Swarbrick ChlöeCHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green—Auckland Central): E te Māngai tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. Mr Speaker what if I told you that around half a century ago we directly imported laws from the United States of America that sought to criminalise people and what they put into their bodies? What if I told you that despite all of the Just say no" moralising people continued to do that thing that this Parliament had tried to ban and that that attempt at that ban caused even more harm?Most of us in this House recognise that banning abortion doesn't stop abortions; it stops safe abortions. We saw politicians—or at least most of us—come across this House in this Parliament condemning the actions of the US Supreme Court in overturning the precedent of Roe v Wade overnight making abortion illegal in around half of American states. We lamented the danger that this creates. Well referring to the comments that Minister Robertson quoted from National Party MP Simon O'Connor about the want for some logical consistency let's have it because we continue to have American-style laws on our books with similar logic that we know will create more harm. I am of course talking about our drug laws. I am talking about the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975. It might surprise Christopher Luxon Simeon Brown Simon O'Connor and the rest of the National Party that we currently have a totally liberalised completely unregulated full-on free market for illegal drugs in this country. The National Party's stance on drugs I might say is perhaps the most coherent economic policy. This morning Christopher Luxon told Tova O'Brien that he would need more evidence before he made up his mind on whether the National Party would support greater resourcing for drug-checking or decriminalising drugs for an evidence-based approach. I've come to learn that like with abortion there is literally no evidence that the National Party MPs could be confronted with that would change their faith in criminal prohibition—not the Law Commission's 2011 report; not He Ara Oranga the mental health and addiction inquiry; not Turuki! Turuki! the Safe and Effective Justice review; not even Victoria University of Wellington's research on drug-checking that shows that when the majority of people are confronted with evidence that the substance that they thought they were consuming is not what they thought it was they will not consume that substance.The reality is that this is exactly the same line that we've heard from the National Party for a really long time now because it was exactly the same line that former National Prime Minister the Hon Bill English took when confronted with a growing death toll as a result of the synthetics crisis when he said that this was just a matter of personal responsibility. Faith is a powerful thing because having spent five years in this place trying to talk about drug law reform and engage in the debate I can tell you for a fact that the reason that this country spends four times as much money on criminal enforcement than on drug harm reduction is because this House does not really care about the evidence. The reason that the police continue to spend the better part of a million dollars on cannabis choppers every single year despite their own internal evidence-based policing unit telling them that it has no discernible impact on supply and in fact we know from Ministry of Health data that cannabis consumption has gone up is because we do not care for the evidence.Despite the evidence that we have inherited these drug laws directly from the United States and they continue to deliver worse and worse outcomes both National and unfortunately I must say to this point largely the Labour Party continue to be invested in the same myths that were peddled by former President of the United States Richard Nixon. Drugs exist like abortions and all of the things that the National Party caucus would prefer did not. These things exist regardless of our moral high-horsing. They exist regardless of our opinions. They just exist and we have to deal with that reality because we've got 50 years of evidence that shows that our laws make drug harm worse and with powdered fentanyl now on our streets a drug that has killed tens of thousands of Americans as a result of the same laws that we have here maybe it's time that we decided to give evidence a go because at some point in all of our lives we have to decide to confront the reality of the world that we live in. It's process known as growing up and when it comes to drug law unfortunately it doesn't feel as though this House to this point has done all too much of that. It's time for this place to grow up."