 Hello and welcome to the last session of the second day of the reform conference. I'm Stephanie Jones, the event manager for this conference. Some of you may also know me in my alter ego, which is a big proponent of nightlife harm reduction and drug policy reform. So I'm very pleased right now to be having this roundtable discussion about emerging drugs. And I'm also pleased that this session has the most interesting title of any of the sessions. So I hope that's appreciated. We have an amazing assembly of speakers here today. I'm just going to go through quickly to identify them before we kick off the discussion. Starting at the far end, Carissa Cornwell, who's with Dance Safe here in the United States. Tim Bingham with HSE Addiction Services from Limerick City, Ireland, which is that's the real name of his city, Limerick City. Welcome Tim. Ross Bell from the New Zealand Drug Foundation, who some of you may have seen on the plenary earlier today. Welcome Ross. James Dunn with Chen Palmer, New Zealand Law. So he represents actually the legal highs industry in New Zealand. Very lucky to have him. Welcome James. Maria Carvalho, who is a psychologist with the Catholic University in Porto, in Portugal. But more famously, you may know her. She runs the harm reduction services at the Boom Festival in Portugal. Welcome Maria. And last but certainly not least, my colleague at Drug Policy Alliance, Grant Smith, who is our federal drug policy manager and a specialist in this area. Welcome Grant. So we have a lot of interesting accents on this round table. So I want to start off with the most common question when it comes to emerging drugs really around terminology and what are they? Like we talk about emerging drugs, we talk about synthetic drugs, we talk about NPS, which is an acronym for novel psychoactive substances. What else we got? I don't remember any of the other names on there. What is it? Oh yeah, there's just like so many different terms. So a lot of these are used interchangeably. So it's not just identifying what the substance is. It is just figuring out what we're even going to call these class of drugs. A friend of mine introduced this term called alphabetamines, which I think is pretty clever. It's all these letters and numbers strung together and nobody really knows what it is. So I wanted to start off before we really get into the discussion by just having Carissa kind of identify for us some of the main classes of what falls under synthetic drugs. So we all kind of understand what we're talking about. Well the basalts would be considered cathenones. There's a wide range of different cathenones. Another thing that I've been seeing is methoxetamine, 2-5-i-n-b-m-o-e. And then there's a bunch more different ones. And do you guys want to, in New Zealand I think James you were saying that it's mostly synthetic cannabinoids that you're... That's right. Originally those were sort of classical research chemicals that I think the first ones have been developed as alternatives to cannabinoids for use and medical research. Over the last two or three years most of the new synthetic cannabinoids we've seen have been designed for that purpose. They're usually developed in a laboratory overseas, synthesised usually in China and then shipped to New Zealand. And those have been designed as I say explicitly for recreational purposes. They're not otherwise used. Most of them are subject to patent although the industry has I'm afraid to say a very robust approach to intellectual property in that particular field. So usually once a substance turns up everyone else rips it off within a couple of days. But mostly New Zealand has mostly been synthetic cannabinoids and increasingly cannabinoids designed for that purpose. Okay. So we have a class of drugs called cathenones. We have our synthetic cannabinoids. Grant, did you want to add any others once to the mix? Yes. There is what is known the two C's which I don't know a lot about but my understanding is that they are designed to be hallucinogens. And they're more, they're research chemicals and they're not, they're not as prevalent but they, some of them have already been banned here in the United States. Okay. So we have cathenones which I think kind of is the MDMA sort of amphetamine sort of type of legal highs, imitations. We have synthetic cannabinoids which obviously mirrors the effects of marijuana. And then we have two C's which is kind of a hallucinogenic sort of mirror. So right now everything under emerging drugs kind of mirrors our whole known class of drugs. So we're dealing with a very broad field. And so you can imagine the challenge when it comes to harm reduction which is the focus of this discussion, trying to do harm reduction. It's like trying to do harm reduction for all drugs. So we have to kind of break it down and get a little bit into the nitty-gritty to find out how we can best do harm reduction on this entirely very wide, diverse class of emerging drugs. I want to also point out the fact that two years ago at this conference we had another session on emerging drugs which Grant was on. So I want to give, I'm going to ask him to give us a little picture about just how different the field was two years ago. So as we jump into this conversation where we have people from New Zealand that we all know are doing some very exciting new stuff, we can see two years ago what was happening and that'll lead us into what we want to talk about today. So whereas today we have zombies and mad scientists, two years ago we had emerging drug criminalization trends. And that really summed up what we were dealing with two years ago. We had, for about two years we had had synthetic cannabinoids in the United States and getting a lot of media attention and some sporadic claims of teen suicides and other sort of bizarre things and some scary things that may or may not have happened during that time period. And then you had more recently, within the year of the panel two years ago, you had the emergence of the synthetic cathanines, bath salts, ivory wave, and that was more prevalent in the media at the time. And together these drugs were getting criminalized left and right both at the state level but also at the federal level. And by the end of 2011 you had at least 3940 states in the United States had criminalized at least something, more so the synthetic cannabinoids but also beginning to work at some of the first way that the cathanines as well. And so I want to point out that they were working on banning the first wave of synthetic cannabinoids. Even as they were banning the first wave of synthetic cannabinoids, the K2s, the spices, there was another wave coming behind it and you saw this sort of, this phenomenon happening where they were banning it, the law was taking effect for K2 and the next day K3 was coming out, okay lawmakers are scratching their heads, what are we going to do? We got to go through this legislative process all over again. Also the congressional level where I was working at the time, we were trying to stop the criminalization of 30 different substances, cannabinoids, cathanines, and some of the hallucinogens as well. And we saw it then as an opportunity to raise the issue of prohibition and that this approach doesn't work, the idea that we can just ban these things, ban the people who use them and suddenly it will just turn the faucet off. And what resulted was a fairly robust conversation in Congress around the failures of the war on drugs, the need for a new scheduling system essentially, a scheduling system that was more agile and could actually address this problem. Because the scheduling system we had was basically either you ban it or you treat it as a medical issue and no one was willing to see a medical benefit out of using synthetic marijuana. And so they were just putting in schedule one, which of course resulted in federal mandatory minimum sentencing and the criminalization of people who were just