It doesn't matter whether there are 42 or 400 products to choose from. One would be one too many. And while politicians have done a pretty good job of selling the slow but supposedly sure process they say offers the only realistic salvation from this new scourge, other countries have reportedly taken a different approach.
New Zealand seems to be the only country in the world to have put its faith in a pre-market clinical trial regime for recreational drugs, that being presented to us the voting public as the only workable response to drug manufacturers who need only tweak an ingredient or two to replace any specific product that might be banned. And 'other countries' are apparently watching with interest to see how we get on. What the politicians haven't told us is that those "other countries' have imposed bans on the sale of all synthetic cannabis. It's all to do with the wording, apparently, but the fact seems to be that 'other countries' have simply closed their doors to these substances. End of story.
Why can our government not do that? Who knows? But even those who portray themselves as implacably opposed to allowing drug manufacturers to prey on the people of this country aren't offering much hope that anything effective will ever be done.
Associate Health Minister Peter Dunne is a good man who for many years has worked hard to better the lives of New Zealanders. His intentions are beyond reproach, but in this instance he seems to have become ensnared in the bureaucratic paralysis that so often prevents Parliament from displaying common sense. Regulations that will govern the trials that synthetic cannabis-type products will need to undergo before they can be marketed are still being drafted, it seems, at typical glacial pace, but Mr Dunne has been quoted as saying that those products - 42 of them - that have interim licences will legally remain on sale after the new regulations take effect, in July or August, as long as they submit plans for clinical trials. And guess what? There will be no deadline for completing such trials.
That is ridiculous and unacceptable. A new drug that cured Alzheimer's, cancer and heart disease wouldn't be allowed anywhere near a pharmacy until it had completed trials proving that it was safe to use, so why should a demonstrably harmful recreational drug get a better deal? What happened to the promises made last year that these drugs would be removed from shop shelves until such time as they had been proven to be 'low risk?'
Politicians quite reasonably become a little peeved sometimes when ordinary people demonstrate a lack of understanding of the parliamentary and regulatory processes. We need to accept that politicians are often simply not able to respond to an issue with the speed that the uninformed might expect, but that doesn't wash this time. The people who took to the streets in 24 communities around New Zealand on Saturday don't give a tinker's cuss for the niceties of the political and regulatory processes. They want these drugs off shop shelves now, and if 'other countries' have imposed blanket bans, someone needs to tell us why our Parliament can't follow suit.
A Massey University researcher was quoted last week as saying that New Zealand's approach was arousing enormous interest overseas because it was seen as "quite a radical experiment". That would seem to be a reasonable assessment if this really is the only country in the world that will permit the sale of psychoactive substances that are found, via clinical trials, to be low risk (whatever that means) on a time scale set by the drug manufacturers, but if this process really is an experiment it is one that is being conducted at the expense of New Zealanders' health, futures and lives. Our own Ministry of Health has noted that the prevalence of specific serious adverse events appears higher in the synthetic group of products (than amongst users of old-fashioned cannabis).
Mr Dunne reckons the number of people presenting at hospital emergency departments with synthetic cannabis-related problems has fallen since the law changed in July last year, which is good. Not good enough though. There is plenty of evidence, anecdotal though much of it might be, that the drugs that are still available have horrible effects on some users, and might well be having horrible but as yet unrecognised effects on others.
These substances have no redeeming features whatsoever, and should be banned in their entirety. And pressure is building on the government to do that. A Facebook page (Ban synthetic cannabis NZ wide), set up in memory of a 23-year-old man who committed suicide after smoking a legal high, had almost 30,000 'likes' as of late last week, and will hopefully continue to gain momentum.
Surely our politicians should be looking at what has worked overseas and follow that example. Then they can fart around with clinical trials until the cows come home, as long as no product is sold until those trials have been completed and the product has been judged not low risk, but no risk.
The people who are selling this stuff, especially in small communities where the customers are their friends and neighbours, should examine their motives too. To claim, as the Kaitaia retailer has, that synthetic cannabis is legal isn't enough. Legal and moral are not the same thing, and it's time some people learned to tell the difference.
