Verrall AyeshaHon Dr AYESHA VERRALL (Labour): Well taking that offer of some pseudoephedrine for the Labour Party and saying No thank you; we're all quite healthy over here." but also saying "Well hasn't this been parliamentary process on speed with this bill?"Now we're happy to support this bill because we agree that over-the-counter pseudoephedrine will be helpful to many people suffering from coughs and colds but this bill is rushed and while we are grateful for the people who did take the time to speak to the Health Committee we noticed many of them complained about the truncated process that they had to go through and no doubt there are many important voices that we did not get to hear from during that process.We also heard about a number of concerns that I'll elaborate on in my remarks this evening that we didn't have the opportunity to explore fully or it is clear that officials advising the committee and the Associate Minister of Health (Pharmac) didn't have the opportunity to explore fully. We want to canvass that because it is important to realise that in doing so as the Minister has acknowledged we are making more available a drug that has tremendous social impacts in New Zealand because of the tremendous amount of harm if it is converted to meth and we need to step into that decision responsibly.I want to acknowledge the chair of the Health Committee Mr Sam Uffindell for making sure that within the constraints that Parliament had set that he extended submissions to the committee to make sure as many people as possible were able to be heard given the short time line set by the Minister. I also want to acknowledge the collaborative way in which the committee was able to gather evidence together and it has been one of the highlights of being in Opposition is the enjoyable experience we get to have on the Health Committee.I also want to acknowledge those who submitted. We heard stories many of which did indeed support the bill but we also heard from people whose lives have been impacted by methamphetamine and who had concerns. I think those concerns are not so easily brushed aside. I understand that the rational actor theory would suggest that when it is cheaper to get meth imported already produced from overseas there is no rational reason why someone would steal pseudoephedrine to produce it themselves less efficiently from a pharmacy. Addiction isn't rational and that is the problem that we have as acknowledged by some of the people with experience working in addictions who submitted to the select committee. There will be people experiencing addiction moments of desperation who will think that stealing or purchasing large amounts of pseudoephedrine would be an appropriate way to make meth. I think where I'd like to focus my contribution is on how we mitigate those risks because those risks are real and to say that we have a theory that pretends that those risks are not real is reckless lawmaking. We should take them seriously. Those mitigations are firstly the need for pseudoephedrine to be stored securely. The option to do that is available in regulations under the Misuse of Drugs Act but we are not taking that option in this bill. The select committee heard that the Ministry of Health sought a very limited number of views on this matter. In fact they told us that they heard from fewer than 10 people on this when they did their consultation on advice that later informed the design of this law and only a handful of them were people with experience of pharmacy and they were some peak body representatives in pharmacies.So the bill currently does not require pseudoephedrine to be restricted to be stored under lock and key when it's in a pharmacy. In fact the advice that the select committee received from the ministry was that their view was that there would be too much sold in order to enable it to be stored under lock and key as many other controlled drugs are. You see the problem this presents. It means that we're storing larger quantities of a drug that has a street value of a drug that could be abused in a less secure space. I believe that that is very concerning and that is a mitigation that has not been taken in this bill. The risk is break-ins to pharmacies and ram raids. Now our committee did discuss these issues and the view of some was that we trust pharmacists to take that risk. My point would be that the harm of these types of crimes is not just faced by pharmacists or pharmacy owners; it is faced by the community; it is faced by the workers in those stores as well. We have an opportunity to do better on that matter.The Minister has already addressed the second mitigation and that is the issue of registers for monitoring the sale and purchase of pseudoephedrine. This allows two things: it allows us to trace back when there's an investigation going on to find out if a network is purchasing a lot of pseudoephedrine in order to make meth. It also might allow real-time detection of that and that is the case of similar registers used in Queensland.Now the Minister suggests that there is a possibility that the evolving nature of pharmacy IT systems may mean that sort of work is possible in the future but my view is that this is already a worthy option to pursue. That is the view of many pharmacists who submitted and I do not accept the assurances of Te Whatu Ora that having some work that might allow this one day is sufficient assurance to say that we are already there. The fact is that there is a risk of abuse with pseudoephedrine being changed into meth and we are not taking action to enable an important mitigation to find out when that is happening.The third mitigation that's really important is the need to make sure that there are appropriate treatment services for those impacted by addiction. There are now widespread community-level services for addiction through the Access and Choice programme but some of the needs of people with meth addiction would be above what is able to be handled by that primary care - level programme and so we need to make sure that more specialised meth services continue to be rolled out because why would we step down this path where potentially we risk increasing access to meth in the community without also having a strong offer of treatment services?Another related issue that was raised which was news to me by the Drug Foundation was a large number of people with addiction who in fact have ADHD and sometimes in their use of meth—this was not the Drug Foundation's view but one could imagine there is some type of self-medication going on there with use of drugs like meth when Ritalin is so hard to access through legitimate channels in New Zealand. So I think there are two important treatment options we need to strengthen one being addiction services the other being access to ADHD treatments.I would like to just go back to the process because I think we did have an opportunity with this bill to do better than we will by rushing it. It is not just that members of the public in the four-week period only had just over one week to submit—members of the public and organisations—but also that the Ministry of Health's ability to reach in to solve these practical problems and resolve them when they heard from pharmacists was limited. As I said they only heard from fewer than 10 representatives when they did their targeted consultation to inform the bill. Also other options like the possibility of binders—compounds that are added to pseudoephedrine tablets so as to make it harder to inhibit the production of meth from them—we heard about this possibility from submitters but the advisers were unable to help us resolve it because they hadn't had time to really go into the evidence.So while we support the appropriateness of people having access to pseudoephedrine for coughs and colds there are a large number of needs for mitigations that fall outside the scope of this bill that we really need the Government to explore. Thank you Madam Speaker."