using these substances. And so another thing that we talked about two years ago was why were people using these? At that time we were still trying to understand what's the appeal of bath salts and what's the appeal of synthetic marijuana? And of course the short answer is that evading drug tests, the criminalization issue, these things were not illegal in many places or were starting to become illegal but they hadn't fully become illegal yet. And so there was that appeal there. And also considering the global economy, the reality that we're dealing with something that's on a global scale as James mentioned moments ago, that we're talking about something that's made in China shipped to another country, the sale is made in another country and then it's imported to the United States and that it's beyond the reach of government and that we need a new regulatory approach. At the time we didn't know what it would look like exactly but it would have elements perhaps similar to how we deal with tobacco along with some other more stringent controls around scientific inquiry, scientific study allowing scientists to study these canninoids rather than completely ban them, something that we were dealing with and continue to deal with. And this continues today. Right now there's a bill in Congress that is being driven by the DEA, it was practically written by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which is the US Federal Drug Enforcement Agency, that would allow them to ban anything that they even identify or know about without even knowing what the effect is on the human body. It's basically redefining the analog or revising the analog definition of the Control Substance Act here in the United States so that they can say, we assume this is going to do this to the human body so we're going to ban it and we're going to give the public only 30 days to weigh in on this. And this bill is actually pending before the Congress right now. So you're seeing, so in other words, today in the United States we're seeing the same response to this, the response of prohibition, the response of we're not going to deal with this as a health issue, we're going to deal with this as a punitive issue, but we do know a little bit more about what's happening. And we can also perhaps have some examples from elsewhere about how we can possibly better deal with this. And I just want to mention too that we also have issues like things that emerge that are not necessarily new drugs, but are emerging drugs in the United States like crocodile and cratum, other substances that have been around for a while or even longer, but are new to the United States and create this media hysteria around it. Okay. And those congressional hearings were as recently as three weeks ago or something like that, isn't that right? That's right. Okay. And we still don't know very much about use patterns of all these different substances in the United States. I'm actually going to ask Carissa about that in a little bit, but first I want to give a picture of what's happening in Europe. I'm going to ask Maria and Tim to give us a little shot of like what's going on in Portugal and in Ireland as relates to which substance is most commonly used and just a quick, you know, shot of like what the policy is for those. So Maria, do you want to start off? So the scenario in Portugal is as very recent developments. During 2013, so precisely this year, new regulation was approved, which represents unfortunately some kind of lost opportunity to keep on with our decriminalization policy. The context is that taking advantage of the new substances emerging unclassified for the moment at the time, there was this arousal of smart shops opening all over the country. Some focusing mainly on hot spot urban areas very associated with nightlife and with synthetic alternatives to, legalized alternatives to cocaine, mostly being the most bought and considered more interesting to users, but also the alternatives to psychedelics. And following some media hysteria on this phenomena of smart shops because cues could get really big in downtown Lisbon, downtown Portugal where nightlife is more active. Following this phenomena and this urge in the media, alarms started to come from emergency episodes related with these products. And unfortunately before this was properly researched and characterized and described, there was this urge to deal with the public health menace. And Portugal has recently adhered to the EU orientation in this matter, which is to be part of an early alert system that quickly identifies all the products, keeps all the countries in connection. And inside nationally what this has translated to has been to a system that as soon as a new substance is identified, it is automatically integrated in a list of prohibited substances. This is interesting because Portugal of course follows the decriminalization model, which so there's no penalties for personal possession of drugs. And yet, so this is relatively recently, they chose to take the new substances that were being identified and just stick them under the criminal law anyway. It is, so it's not under the criminal law because the framework is still administrative law and the sanctions that came out of that are mostly on the form of payment of charges. So what this has, the most important consequence of course has been that smart shops started to close all over because they weren't exactly pronounced illegal, but their activity was severely menaced. So they couldn't find a reason to keep open. And of course there's a lost opportunity to, in first of all, this is my personal opinion, to have this special context where users will be that could have trained people. The situation as it was couldn't really be maintained because there was a lot of misinformation, products were being sold as assaults, as fertilizers. Information on the packages wasn't accurate. There was a real health menace, but other than trying to decipher what was going on, describe the phenomena, invest in researching these products, their use patterns, their users, there was this immediate reaction, very typical, very disappointing in fact, which was to immediately go forward with a more repressive answer. And this unfortunately has closed users to the internet circuit where everything is anonymous, where no quality is guaranteed. Crisis and emergency episodes will not be put to an end because of this or reduced professionals in the field, mostly the less trained ones won't be better adjust to deal with the problem. And of course new products will keep on appearing as the identified substance is going to the list. So we see that there's still a harm reduction imperative that's still not quite happening in Portugal, there's still a lot of challenges to address. So actually your point about it moving to an online market actually is a perfect segue to Tim Bingham, who knows quite a bit about Silk Road, possibly more than, certainly more than anyone else that I know. So Tim, can you give us a little picture about like, so it sounds like in Portugal it's a lot of recreational use, cocaine like, legal highs, hallucinogen like legal highs, they have the problem with the head shops or the shops on the street. So is that at all similar to the situation in Ireland? And then maybe can you say a little bit about the use of the online buying portals? First of all I think Ireland was the first EU country to actually bring in any sort of psychoactive substance law in 2011. Up until then I have to say it was a pretty mad place to live. We had a lot of head shops, you could have in a population of 14,000, you could have two or three head shops in one area, they were open seven days a week, they were doing home deliveries, they were open 24 hours a day. There was a lot of young people, I was talking about this earlier, there was a lot of young people who were coming into attention, who never had had previous convictions or even come in