon Brown and Simon Bridges—if you go on to that website you will see consistently that the majority of people will dispose of the substance and not take it if it turns out not to be what they thought it was. Actually we have far more profound and long-reaching evidence as released about a week ago out of the International Journal of Drug Policy. This shows us actually qualitatively and quantitatively on about 3500 people out of the UK who've been followed up over a process of the last three years that actually not only does it change potentially harmful behaviour at the point of that potential harmful behaviour but it has flow-on effects. Two-thirds of people in this study had changed their behaviour permanently because of the interaction that they had had with a drug-checking service which in turn meant that they were less likely to engage in harmful behaviour. Now I also just really need to address a few of the points made by the National Party in their I think intentionally quite riling contributions tonight one of which is the point made by Simeon Brown that you know "Are the public going to be happy with these drug-checking services popping up everywhere?" Well it may come as a surprise to the likes of the member Simeon Brown but it actually happens again in this place called reality that people aren't just consuming illicit substances at music festivals. They happen to do it every other weekend as well. And we know this because we've also heard from the National Party that they're frustrated that the police are not enforcing the law at present. The reason that the police have not been enforcing that law is because it is completely unworkable. I also need to refer the member and the other National Party members who are attempting to barrack me right now to what happened in the 1980s in this country when we were a world leader and we instituted the very first national needle exchange services which they seem to have forgotten about in their tweets about "Does this mean that we're now going to have needle exchange services?" We do and we did it first. And as a result of that we have the lowest in the OECD amount of HIV/AIDS amongst intravenous drug users in the entire comparable countries that we often compare ourselves to. That should be a win. Of course Dr Nick Smith people are still taking these intravenous drugs but would you not prefer that they do not contract HIV/AIDS and lead to their deaths by virtue of doing a behaviour that your preference for criminal prohibition would continue to see occur?DEPUTY SPEAKER: I'm going to warn the member: too much use of the personal pronoun bringing the Speaker into the debate. Don't do it.CHLÖE SWARBRICK: Apologies Mr Speaker—I was doing a bit of a Mark Mitchell there. I also just need to very briefly run through the process that has been alluded to frequently by National Party members as a reason as to why we shouldn't do this and that is the psychoactive substances legislation. I would refer members of the National Party to the chronology which happened under their watch in Government. The psychoactive substances legislation was created under the former National Government and was a process to try to grapple with the fact that the Misuse of Drugs Act classification scheme requires that every single time a new substance comes on to the market Parliament quickly tries to prohibit it. By virtue of that process and new chemical procedures being developed we saw that Parliament had to do something differently if it wanted to maintain this criminal prohibition. That was the psychoactive substances legislation. Largely Government had its hand forced by the continued proliferation of synthetic cannabinoids. At that point in time we had a number of people who were experiencing a huge number of issues. What was actually proposed in the psychoactive substances legislation was a procedure to regulate to reduce harm. Inherent in that was for example requiring that those substances were sold in R18 venues without any sale of alcohol being present. In practicality that meant those substances went from being sold in a ubiquitous place like dairy counters to in a pretty evident and obvious place like adult stores which were the only kinds of places or shops that fit that bill. All of a sudden that compounding and visibility of the issue meant that there were lines outside of these shops and at that point in time with the temporary licensing scheme implemented there were no deaths by virtue of those drugs that had been licensed under that temporary scheme. But a knee-jerk response from the National Government to repeal that temporary licensing pushed those substances underground and in turn killed nearly 50 New Zealanders based on coronial reports. We can and must do better."