Hutchison Paul: Psychoactive Substances Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHutchison Paul: Psychoactive Substances Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 09 April 2013. Volume:689;Page:9136. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Hunua): Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker for the opportunity to speak on this very important Psychoactive Substances Bill. It undoubtedly is an innovative world-leading piece of legislation from an innovative world-leading National Government.Iain Lees-Galloway: Ha ha!Dr PAUL HUTCHISON: I am glad you agree and I am glad that you are going to support this bill.There is no doubt that over the last 22 years or so party pills and the manufacture of psychoactive pills have escalated enormously in this country. They have been extremely hard to control legally. We have seen all sorts of attempts at this particularly since about 2002 as there have been changes in 2005 with the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Act and then further changes to that. It came particularly to the notice of the public with benzylpiperazine which I think people could manufacture easily from sheep dip which was cheap and easily available in a country like New Zealand. Sadly we had to grapple with the spectre of many of these party pills being available in our dairies to young people and being sold in a pretty frivolous way by all sorts of people to a variety of people in particular young people for whom these pills when mixed with alcohol could lead to all sorts of disastrous consequences. The trouble was they were legal they were cheap and they were readily available. As I mentioned the Misuse of Drugs Act amendment came in in 2005 and it gave a ready mechanism to be able to categorise drugs such as these as controlled drugs. But the problem was that as soon as one was categorised then another variety just with a slight change in the compound would be made and off and away once again—it would be legal it would be cheap and the manufacturers were taking great advantage of this situation.By 2008 another wave of party pills emerged. These were cannabinoids and synthetic cannabinoids. Of course there were a whole variety of these that could be smoked or vaporised and a whole variety of utensils and other things that were associated with them so that literally dozens of new psychoactive substances containing a huge new number of ingredients were being brought on to the market in a matter of weeks and the existing legislation just could not keep up. The Law Commission as was mentioned completed its review in 2011 and came through with a very very comprehensive variety of solutions. It was not entirely clear but certainly the very important concept of requiring the manufacturer to show that the product was oflow risk of harm or to prove that the product was of low risk of harm is the essence of what this bill is all about. That is where it is innovative; that is where it is world leading.In the meantime of course the Hon Peter Dunne introduced temporary class drug notices and they have met with quite an amount of success. I think he said 33 substances had been banned under these temporary class drug notices. This has worked well with a 75 percent fall in the number of calls received by the National Poisons Centre over incidences around synthetic cannabis in 12 months alone. This bill is to replace these current notices. The current notices are due to expire I think by about August this year so indeed it will be important to get the legislation through in a fairly rapid way. New Zealanders indeed deserve to know that products available to them are safe and that they are not being put in harm’s way with untested risky substances.Hon Phil Heatley: I think so.Dr PAUL HUTCHISON: I am glad the Hon Phil Heatley agrees with this.One of the important things to emphasise is that the cost of testing will be borne by manufacturers and not the taxpayer. This manufacturing group of people who have been involved with party pills have made a lot of money in a very very dubious way for a long period of time so I think that it is good to see that they will have to work extremely hard to show that the products are low risk.The bill will seamlessly replace the current temporary class drug notices regime. This regime has made it possible to respond faster to new developments but does nothing to nip them in the bud in the first place. So the bill will indeed hopefully be a much more durable long-term solution. It has considerable support from organisations like the New Zealand Medical Association and the New Zealand Drug Foundation and I must say I look forward very much to the select committee process so that hopefully we can get it into optimal shape. Thank you.