any, had actually come to attention of the law, in a law enforcement beforehand. And a lot of these young people were actually getting, mostly through a methadone, there's a lot of people who probably know it, we use it because that was very popular at the time. And really I suppose that's quite a lot of the work actually coming into contact with A&E and the psychiatric services. So that kind of really, and obviously the media got onto that as well, so that kind of really led on to the whole thing around the prohibition, not prohibition, the dismantling of the head shops. Now where we are today, we've still got a lot of underground, obviously underground substances, we're still interesting enough, we had a lot of, up until about 2011 we had our three methadone, a few people know about it and then it became four methadone. Recently we had a seizure of three methadone, which I haven't seen for the last couple of years, for me it's quite interesting. A lot of the stuff that was coming in from, was being synthesized in China, so that's kind of where we are today. I mean speaking to drugs workers and to the guardie, all the police in Ireland, since the head shops have actually been closed, there has been a reduction in young people coming in contact with the law and in regards to mental health services. But what we've certainly seen, a growth in the synthetic cannabinoids, because there's been very large seizures of cannabis in Ireland, just obviously taking them off the market, so obviously once that's been taken off, something else comes in. Regarding I suppose Silk Road, I suppose I've been on Silk Road for about the last two years, primarily I started off as a harm reduction worker. It was really Monica Barrett in Australia, I blame her really for getting me involved, having a good old chat with her one night. But what I was finding was a lot of these people on Silk Road, there was two parts of it, there was the forum side and there was the side that solved the drugs. What I was finding is that the forum was more like a community. And it was a community of people who wanted information about, I don't know, coming down off MDMA. And a lot of us were sort of talking about the whole thing around serotonin regulation. And it was a very, very interesting topic that was happening. There was even a Spanish general practitioner, people could actually just drop him a line on Silk Road. There was a number of pharmacists who were both contributing and I would say probably acting as vendors as well. But the interesting thing about Silk Road is that it did create, when it created a community, it also created some form of regulation that was going on within the community. Because it was the community who actually kind of held the vendors to account. So if they got a bad batch of whatever, they would basically put that on the forum. And obviously it was rated. So if you had a rating of less than 98%, you were classed as a crap vendor, basically by people when people wouldn't go through them. And interestingly enough, there was another part, there was outside of Silk Road on another site, you could actually go on to it and you could actually determine which cocaine vendor was better than other. Because that testing was already going on. And the vendors I interviewed all did their own testing and they needed to have their own drug testing kits or they'd actually know exactly what's going into those substances. So there was a kind of an ethos that we want our products to be really good. The very interesting thing about it as well is that when I was speaking to them, a number of them mentioned that under 18s people had said they'd go under 18. And it was an ethic with some of the vendors, they wouldn't actually sell to under 18s. Which I thought was quite interesting. So you're saying that there's a lot of... So having this online place actually helped provide a lot of harm reduction in that there was an honest venue for people to rate things, people know that they would be held accountable to what was there. So that's the benefit of Silk Road. As opposed... So when we see actually that there's the head shops which people react to and that seems to kind of bring down some prohibition sort of knee-jerk reactions, whereas Silk Road created more of an environment wherein we could... Maybe we didn't still know like things weren't precisely labeled, but if you had somebody who bought something that was bad batch, you found out about it. I'm going to actually go on to Carissa because she's doing the real like... On the ground literally at festivals and venues, like seeing these things come up to the dance safe booth and people wanting to know what is this and how can I be safe and that sort of thing. So can you tell us a little bit about your experience in the real world doing this? Yeah. You know, I would say probably 75 to 80% of the stuff that we tested over the summer was not what it was supposed to be. And so with that being said, it's definitely a scary market to go to an event and try to buy something that you think might be MDMA. The chances of you getting MDMA are very small. The chances of you getting something that could be much more harmful to you is definitely probably more the case than you finding MDMA. We definitely feel that there's a need for testing. Silk Road was great because everything that was bought and sold on Silk Road was what it was supposed to be. If you wanted to buy a cathenone, you could buy a cathenone. If you wanted to buy MDMA, you could buy MDMA. And so I think that with the Silk Road going down, it kind of makes me more nervous because for a while there, it was pretty good. Everybody that had what they thought they were supposed to, it was all because they had bought MDMA Silk Road. So two quick questions for you. We're big proponents of testing kits and people knowing what's in their substances, but how useful are they for the emerging drugs? Like if somebody's like, oh, I really wanted methadone. Like is this white powder it? Does it work? Yes, definitely. And I've performed two different tests for people. One ended up being MDMA. One was the cathenone. And this girl looks at me and she's like, well, what if I like that other one better? Because she didn't like the MDMA. She liked the cathenone. And how often do you see that? Out there in festivals, are people really preferring these things? Do you see that a lot of people are either preferring them or asking questions about them? I think a lot of it is that the market is flooded with cathenones that most of these people that are taking it don't even know the difference, probably, unless they've had a test performed for them. And lack of information, I think that's a big thing too. The less they know, the less they know. Right. So let's actually go back to Maria, because I'm going to ask now about your experience specifically with the Boom Festival. That's a festival that happens every two years in Portugal. So why don't you tell us for the people in the crowd that may not know what Boom Festival is all about? Give us a little explanation of what that is and then how harm reduction works at this festival. OK. So Boom is an event that takes place every two years in Portugal. The festival has a very large dimension. You can imagine. It's a venue that gathers over 30,000 people from over 100 different countries for a week. And in a very isolated and recluded area in interior Portugal, which isn't such a big geographical context to keep in mind. Anyway, it gets really isolated. Climate conditions are also very, very harsh with very high temperatures. So the context of risk and reactions people might have to psychoactives and to the environmental factors themselves are a bit amplified. But Boom is much more than that. It has won consecutively for the third edition in 2012, the United Nations Award for Outstanding Greener Festival. It promotes the values of sustainability, care, culture. It cannot no longer be considered