Mathers Mojo: Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMathers Mojo: Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 06 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17539. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MOJO MATHERS (Green): I spoke earlier at the first reading of this bill the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill of my belief that the U-turn that has been taken by the Government on prohibiting the use of information from animal testing to approve applications for the use of psychoactive substances is in essence the same as the amendment that I put forward on the Psychoactive Substances Bill a year ago. I would like to take the opportunity to just thank all the parties that voted in support of that amendment which included the Labour Party—in particular Trevor Mallard’s hard work on that—John Banks Mana and the Māori Party. I also spoke about the shocking process that the bill went through whereby all the voices of the animal welfare organisations and people speaking out against the use of animal testing to approve these drugs were rejected by the chair of the Health Committee.What I would like to do is to actually go through the report that we produced as a result of the hearings that we held. We held our own alternative hearings to hear these submitters who were excluded from having the right to their democratic say. There were a number of major organisations that spoke and presented their submissions. These included Save Animals from Exploitation the SPCA Helping You Help Animals the New Zealand Anti-Vivisection Society as well as a number of individuals. The first thing that most of the submitters actually said was to acknowledge the need for strong regulation of psychoactive substances. They accepted that the situation that existed at that time was not working and they were welcoming the intent of the bill. Some of them even talked about their private lives and people whom they knew who had been turned upside down by some of these drugs. A lot of them talked about their utter dismay that democratic process had not been followed that they had made their submissions and done their research in good faith that their concerns around animal testing would be heard by the Health Committee and they had done so under the recommendation of the Minister at the time and the health officials. To then be rejected was for them a deep betrayal of democratic process.What there was also was a fairly detailed submission from the Anti-Vivisection Society. You see what had happened was that right back 6 months previously it had under the Official Information Act got hold of a report that had been produced by the Ministry of Health that outlined a proposed testing regime for these drugs. At that point in time the testing regime was to involve a number of stages. There were the preclinical toxicological trials and then the human clinical trials as well as the post-registration surveillance. It is quite important to understand that a testing regime is composed of all these three elements. It was never proposed that a clinical trial would be able to prove safety to the point that the substance goes straight to being used by the general population. There were always going to be human clinical trials involved. This is something that the public often do not realise when they say that they do not wantanimal testing so let us go straight to testing them on drug addicts and so on. Actually we need controlled studies and they were always going to be part of the process with human volunteers. They start with micro-dosing and monitoring very carefully for the clinical signs of reactions and so on. So whatever tests they use for the preclinical trials are designed to weed out the most toxic substances the most likely to have extreme dangerous reactions.The original Ministry of Health standard for safety—actually “safety” is not the right word to talk about the whole testing regime. It is about low risk because actually we cannot prove that any recreational drug is safe. Alcohol is not safe and tobacco is not safe and yet we use them and we accept the risks that come with their use. So it is always going to be about trying to screen out the most damaging of these drugs and then focusing on the low-risk drugs and educating the public about their use. The reality is that the Ministry of Health’s initial proposed testing regime included four types of testing—for acute toxicity for repeated-dose toxicity fortoxicokinetic investigation and forgenotoxicity. For all four of these there are validated alternatives to animal testing—not just one or two but three or four or more—and all of them have been validated. That means that they have been demonstrated to give as good if not better results than those of the equivalent animal trials. So I utterly reject the claim by Paul Hutchison that we are being somehow kind of unscientific or airy-fairy or what have you. That is not the case. There are established international studies on these areas.The reality is that report was commissioned by the Anti-Vivisection Society using an overseas expert because we do not have the expertise in New Zealand. That is the problem. New Zealand is small. It is a country of only a few million people. We are not experts in alternatives to animal testing. The experts are overseas. We have to rely on overseas input in this area to achieve the goal of having low-risk products that have been tested using non-animal tests. We can do it but we must look overseas for the expertise and the tests involved. Thank you.