Ardern Jacinda: Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Ardern Jacinda: Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:674;Page:20064] 
JACINDA ARDERN (Labour) 
: 
 It is my pleasure to speak on the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill. I endorse the comments that have been made by some of my colleagues and I would hope that as a consequence of those comments no one would be left in any doubt that of course the Labour Party has seen the scourge on our communities that P represents as do many other forms of drugs some of which are more socially acceptable than others. But I will come to that. 
First I will say that as I was listening to some of the other speakers I was recalling the first time I heard a discussion or any presentation on the issue of P. It might have been as far back as 2003 that I went to a presentation by I think either a drugs specialist or a law enforcement officer from Hawaii. He had come to New Zealand to talk especially about what was then a new drug. He came to New Zealand before the issues with regard to this particular drug were really in the public consciousness—actually it might have been in 2002 now that I think about it. His warning to us was that Hawaii probably much like New Zealand had not experienced the same level of issues with other drugs like for instance heroin. The nature of our borders meant that we were able to protect ourselves much more from the trafficking of such illicit drugs but the ability to manufacture drugs like P within our borders almost anywhere if the right products were available made this drug particularly difficult to control. The second issue that the presenter highlighted was that this kind of drug would have such an impact in terms of social and community harm. It obviously struck me because I remember it to this day. 
No one here denies the issue that P represents for our communities but the debate then comes down to what we do about it. Some of the issues about P have been raised in the House today and I would not want there to be any doubt in anyone’s mind that of course we wish to combat this drug in every way we can but we want to do it effectively. With some of the questions that we have been raising we have been asking—and rightly so—whether we have been targeting our energies in the best way possible. One of the issues we have raised relates to the measures around the sale of pseudoephedrine in particular over a pharmacy counter and whether those measures will have the impact that is needed in order to stop the proliferation of P. That is one of the issues we wanted to raise. 
Another significant issue for us is that if we look across the board at the way we have been approaching the control of drugs across the spectrum within New Zealand we wonder whether it is time for us to take a much more comprehensive approach to the way we control drugs. This is not a debate that is happening only here or that we are urging to happen here; it is happening at a global level. 
Not all that long ago the United Nations commissioned and produced a report on the global trade criminalisation and classification of drugs. As I recall one member of the commission was Georgios Papandreou. He is of course the much embattled leader of Greece. I have worked with him in another capacity and he is a very thoughtful and intelligent man. A range of individuals and politicians from countries we associate with drug issues rightly or wrongly were also members of the commission and the conclusions they came to were bold. They suggested that we have perhaps in the past targeted the wrong people and that was their view in the way we dealt with Afghanistan in particular. But the commission also called on countries to review their own legislation as to whether we were over-criminalising for drugs that were not having the same level of social harm and whether as a consequence of that over-criminalisation we were creating our own social harm by institutionalising prison within some of those communities. That is a big issue and we have denied that issue for a long time. 
I heard one of the most shocking statistics that I have heard in my political career recently and it came from Kim Workman from Rethinking Crime and Punishment. He had questioned the number himself because it was so high. He said that 40 percent of our 15-year-old - plus Maori males have experienced either a form of community detention or prison—40 percent. That is a travesty and a shame on New Zealand. I would be incredibly interested to know how many of those offences are for what we would probably classify as low-level drug offences. I would be really interested to know that. Is it society’s expectation that that is the kind of statistic we want to be dealing with? 
I think it is time for Parliament to be bold and the Law Commission has provided us with the perfect opportunity to do that. The UN has started it and the Law Commission has done so as well with its report on controlling and regulating drugs. It is an excellent starting point for us as a Parliament to review the classification of drugs across the board. But I would also say that in doing so we cannot ignore that alcohol by far causes the most social harm in New Zealand—by far. I would not mind looking at a bit of a comparison as to how much in our communities or in Parliament we have discussed the war on P relative to the war we need to make on the culture of drinking in this country because it has a much more costly impact on our families our communities and our health sector than methamphetamine. That is not to say that we cannot deal with both but at the present time we are paying disproportionately less and not enough time on the issue of alcohol. 
I am glad that the Government has instigated a comprehensive review of alcohol. That review has been going on and a select committee is dealing with that report at present but I think it was neglectful of us to take one of the options off the table as early on as this and that option is the issue of price. I know that we have looked at advertising marketing supply accessibility and the age at which one can purchase alcohol but I think we have neglected our duty to our communities by taking away the issue of price. I know that the Government has said that once it has collected some more data and more information it will come back and look at it. We did not collect the data or information when it came to the legislation we are looking at now. We knew that it was a political hot potato and that no one would stand up and say that we should not be dealing with P so we did it without the evidence. Yet we will not do that with alcohol when actually in my mind we have all the evidence we need. The Law Commission presented all the evidence we needed to deal with alcohol in a much more comprehensive way. 
I want to share one little anecdote. Not all that long ago I visited a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre and asked those working there whether they had enough bed space to deal with all the patients they needed to deal with. I was told: “We will be honest. We have had additional funding for bed space to deal with those who identify as being methamphetamine addicts but we have been cross-using those beds. We have been putting those who need assistance for alcohol addiction into those beds.” They were able to identify that at some point in the drug-use history of those people they may have once used P and therefore they could legitimately put them into those beds but that was where the demand and the need were. Although the Government is saying that one of its five-pronged attacks is to assist families who are dealing with methamphetamine I would wager there are far more New Zealand families who need assistance in the area of drug-alcohol usage. 
Those are some of the challenges that I wanted to lay out in the mix. I applaud the fact that the Government is trying to look at what it is doing in relation to other topical issues like the restriction of synthetic cannabis and reversing the onus so that these substances are unable to be put up for sale until it is proven that these products are safe and that they can be sold but I think this demonstrates to us that this is a fast-moving area. I remember when I worked— 
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member but her time has expired.