a psychedelic trans festival exclusively. So it appeals to an enormous array of people of different characteristics culturally speaking. And what has happened in Boom Festival is that because of this conscience of promoters since very early on, back in 2002, a spontaneous organization of volunteers started to be aware of the need to do something about difficult situations that could emerge during the festival related to the use of substances. And the organization of Boom asked in the initial editions to implement a service of care to the people in the festival. So this service was hired, organizers hired maps to present this service for a number of years. Anyway, the experience was at the beginning very spontaneous. It relied mostly on volunteer work. It still does. But it was very spontaneous in the way it was offered, always with support from the organizers. But what is our effort since we've been involved in the project has been to really start doing some research and evaluating what we are doing, describing the process that was already being used, create a better understanding of how it should be implemented. And the project actually includes a number of different strategies. So it has been possible for a number of editions to offer thin layer chromatography testing service, which is usually offered in... That's the good stuff, right? That's the best kind. The thin layer? Yeah. The thin layer, maybe it's worth saying, it's a testing process that allows you not only to say whether the product is or not what you were expecting it to be, but it also identifies the percentage and number and types of adulterants involved. So the kind of feedback that it offers to users is extremely accurate and provides the safest information and reliable information you can obtain. And let me ask you, because I heard something in another panel. I heard that when you get stuff tested, first of all, there are signs that say drug checking near the dance at this time it happens. This is totally acknowledged by the festival. So it's advertised as they tell you where exactly to go, then you go and you get this high tech fancy checking. And then I also heard that they put the results up like on a big... They do. So in 2012, a daily report on the results of testing was being offered by the new WIP team. So we partnered up with a EU funded project that has people from a number of teams in doing this kind of work all over Europe, a group called TEDI. And they have a project which is specifically related to testing, which is new WIP. So we partnered up with, Cosmic Care partnered up with new WIP to guarantee the testing service. And what they helped us do and implemented on their initiative during the last edition was a daily report on the results of testing. So and also alerts that could be distributed in specific areas of the festival like the restaurants or the dance floor that would identify some risk situations that people should be aware of. We had a particular situation in 2012, which was there was a shortage of LSD all over Europe last year. This usually represents increased work for Cosmic Care. So these blue micro dots were being sold as LSD. In fact, they weren't. They were DOB, DOC, DOE. So people were unaware of it. And this meant a huge number of extremely severe reactions of physical agitation, aggressiveness, very, very intense episodes for extenuating hours like over a day sometimes. And people aren't aware of this because LSD doesn't usually take this long to peak. So the fact that we were constantly getting feedback from the testing also helped us at the crisis intervention setting which doesn't happen in the same place in the festival. So drug testing is near the dance floor and then Cosmic Care crisis intervention area is in another space, more quiet, more protected from public. And the fact that we were in constant feedback allowed us also to be aware of what situations we were receiving, the potential motives, offered samples for them to keep track. So this double intervention is in fact what should happen. And not only is the testing, the crisis intervention and also close work with paramedics and safety staff. So this meant that every situation in the festival being appearing, we would get a call on our radio, we would go there to pick up the person if the person couldn't come by themselves. So we have a, and the articulation with the medical staff allowed a quick evaluation of the situation there, whether it was from health. And the medical incidents that were happening, were they mostly involving new drugs or were they all different kinds? No. The testing results for 2012 show us that 47% of the samples are MDMA with 80% purity. So it is in fact a different scenario than perhaps what you have. Research chemicals aren't particularly prevalent because LSD has 15% of samples, cocaine 7%, and then 6% unknown substances, 7% other substances. Andphetamines, perhaps after cocaine, if I recall. And so it isn't something you would exactly see translated in the information we have on the testing. But it is true that in the 2010 edition, we identified from our visitors reports at Cosmic Care a list of over 40 different substances. So we see that there is a range of these new substances being used, but for the most part it's still the classics. It is, yes. And BOOM is perhaps very representative of what the pattern is a bit all over Europe and the world, even though supply is being perhaps offered mostly by Portuguese traffickers. So BOOM Festival being a model then for what can be done to kind of engage harm reduction on the most, the highest level at a festival. I want to turn now to our New Zealanders and hear a little bit more about what the situation was that led up to the new law that they have in place and what that has impacted in terms of harm reduction outreach in your country. I don't know, Ross or James, you want to start? I thought it was interesting that you were talking about emergency scheduling orders because we tried that in New Zealand for a year and a half. We had a regime where the Minister of Health could issue a notice which banned the commercial sale and supply of a substance with seven days to get rid of it. We banned 38 substances, I think. I don't think a day went by when you could not legally buy synthetic cannabis in New Zealand. It just did not work. And it actually created really bad incentives for the industry because it didn't make sense to make a product that was easy to identify or to put labels on it or to be open and upfront with the government about what you were doing. So what you'd get is the same product but it would have half a dozen different ingredients and as they were identified they would be banned one by one and replaced with new ingredients. So where we got to after a year and a half was we ran as fast as we could to stay in the same place. Now to the New Zealand government's credit they knew going into that that wasn't going to work. They actually said that. It's a stop gap and they knew that. But temporary banning orders, what they think they did certainly in New Zealand was really bring the failures of the prohibition model. It happened really quickly. Like you know with say a traditional drug you can ban it and then 40 years down the line oh wait crap it's still available or look at all these problems. Whereas with the temporary banning regime we had you could ban it and 20 minutes later something else would be available. So you really got that just how ineffective it was. It was just really driven home. So where that got us to was the Psychoactive Substances Act which took a long time to develop. It was a very very painful birth. Basically the crux of the act is that if you can demonstrate that a particular product poses a low risk of harm to people who use it you'll get approved. And the evidence you have to put forward for that is clinical and pre-clinical trials. So it's a very high bar. For example it's you know the