Craig LizDr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. Reading this bill this afternoon brought back some memories of my time working in emergency departments at the weekends. Often we'd see young people coming in having ingested an unknown substance. I think the issue was having to spend time with those young people with often quite frightening symptoms and working out what it is that they'd taken and how best to look after them over the next few hours or days that they were in hospital. It made me reflect on the two options we've got in front of us: one is to have drug testing at festivals and other events and the other is not to do so.Just looking at the New Zealand Drug Foundation website it describes what actually happens if you do go to a festival and turn up to have your drugs or substances tested. What it says is you will receive a one-on-one service and it takes about 15 minutes. So what will happen is trained volunteers will take a very small sample of your substance and they'll divide it into three piles. Two of those piles are tested with reagents and what that does is it's got acids and it makes colour changes if certain substances are present. Then one of the piles is tested with a spectrometer and what it does is it compares your sample against other known samples of known substances and it can detect the presence of unexpected substances adulterants or additives. Then what you get in that 15 minutes is you get a report and you also get some harm reduction advice. As I was mentioning in my previous contribution about 20 percent of people's substances don't turn out to be what they thought they were and another 11 percent have got additives that were completely unexpected. So then it's your choice whether you go ahead and you take that substance or not. In many cases if there's a difference in what you're expecting you don't take the substance—harm reduction and issue averted.If you actually though think about what happens if you don't go down that route—you can do a quick google and if you put MDMA" into the search engine what comes up is a range of headlines. For example: "13 hospitalised in Christchurch after taking drugs they thought were MDMA"; "Substance behind mass hospitalisations was three times stronger than MDMA"; "Dodgy batch suspected in Christchurch Hospital emergency admissions spike over the weekend." And they go on to talk about the spike of cases where nine patients turned up in the emergency department over a very short period of time patients with agitated state dangerously high blood pressure elevated heart rate and the health team was so concerned that they started to put out warnings talking about how serious this stuff could be talking about the fact that permanent damage to the heart long-term mental health problems severe kidney failure heart attacks and seizures may occur. So it's just weighing up 15 minutes—basically getting your pills tested to find out if they contain what you thought they did versus the risk of turning up to a hospital department with long-term side effects potentially on the radar. So I think what this bill does today is make sure that our young people can be kept safe over summer when they start to attend their festivals if they do choose to take drugs and have those tested.But in the longer term Andrew Little Minister will be going through and putting a more detailed proposal through to Cabinet so that over the next year we can go through and create the legislative framework we need that's got more time. Thank you I commend this to the House."