 I'll just start with a little bit of context here. New Zealand has a proud history of leading the world with various important social reforms. New Zealand was the first country in the world to have a treaty with the indigenous people. It was the first country in the world to give women the vote, and the sun still came up the next day. We've just legalised same-sex marriage. All these reforms came about thanks to the dedication and perseverance of truth-loving reformers like you and me. These victories past give us hope for the future. So it seems quite appropriate that New Zealand is the first country in the world to regulate novel, psychoactive substances. And this is indeed a bold step. It's a step forward that we commend the New Zealand Government for because they listened to the experts, they listened to the scientists, they respected the recommendations in the NZ Law Commission report. Is it a good policy? We actually don't know yet, and you've heard some feedback today suggesting that it's still too soon to call. But the vision and values espoused are correctly focused on harm reduction and hence we support it unconditionally. Will it work? Too soon to say. We certainly hope so, and seeing everyone here and listening and hearing the feedback, we're greatly encouraged. Should an all-drugs, currently legal and illegal, be held to the same safety standard? Absolutely, of course they should, but we're not there yet. This is a journey, and the Act is not perfect. We can already see some gaps in the legislation, but what we know is this Act is better than prohibition. Reform can be frustratingly slow sometimes, but don't let perfect get in the way of better. In this session, we hear from overseas experts who discuss what their own country is doing to address the challenges of novel psychoactive products in their communities, and we ask the question, could the New Zealand model be a template for reform globally? So I'd like to introduce the opening keynote for the afternoon session and this is another huge honour for me. Our next speaker is the founder and director of the Beckley Foundation and she travelled further than anyone else to be here today. In fact, if she had gone any further, she would have left the planet. Good on you, which is a great metaphor actually for her own amazing journey. I'd like to think of our next speaker as the, and this is a term of endearment, as the Keith Richards of the reform movement. And I say that because she's been there from the very beginning. She's seen it all. She's still working as hard as ever. She's still as passionate as ever. And you know what? I don't think she's even peaked yet. Ladies and gentlemen, would you please put your hand together for the founder of the Beckley Foundation, the baroness of Beckley, Amanda Fielding. Thank you. And I'm delighted to be here and thank you, Star Trust, for this celebratory new move into global drug policy reform. I hope you'll forgive me, but I'll read. If we had set out to design a system of global drug policy to create maximum damage and suffering, we would probably have designed the system we've had for the last 50 years. Since the advent of drug prohibition, drugs have become cheaper and more easily available than ever before. The collateral damage, particularly in producing transit countries, is devastating. Despite the $100 billion of taxpayers' money expended in its suppression every year, the value of the global drug industry is estimated to be in excess of $400 billion per annum. Most of it streaming through the hands of highly unpleasant criminals. Drug prohibition is like a cancer in the world. It has undermined states, left a trail of corruption, violence and death, endemic health problems and a global network of crime. There is no other social issue which has caused so much suffering which could be mitigated simply by a change of policies. This is because the policies, rather than the drugs themselves, cause most of the suffering. We have been down this road before. In 1919, the US instituted nationwide alcohol prohibition. The result was an almost unmitigated failure. Criminal organisations flourished as never before. The police discovered the joys of corruption. Drinking strong spirits became hugely popular and health problems multiplied. After 13 disastrous years, the policy was abandoned. Tragically, the role lesson that demand always calls for its own supply and that prohibition only hands over lucrative industries, the criminals and violent cartels was not learnt. In 50 years of drug prohibition, we have surely seen enough devastation and suffering to lead rational people to seek new solutions. Surely the governments of the world can do a better job of minimising the overall harms of drugs than the cartels whose only motivation is profit. When I started the Betley Foundation 16 years ago, drug policy reform seemed to be a hopeless cause. At that point, there was no attempt to have a scientific evidence base. The Betley set about helping to provide. But in recent years, we are at last seeing the damn prohibition crumbling and the water of common sense beginning to seep through the cracks. In 2011, seven former presidents and two sitting presidents, together with 11 Nobel laureates and other global notables, signed the Betley Foundation public letter calling for a fundamentally different approach to global drug policy. These included President Molina of Guatemala and President Santos of Colombia, both of whom became leading advocates for drug policy reform. Latin America, the region which has suffered the most from the war on drugs, has become the engine of change. Even in the USA, the original motor prohibition is witnessing a fundamental shift with two U.S. states, Colorado and Washington, recently voting to legalize marijuana for recreational use. And President Obama publicly declaring that cannabis is probably no more harmful than alcohol, something that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. Meanwhile, Uruguay has become the first nation in the world to establish a legal market for recreational cannabis. These policy initiatives, combined with the positive outcomes of recent research into the potential medicinal and therapeutic benefits of certain psychoactive substances, are helping, slowly but surely, to change world opinion in favour of a more rational approach. Recognizing that prohibitionist approach does not work, must seek out alternative policies. At the beginning of the 21st century, in reaction to the prohibition of classical psychoactive substances and their analogs, under the UN conventions of 1961 and 1971, a new phenomenon emerged, the so-called legal highs, or designer drugs, a category of psychoactive compounds not included in the UN schedules. These new psychoactive substances, or NPSs, as they're called, are created by freelance chemists, largely imitating the work of the wonderful Sasha Shulgin, who had been producing and self-assessing new psychoactive substances for decades. They're mostly manufactured in China and India and sold via the internet a process which now government has been able to effectively control. Governments around the world reacted to this proliferation of so-called legal highs by prohibiting the