government said if you put alcohol through the same process it would be declined. Tobacco would be declined. Probably most of the control, almost all of the control drugs we have would probably be declined. So it is a very very very high bar. From a harm reduction perspective though there are a number of things about it that I think are quite promising. First of all you're required to put, when you have an approved product you have to put what's in it on the label. You have to put a health warning that explains if the side effects are I don't know nausea you've got to say nausea. You can't advertise at all. You can't claim that the product is safe. It has to be sold from a licensed retailer. So there's a lot more control over the market and a lot better understand. What it's meant from a health professionals perspective I think is that before people would come in and say oh I smoked some chronic. Well great you know which of the 200 different cannabinoids were you using. Whereas now if someone comes in and says I smoked my Juicy Puff or something and I got sick. I'm afraid the names are... That's a real name Juicy Puff. Oh yeah the product names are not distinguished by their maturity I'm afraid to say. But yeah at least if you come in and say I smoked Juicy Puff I got sick. The clinician can look it up on the on the register and be like oh okay so it's you know whatever is what is in that 5FAKV42 or something and they'll know what it is and they'll know what their reported effects are and they can feed that back to the regulatory authority in the long run so we can build a better picture around how these because a lot of these these new substances we know virtually nothing about them. And particularly with New Zealand synthetic cannabinoids they have been designed by New Zealand you know market players for use in the New Zealand market. So they're extremely new there's virtually no literature about them. The literature we do have available is about the cannabinoids we banned two years ago. So it's not that useful for us going forward. The other thing I think it's important for me and it's interesting you were talking about sort of purity as an issue. In the long run it's intended that there will be a code of manufacturing practice for manufacturers. It'll be akin to sort of GMP pharmaceutical level processes. So there'll be a high level of purity in theory. Really good understanding of what's going on and probably a lot more control over the market and a much better understanding about what's what's actually happening who's using what who's buying it what happens when they use it. I mean obviously that said there are a whole bunch of issues of the act which perhaps Ross you know when New Zealanders we love to complain so you're not alone in that. We've got yeah I mean there are the biggest conceptual issue of the act obviously is it only applies to new substances not medicines nothing that's already banned not herbal remedies not tobacco not alcohol. So it's a good model but it's it's only it only covers a very small you know wedge of the market and if you want to go out and buy you know cocaine well tough you know you still have to you still have to go to your dealer whereas if you want to buy the the sort of cocaine derivative that someone came up with and managed to convince the authority you should be able to sell fine go down to the shop yeah great get a receipt. So there are there are conceptually there are some sort of inconsistencies in how it all fits together. So that yeah I mean that kind of begs the question actually because some people have brought up the fact you know despite what New Zealand's doing it's amazing we're all big fans it's a very forward-thinking policy. It's kind of like well we kind of know what the harms of cocaine are and we kind of know what the harms of MDMA are but with all of these even the new ones that are being developed like you just said we don't really know. So how is how is the industry or or or policy or people in New Zealand addressing that question? To get approval it's not just a matter of sort of asserting that your substance is low risk in the long run you will have to produce clinical data that will replicate something on the lines of a phase one pharmaceutical trial. So we're not looking at proving efficacy because you know that sucks that's your problem but you will have to prove that it's safe or low risk and that's going to have to be based on you know it probably unfortunately animal testing or something akin to that and then clinical trials with human patients. So we will we don't have much of an understanding what's on the market now by the time products receive formal approval which may not be for a year or so we'll have a really good understanding about what those products are and what the risks the risks are from using them. Okay and did you want to add to that Ross because I'm about to ask him some tough questions about his employers. Go for gold. So I mean the interesting thing about James is that he works for some of the people that make these legal highs. So why don't you tell us how you got that cool job? Actually I mean technically technically my employer I work for a law firm in Wellington and they came to us many years ago with a range of issues. Over the last couple of years increasingly it's become my area of specialty. I mean part of that and one thing I think that's interesting about the New Zealand context that is probably different to a lot of places overseas is the legal highs industry operates semi-openly. You know they have limited liability companies and shareholders and they instruct accountants and lawyers to write crap letters to each other and all that sort of thing. So there's always been a level of openness and reflected in that and I'm usually slaking off our Ministry of Health so it's nice to be different. The ministry has always been very interested in what the industry has to say. I mean during the process of the act they would come to us with things and say do you think this will work? You know is this a goer? And we'd say well no it's not. I mean a classic example was around this whole issue of data exclusivity. Under the act when you get your product approved you have five years exclusivity around the clinical safety data used to get over the line which means somebody else can't just can't rip it off and put the same thing forward because they know they'll know to get approved. That's a commercial thing. You know no one would be the first person to put a product forward if they didn't or they weren't going to be able to make money out of it frankly. So those kind of issues the ministry was very receptive which was good. I mean when that obviously they set the policy which is as it should be but they were receptive to hearing from the industry about what would work and what wouldn't work how we thought it would work going forward whether there were any obvious tripmines or or pratfalls they were going to head into so that was that was really helpful and that was I think that's really important. So there's an open communication between the industry and the government which is nice. Absolutely yeah. So let me throw another factor into the mix and this is going to be my last question that'll be for the whole panel before I open up to everybody in the crowd to start asking questions to the panelists. We would be remiss in talking about emerging drugs without mentioning the impact that media has on the understanding of what these drugs are, what they do, how safe are they etc. And that's in part how we got the title for this session. Americans will know the very well publicized story of a man in Miami who was a little crazy out of his head. He was found like biting somebody's face and then they called this the zombie story and said he was on bath salts. Turned out of course that he wasn't on it bath salts at all. He actually tested positive for marijuana but we think in the end it's mostly a