Lees-Galloway Iain: Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Lees-Galloway Iain: Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:674;Page:20206] 
IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North) 
: 
 I wondered whether the Minister in the chair the Associate Minister of Health Peter Dunne would respond to the Hon Rick Barker’s questions but maybe he needs a little time and I am prepared to help him take that time. 
I come to my own Supplementary Order Paper 260 on clause 4 but before I do that I will respond to Heather Roy and briefly set out why Labour will oppose her Supplementary Order Paper 261. Although to be fair she is absolutely right in saying that I have expressed the view in this Chamber that prohibition has its limitations I think what Heather Roy is proposing will first of all not change the status quo very much. Secondly it will allow for the continued commercialisation I suppose of these products. Even if one has concerns about the effectiveness of prohibition as a mechanism of controlling drugs it is also true that the over-commercialisation of substances is of equal concern. 
Heather Roy has proposed that these drugs can be sold only to people over the age of 18. In fact the status quo is that most of these substances already have an R18 restriction on them. That does not come about because they are psychoactive substances; it comes about because the vast majority of them can be smoked and therefore they fall under the purview of the Smoke-free Environments Act and have an R18 restriction on them. For the overwhelming bulk—and probably just about all the substances that we are really focusing on here—the notion of introducing an R18 restriction makes no difference to the current situation. 
What it does not do of course is get these products out of dairies and out of sight. A concern for everyone I suppose in this Chamber—except for the ACT Party perhaps—is that substances such as Kronic are heavily marketed at the point of sale. When we go into a dairy or some liquor stores these days we see a lot of that advertising. There is a tobacconist in my electorate in Palmerston North whose outside wall now seems to be completely covered in Kronic advertising so it is still well and truly on display. We know for a fact that even though these substances are already R18 young people under the age of 18 are able to get their hands on them. There is no real effect of that proposal and still there is the issue of the advertising and commercialisation of the substance. As a number of us have said although we do not think that what the Minister is suggesting is ideal or that the process is ideal it is a useful stopgap measure in the interim whilst we get this issue sorted out and come up with something more permanent and sustainable. 
On the issue of pipes and other utensils and the amendment that I have put up to have clause 4 removed this is a matter of harm minimisation. We are supporting the measures in this bill that support the minimisation of harm. Some of them we argue will do very little to minimise harm but they will do something; others we support because we think they will do more to minimise harm. But further restricting access to drug utensils will do absolutely nothing to minimise harm. 
I refer to the comments made by Nicky Wagner who compared this measure to the recent ban on point-of-sale tobacco advertising. Of course what we did not do when we got rid of tobacco advertising was get rid of the ability to display tobacco smoking pipes for instance. In fact when I put up my own bill to deal with the tobacco display issue the Attorney-General said that getting rid of tobacco smoking utensils was too great a contravention of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act to be allowed. So the consistent approach—and Nicky Wagner sought a consistent approach—is not to get rid of the ability to display these drug utensils. Nicky Wagner made the argument that it somehow glamorises drug use. But actually these utensils offer a mechanism by which the harm—