substances almost as soon as they attracted media attention, with the result that the chemists move on to design a newer compound which can easily be more harmful than the now banned predecessors. This game of cat and mouse encourages the proliferation of NPSs so that now a new NPS is being produced and brought to market every week. Since the governments of the world do not scientifically test these NPSs for toxicity, the market is totally uncontrolled, resulting in millions of young people around the world, regularly ingesting unknown powders produced in unregulated ways and sold without restriction. Those unfortunate enough to end up in a hospital face doctors who have no idea what compound they are dealing with or how to treat its effects. Because of New Zealand's geographical isolation and the South Pacific, it is frail from the supply routes of classic psychoactive substances such as cocaine and opium and so it quickly became an attractive market for the consumers and producers of legal highs. This resulted in a new usual drug landscape which led to early realisation that new tools were needed if a way was to be found to minimise the harms of this rapidly expanding market. New Zealand has often been the harbinger of new solutions to key policy challenges of our times. It was the first country to recognise the equality of Indigenous people. It was the first country to grant women the vote. And now, while much of the rest of the world seems stuck in the futile rhetoric of reactive prohibition, New Zealand has given us a new paradigm of regulation in the form of the Psychoactive Substance Act, a bill which was passed in mid-2013 with broad political support. The Psychoactive Substance Act is unique for several reasons. It is the first national drug policy other than recent moves to regulate cannabis in Iroguai to be based on scientific evidence of harms rather than on dogma, panic and guesswork. It is the first to have a harm minimisation at its heart and the protection of the user's health as its explicit aim. It is unique in its pragmatic acceptance that you humans have always sought ways of altering their consciousness and will, no doubt, continue to do so. New Zealand has realised that a good government, like a good parent, should aim to provide measures which optimally protect the health of the people who choose this route and that a substance which has been clinically tested and is sold with appropriate labelling which indicates the contents and potential harms is safer than an unknown, unlabeled powder. Importantly, the Act is also unique in giving manufacturers the incentive to create the safest drugs possible and to test them in order to prove that they are low risk before the product can obtain approval and be legally brought to market. We should congratulate all those who have worked so hard in getting this Act into the statute book. The Act marks the beginning of a new drug policy model which can evolve and be improved as new information comes to light. It is an innovative and rational way of normalising harms to both users and society while permitting freedom of choice. It ensures for the first time that users of certain psychoactive substances no longer automatically designated as dysfunctional criminals making poor decisions but rather as rational consumers seeking to have a good time within the protective framework of state regulation. Whilst the principles and purpose of the Act have rightly been positively received it would be naive to announce its success before it has been fully implemented or before there has been time to assess the actual impact of the model. As with any policy initiative there are risks attached to it which must be carefully managed if it is to be a true success. An obvious danger of new substances even under a system of regulation is drug interactions such as mixing of certain drugs with alcohol. One natural way to manage this and other risks is to have a very strict post-marketing monitoring programme so that if adverse reactions do happen informed decisions can be made about whether to pull the drug from the market. Another way is to produce reversing agents or antidotes for the approved products which will counter their effect. Never before has the producers of recreational psychoactive substances had the incentive all the technical know-how to do this. Health care professionals will be made aware of the chemical profiles of these substances and informed of adverse reactions which they can then report to the regulator thus through feedback making the model ever safer. New Zealand has shown that collaboration between the various stakeholders such as government agencies and the industry is the most effective way of minimising harms and protecting the health of the consumer. Despite these potential challenges the Act remains the best legislative response to new psychoactive substances that currently exist. It is especially comforting to note that the evidence-based approach of the Act extends not only to the testing of substances for relative levels of risk but also to the working of the Act itself. Inherent to evidence-based policy is the ability to adapt and improve it when new information or evidence comes to light. To this end a review of the Act was conducted within the next five years. This is in contrast to the vast majority of drug policies worldwide with the power of inertia and the inflexibility of the international drug control regime have ensured that ineffective or harmful policies have remained in place for decades irrespective of evidence pointing to their manifest failure. The New Psychoactive Substance Act opens away to a better future for drug policy a future that puts reason before rhetoric and science before politics. I trust that in the coming years other countries will follow New Zealand's enlightened leadership. An additional value of the New Zealand approach is that it reminds us that those laws which legislate for how we're allowed to alter our consciousness cannot be determined by archaic moralistic ideas about which substances are culturally acceptable but by sounds and evidence of harms. We know that many of the drugs which are currently listed in the UN conventions of 1961 and 71 are there for reasons which are completely unscientific. In this regard the New Zealand solution has come at a specially relevant time. In 2016 the Member States of the United Nations will meet in order to debate for the first time what new options might be considered for the reform of global drug policy. As the New Zealand initiative is implemented an evidence of its successes and challenges come to light it is my hope and the hope of many others that the world will look to New Zealand for inspiration. Perhaps the New Zealand model of scientific testing in strict regulation or something very similar to it can be used as the framework for regulation of other currently illegal substances such as cannabis, MDMA and classic psychedelics. The New Zealand government is to be congratulated for breaking new ground and offering the world a new pathway to reform one which aims to protect the precious commodities of health and freedom and does so through a system based on scientific evidence and common sense. Thank you.