mental health issue anyway the point being can't unring that bell that story is out there. And now when you mention bath salts a lot of times the first thing people think about is the zombie thing. Now like when we're doing harm reduction that's obviously in addition to already the challenges that the panel has brought up about just even understanding what these drugs are, what are their effects, how do we make it safe. In addition all those regular level challenges now we have this crazy media circus that we have to do. So I'm going to ask each of you to go one minute like media impact and how to has it been good and bad and how to make it work in the service of you know being you know putting good harm reduction practices out there. Well it's mostly been bad I think especially from the work I do on the hill. I mean it's a lot of the policies driven by the media reports the anecdotal reports what a police officer who may or may not have been the scene of an incident said to a reporter in a small town somewhere or the parent who blames the drug for you know the loss of their son or daughter which you know I'm not saying that didn't happen but the fact is that what we have that's largely what we have to go on. I think you know I think all of us have a responsibility to explain to the media what what the real problem is here you know what we need to do about these drugs that we need to start you know we really need to emphasize education you know we really need to focus on ensuring that we don't criminalize people who use drugs who use synthetic drugs and we need to start emphasizing the science and looking and searching for the science around this and I think we you know I think the media can they're never necessarily allies but I think they can you know we can start to work more effective messaging into the into the into what the media reports and and and remind people when there's when it when false information is put out there such as with the best with the Miami incident. Maria well what happened in Portugal is as I've said a very disappointing classical moral panic scenario where a small number of situations of acute bad reactions to to illegal high would get extremely mediatized and receive large attention and there's also a number of influence agents in the civil society that act as the moral guardians in inside our political and legal framework of decriminalization that took clearly an advantage of this new scenario to make pressure for disorientation in the in the law I believe so media had certainly a lot to do with the with the scenario we we have today to deal with these new psychoactives for all the bad reasons and the ones that are typically known unfortunately James yeah um put it this way in New Zealand it is illegal to advertise the sale of a psychoactive product that doesn't matter because the New Zealand hero will helpfully tell you what's on sale where you can buy from and that it's mind-blowingly strong every second day so it has been a that's that's the least bad of it I mean they have ran you know the media has led to moral panic after moral panic after moral panic and from a harm reduction perspective the worst thing is every time you know big old article about how terrible synthetic cannabis is and a big picture of one of the leading brands so it's like why we've tried to keep them keep the market under control and at the same time the media is just putting this stuff out there day after day after day I mean most of it's semi-accurate but it's the thing that I mean it is it is the thing that bothers me the most is the constant publicization you know here's where you can get it here's where it's for sale here's what you can buy it's so strong and it's like well what do you think what do you think the average 19 year old reading that's going to get out of it the other I mean the other thing obviously as I said we have a real issue of moral panic around this stuff and everyone does I mean the most asinine example I'm aware of comes from Australia where a kid fell off a balcony or something after overdosing on one of the mbo me hallucinogens I forget which one and the government said oh look in the government backed by the media said this is terrible this is why we have to crack down on these legal highs etc etc the kid thought he was using LSD so he wasn't like a legal high scenario he thought he was buying illegal drugs turned out they were actually legal and not good for him so and we just get these kind of story I mean the central papers are usually fairly responsible we head out to the provinces and it's just the same stuff over and over again you know day in day out and it's really unhelpful because it's inaccurate and as I say it's actually doing more to advertise the industry than the industry is so I don't that's you know completely sort of the opposite effect you'd want from a harm reduction perspective yeah Russ do you want to add to that yeah I do um the the zombie case in America so a week after that happened there was a similar there was a thing happened in Auckland and the media reported this thing that this guy must have been on bath salts just because but the media were just reporting what a police officer had said so was it the media's fault for reporting the senior police officer was it the senior police officer's fault for pulling something out of his ass but but I'll put a different spin on the yes the New Zealand media coverage of these things has been really dreadful but for a policy reform point of view it's been really useful because what it did was encourage politicians to move more quickly and by the end when you looked at the debate that took place over the two or three year period of the as the bill progressed by the end of it all of the journalists all of the opinion writers all of the politicians had the same key message that you know the industry has to prove these products a low risk before they're sold so all of the moral panic while it's never usually good in drug reform was really helpful because it we ended up with a good result in the end Tim I think the many I think the media in Ireland has been good and bad in a sense we've had a lot of PMA related overdoses or deaths in in Ireland we've had quite a number and unfortunately the media has kind of portrayed it as pure ecstasy so there's been kind of no real kind of definition of what this this has been we've had a lot of other sort of legal highs of whatever you want to call them issues where the where the media's really got it wrong going back to what Ross has gone back to what Ross has said there has been examples where there's been you know there's been high profile seizures of a white substance and the guard you know the law enforcement at the time said you know this is methadone or this is something else because really they didn't want anybody else to think it was crystal meth or something else so I think the problem is at the moment without actually getting proper talk you know without getting the tox reports we don't really know whether we don't know the seizures I mean well and you're just getting the sort of tox reports back about recent seizures but I mean my experience of some of the Irish press I mean just I mean this is for you guys as well is that I've built kind of really good relationships with some of the journalists and we do I mean recently about a year ago there was a whole a whole stuff around PMA and stuff like that and we were well it was actually to get some harm reduction messages out into the mainstream media into some of the local papers and some of the national papers were actually one of the national papers actually published a half page literally sort of 10 points to harm reduction on how to reduce the risk of overdose which I think is pretty you know which is pretty good but so just you know I mean just for yourselves you know build up your contacts with the journalists and you'll know the ones to trust and the ones to trust they'll