KEY POINTS:
Toddlers as young as 18 months have swallowed party pills - which contain a drug that can cause potentially fatal kidney failure - according to figures from the National Poisons Centre.
National MP Jacqui Dean, who is campaigning for the pills to be banned, quoted the statistics to Parliament's health select committee yesterday on the first day of submissions on legislation to outlaw them.
The figures show that from July 2002 to last October, the centre was contacted regarding 16 children and teenagers under 16 consuming piperazine-based party pills. This included two aged 18 months, two of 23 months and one of 24 months.
A medical toxicologist at the Otago University-based centre, Dr John Fountain, said it had no information on the outcomes for any of the youngsters.
Children who take party pills could suffer seizures and muscle breakdown and their kidneys could go into acute renal failure ending in death. Some adults have also reported seizures.
Mrs Dean said it was clearly dangerous for children to take party pills.
"BZP [benzylpiperazine] is not intended for human consumption. It was developed in veterinary science to control worms in cattle. They stopped using it because the side-effects were bad."
Christchurch Hospital emergency department physician Paul Gee recalled that two or three toddlers aged about 2 had been brought to the hospital by parents concerned their children had consumed party pills, but it was unclear whether they had.
The children were thought to have got into bottles or handbags and their parents thought they were acting strangely.
"We keep them in for three or four hours and try and assess whether there is any sign of toxicity. We certainly didn't see any toxicity."
It was not clear whether young children would be more or less susceptible to the adverse effects of party pills, which for adults included sleeplessness, coma and seizures.
Dr Gee said hospitals saw children who had ingested many kinds of medicines, most commonly paracetamol tablets and syrup, even when they had been stored in "child-proof" containers or packaging. He had seen party pills in various kinds of packaging including bags - and plastic boxes that would entice children. "I've seen some quite inviting ones that look like they are Tic Tac boxes."
The bill, which has strong support in Parliament, would make BZP and related party pills class C1 drugs, making people caught possessing them liable to a maximum of three months imprisonment and/or a fine of up to a $500.
The select committee's chairwoman, Green MP Sue Kedgley, questioned Mrs Dean on whether it would make more sense to increase the restrictions on the marketing and sale of tobacco and alcohol before banning party pills, because alcohol and tobacco were associated with thousands of deaths a year in New Zealand and party pills with none.
"Why would you not take a consistent approach?" she asked.
Mrs Dean said it was "not helpful" to start a bidding war on which drugs were the more harmful.
Dr Gee said it was hard to say exactly what impact a party pill could have on a toddler but, like any drug overdose, it had the potential to end in death.
"One of the difficulties we have is that there really hasn't been a robust study, particularly in 2-year-olds, to find out what happens," he said.
"But what we do know is that they are a stimulant and they have actions which are similar to amphetamines.
"We know from good, robust, scientific research that party pills, or BZP is what I am referring to here, is one tenth the potency of amphetamine. So you can imagine a child taking amphetamine, basically.
"Children could suffer seizures, which some adults had also reported after taking the pills, muscle breakdown and their kidneys could go into acute renal failure ending in death.
"It could hype them up, make them quite agitated, they may suffer from high temperature, and then they may have concerns with various body organs not functioning, or going into failure."
The most common calls relating to children overdosing on drugs was for paracetamol-based medicine.
National Poisons Centre poisons information specialist Mairead Harnett said there was no evidence that party pills had led to any deaths.
One person had died in Europe after taking BZP but the person had also taken Ecstasy and a coroner ruled the death was most likely due to the Ecstasy, she said. Eight children had taken BZP. Six of them were under 6, the other two were under 2 1/2.
