It's Been Eight Months Since New Zealand Stopped Banning Designer Drugs

Last July, New Zealand ushered in a world-first law aimed at regulating controversial synthetic drugs and herbal highs that get sold over-the-counter with droll names like Kronic, Thai Hi and Giggle. The radical Psychoactive Substances Act sees the country move away from a failing prohibition model, by allowing the sale of certain drugs that pass safety tests, in an attempt to cope with a hydra-esque legal high industry that had swiftly replaced banned drugs with new and uncontested products.

When introduced, the new rules immediately slashed the number of legal high outlets from 4000 to 170, as corner stores lost the right to sell. But while a full set of regulations is still being developed for the teething law, stories have emerged from the media blaming synthetic cannabis for mental breakdowns, violent outbursts and even death. However, Ross Bell from the NZ Drug Foundation attended the recent United Nations Drug Summit in Vienna where psychoactive substances were high on the topics of conversation and he believes other countries will soon follow in New Zealand’s footsteps.

VICE: Firstly Ross, submissions on the Psychoactive Substances Act closed last month, what happens from here?
Ross Bell: So there are some things in the law that are already in place, but the law also allows the Ministry of Health to create a broader range of regulations, bearing in mind this is the world’s first attempt to do this. So when you are looking at alternatives you have to create a whole lot of detail: what kind of testing regime should you have? what do you have to do to prove your product is low risk? does it get tested on animals before its used on human clinical trials? So there is a whole lot of nuts and bolts detail about the testing regime. Regulations are a lot harder than prohibition and because it’s new we are all learning about what’s the best kind of system to put in place.

And the world is watching…?
Absolutely it is. And the scary thing for New Zealand is that no one is ready to follow us. In fact, the British drug policy minister said they might do something similar and the home office very quickly rejected that idea. So countries are looking at New Zealand and they describe what we are doing in very nice ways, like “flexible” and “creative”, but no one is yet brave enough to follow. But the New Zealand politicians have run out of patience before other countries have.

What do you mean by run out of patience?
Well, we were one of the first countries to have these products in the first place. We tried prohibition and the first product that was ultimately banned was Benzylpiperazine (BZP), and then the industry swamped the market with new product. We banned those and other products came along, so we tried to ban things faster. Ultimately the government realised it would be a few steps behind the industry and that the best way to solve that was to try these regulations. And so all the other countries that we’ve been looking at, Australia is a good example, are a few years behind us and haven’t lost patience with the industry like New Zealand has, but I think they will get there. I’m convinced the New Zealand model will work, and once it does I think other countries will follow us.

While the law is being fine-tuned there have been a lot of stories about how bad psychoactive highs are. Are the media overcooking it?
I think the media might find some extreme cases and then say that everyone is at risk, so it could well be that the media have overcooked the problem, but the problem is a real one. And I think there’s an assumption that the products are safe because they “must be like cannabis”, I think that has been the real problem for users, because you expect a certain effect with pot, but these drugs are going to give you a completely different effect. Even if you look at the reports from cannabis users themselves which say: “I use these legal ones because they were legal, but the effect was really shit. So I went back to using the illegal natural product”. When you have users shying away from them because the effects are really unpleasant then I think there is something to it.

In one story a policeman reported lines of 30-40 people waiting to buy synthetic cannabis outside one store…
Yeah look, the police need to be quite careful about this. In some communities where all the dairies had to stop selling and there was only one store, then of course all the consumers of those products go to that one store to buy it, I don’t think that’s an indication that you’ve got a whole lot of drug dependant people who are having to get their fix, I think it’s more to do with the fact that there is only one shop in town who sells these things.

But are these synthetic substances addictive?
I think there are enough reports from treatment agencies to say yes. We don’t know if it’s a psychological dependence or a physical dependence, but people were absolutely spending all their money on synthetic cannabis and losing their jobs and those sort so problems were real. Absolutely people were getting the kind of chaos you would see in drug dependency. These chemicals were doing that.

So could adopting this law impact New Zealand’s health system?
Well, by definition the products that eventually will be approved will be low risk products that have gone through a testing regime, so what that says to me, is that products that come onto the market shouldn’t be products that cause major health issues. So we should be okay. But the big thing that isn’t talked about much is the black market for drugs. What we don’t know is what effect will this law change have on the black market - will people substitute black market drugs for these government approved ones or will there be a market for both, will people want to get illegal highs as well as legal highs.

What do we know about the black market at the moment?
We know that when BZP was banned it made it’s way onto the black market, but it wasn’t sold as BZP, it was often sold as ecstasy. So what we are seeing globally, and in New Zealand, is there is a real shortage of ecstasy, but people are buying drugs which are called ecstasy but it’s anything but. It’s all of these new chemicals which are cheaply made very quickly find their way onto the black market, so we absolutely know there are a lot of new psychoactive substances across the black market all over the world.

Is more public education about these products needed?
Absolutely. I think there are two problems: there is a lack of education about these products and there is a lack of information about how the law actually works. In terms of the information for the public about the actual products, the fantastic thing about the New Zealand law is that finally we are going to be able to provide people with really good information about the health effects, because before these products get approved they have to go through a testing regime, which is estimated to take about two years. But I think there is a communication failure in what the law means generally, so I think government needs to have another look at some of its PR around the law change.

What would the NZ Drug Foundation like to see?
I think New Zealand needs to look at wider drug law reform. Now that we’re passing legal high regulations I think it’s time to look at those other law commission regulations. Like what do we do with low level offending like possession of drugs, I think when we are talking about reform I we need real pragmatic, practical reforms.

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