come to you for the information and you can go to them for the information as well and Carissa well I'd say that it's probably been good and bad basalts I mean who knows what that is it definitely creates confusion Molly if I hear one more article say something about Molly being pure MDMA I'm going to scream anybody can put a white powder in a capsule and call it Molly and so I think that a lot of times the media does more harm than good you know ecstasy overdoses somebody dies from an ecstasy overdose what does that mean are they talking about MDMA are they talking about something else so just like the misinformation that is they put out there in relation to different drugs is definitely confusing all right so it's time for you guys to have a turn and ask questions of panelists I see one over here I'm going to go walking all the way over what's your question for the panel hi panel my name is Daniel Gabor I'm the founder of the psychedelic society and repeat tech startup founder and a software engineer and my question for you guys is in reference to the online drug markets you know there's nothing new about online drug markets college psychonauts have been buying gray market research chemicals online since the 1990s but as silk road is being shutting down we're seeing law enforcement trying to desperately to convey to the public that the underlying tech is not secure and that they're watching everybody and going to catch you and I think the real reason for that is that the reason that they've been able to shut anything down ever I know a vendor on silk road that had trouble before it got shut down because his girlfriend read it on him there's this human factor that tends to lead to stuff like that getting caught but I think in silk road we see actually that in its wake eight plus popular torque hidden sites are popping up and we're seeing this mainstreaming of the online drug market so as you said it was self-regulating and there was all these positive benefits so here's my question do you have high hopes for online drug markets I mean the vendor friend that I had that was selling drugs online posted GCMS analysis reports of the drugs he was selling I mean I've never gotten a GCMS report from any drug dealer before him so so yeah I mean what do you guys think is the future you know do you think that these other sites are the answer I mean Tor may not be the answer Bitcoin may not be the answer but is technology the future of you know drug harm reduction great question yes no I do no I do I think that definitely it's been interesting to watch kind of what see what's happened with silk road in regards to the actual kind of I don't know people know about there was a drug site there was a drug site there was a forum site but what was really interesting is when actually the drug site got closed down all the vendors and all the buyers the forum was still open so all the vendors and all the buyers was show was sharing their encryption keys and their email addresses so it didn't actually close anything down and it dismantled one person and part of the drugs market so it's now in a sense there's more profit to be made from these from the vendors because they're not having to pay the transaction fees with with on silk road however a number a number you know obviously there's a number of there's a number of other websites like sheep and black market reloaded but really I mean my in fairness black market reloaded they opened a thread for you know for silk roads community to sort of to to talk about talk about you know and to as opposed to communicate on but we've seen other sites starting to come through as well and there's a lot I think it's been actually it's almost like it's made made the the community stronger because I mean we've we know there's the from people there was one there's a couple of people I think there's a couple of people who are on the old silk road are now putting money substantial money into developing this old you know the new one which is going to be a lot more secure and I think a lot of people want a lot more people are more aware of that how you know encryption and obviously we know what will happen with with freedom hosting everything where Torma got taken down as well so I think a lot more people are much more aware there's a lot more I think but definitely I think it's definitely one of the I can see it growing definitely I mean you've only got to look at the price of bitcoins bitcoin you know the price of bitcoins went down if anybody little bitcoins are to you yeah grand makes my life easier but that was it was about one dollar I don't 35 14 hours but one is what 190 dollars a bit bitcoin now so that hasn't you know the market's definitely there let me throw a naysayer in there does like isn't there an argument that it's just giving access to people that don't really know what they're doing anyway they just heard about this thing they can buy it online and that's not very safe or that's not a very good harm reduction practice let me actually toss that over to the New Zealanders and say for the market that you're creating for legal highs that's going to be regulated is there going to be is it the preference that they be shops is it like online sales how's that going to work well the preference is probably shops just because it's easier for the authority to keep an eye on what's going on there is scope to sell online that's that's not prohibited and you can you can certainly do that I'm not I mean that one of the challenges has been to be honest that you can only sell from a website that exists purely for that purpose and where that's difficult of course is if you're a head shot and we've got a few big chains you don't just sell legal highs so you have to kind of have two websites or take all your other product off or so there is scope for online sale presumably that you could ship you could sell to overseas customers if you really wanted to um but it's the preference is certainly retailers simply because they're easier to control you can keep kids out of it you can put them you and out of the way places whereas at a website you you can do your best with age verification but there's always going to be that risk someone just gets their brother you know put in his date of birth or his credit card for them so there is scope for both probably the preference at the moment is for physical locations okay you notice a very quick response to that um I think the benefit of having it from a retail shop is that a well trained shop you know retailer can talk to the can talk to the person who's going to buy the drugs but from one of the things we've had in New Zealand are communities don't want these shops in their community yeah you know I said there's been a lot of there's been a lot of moral panic about that and so to address that I actually think the online sales has an advantage for those communities who are quite conservative around these issues and so the sales are online we you know see no evil here no evil and I think there's some benefit in that right so it seems like that one is still open for debate okay so I'm gonna go to the next question here hi my name is Devin Ringer I'm a law student and a policy analyst at the criminal justice policy foundation I actually have one larger question but first I wanted to start with a thought about what Carissa had mentioned about when you hear the term molly overdose what does that even mean our organization has kind of taken to pushing back against the media by distinguishing between overdoses and poisonings so that an overdose would be something that could only occur if what was consumed was what was desired and a poisoning would be all of the broader category of defrauding and therefore the toxicity afterwards so we found that to be quite successful in our PR distinctions but the larger question I wanted to ask was for the New Zealanders here in the United States our drug scheduling regime is I imagine a bit different than what yours is one of the biggest criticisms that people who are proposing the new amendment to change the controlled substance act is that it costs so much money and time and human capital in order to actually go through what legislators would think is a rigmarole to find the same finding that some analog is exactly the same as the other 20 analogs we've already scheduled the problem we also face is that here in the United States if something a chemical is intended not for human consumption it skips past all of the health and safety checks and goes straight to the market as a result there's a huge lobby of chemical producers who produce really odds and ends chemicals for specific purposes and put them to market and really don't want to have to spend money to have them test it beforehand they're not involved in psychotropic at all they're involved in in lubricants but they don't want to have this testing and there's a ton of money behind that industry so my question is who bears the costs in New Zealand paying for these tests and how do you know which new chemicals coming to market you need to test under the psychedelic sentencing law or the psychedelic scheduling law because it seems to me that you wouldn't know that a substance is psychedelic until you've tested it so how do you prevent the broader outrage from the testing yeah it's a really good question and it's one that you know there are a lot there's a lot of gray around the fringes of how it works basically every substance that is every substance article object or thing that is capable of inducing a psychoactive effect by any means in a person is technically covered by the legislation now obviously since that includes you know paint and colors and sunlight that's that's not actually how it works in practice and the key test is whether or not it's been administered for the primary purpose of inducing a psychoactive effect that's pretty vague and in the in classic New Zealand terms we just know we know when we see it I mean people there was there has been for a while a there was sort of a tendency to sell these kind of products is like fish food or a CD cleaner that was popular for a while or incense the new legislation allows the authority to specifically declare a substance article object or thing to be a psychoactive substance or to not be a psychoactive substance and the intention there is for there to be some clarity the example that's given quite often is for example of you want to grow a psychoactive plant in your back garden that's fine they don't care if you want to put it up in little bags that say super high on it and claim it's not for human consumption you know they're not don't take the piss you know that's a New Zealand phrase but you know they're going to know everyone knows when these products are up there and intended for human use for a psychoactive effect and the expectation is that those products will be covered if your product merely happens to have a psychoactive effect but it's actually you know as you say a lubricant or something else because the intention is not that it will be administered for the primary purpose you should be in the clear but if someone took that exact same substance and packaged it up for retail sale and sold it at a head shop obviously then you'd be looking at inducing a psychoactive effect on purpose so you would be covered okay going over here for a question yeah my name is Malekar Borjak I actually have one quick comment about sample bias for Maria and Carissa and what I think is really going on here is that you're facing two different questions and in Boom Festival the question you're facing is how good is my MDMA and in the festivals in the US you're asking is this MDMA and so you get very different numbers when you're looking at that so 80% comes back yeah it's MDMA it's of good quality and 20% well okay this stuff wasn't so good and in the other side you're getting only 20% is actually MDMA so that's just a sample bias that's occurring based on attendees now my question for the whole panel though is this has been an ongoing war against language first when Henry Anslinger came before congress he didn't say him he said marijuana and the media went right in tow with that reporting all kinds of psychotic crap now modernly is bad salts or molly or whatever but I mean what is our strategy to defeat this because it's been working for 100 years and still going and to me it's whenever I hear it it says little Chris is saying it's not cocaine it's this new drug called blow I mean really I mean really guys are we gonna fall for this again so I think your question is about different names of things and reinventing well I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that you know in the United States most of these drugs are being made to get around drugs that are illegal so I think that that's gonna be the bottom line the reason why 80% of the stuff that I test is not MDMA is because you know they're trying to make this thing to go around MDMA or you know marijuana or whatnot so I think that that's probably the original problem and since you know you in Portugal it's all the drugs are decriminalized they don't have to have all these different drugs to go around the drugs because they're all legal anybody else our problem in the experience of testing in boom and all the related consequences that come from what's available have from recent years had always more to do on shortage of some very demanded product it happened with MDMA in 2010 that because of the Olympics apparently China developed this very harsh prosecution of a number of precursors of MDMA and because of that all over Europe there was this huge shortage of MDMA it reflected in the products available in the festival and in 2000 and I'm sorry I mentioned 2010 I meant 2008 and because of that at that particular time we had a problem with MDMA there was the cutting and the adulteration had a lot of lava missile people are unaware of it yes yes yes and and that was the problem that edition read more recently in 2000 in 2012 it was a problem with LST and blue micro dots that weren't LST after all because there was a letter LST shortage so it's not just how good are they is it is also are they available enough it's also another another issue and we've always seen increasing problems when availability is compromised for highly demanded products okay I'm going to go to the next question because I want to get a couple more in and we're about 10 minutes left hi my name is Brun Gonzalez I'm from Espolea from Mexico I wanted to ask you mentioned a while ago the importance of the thin layer chromatography test or analysis and I wanted to ask if you could comment or expand a little bit I said how it compares with gas or mass spectrometry and the importance of quantitative and qualitative results and how those two tests correlate and what each one provides and I am not the right person to answer to you because I don't major in psychopharmacology or or chemistry I only have a basic notion of the thin layer chromatography I'm not into chemistry so but I can put you in contact with the people that developed this and are very specialized in Europe namely at the Portuguese team Shekin from a PAJ agency here represented by my friend José or energy control specialists in Spain that have been doing this for a long time there are perhaps the best people to answer to you so I have a basic notion that thin layer chromatography acts on by comparison by contrast of the sample with a panel of products and this this contrast allows the thorough identification of all the products present in a sample this is all a psychologist can say on the subject sorry just want to say two things one is to correct Maria because lava missile is it was present in cocaine it was not in MDMA okay it was yeah and it was yes but it was a very problematic issue lava missile in Portugal and also that MDMA outside boom festival contains a lot of caffeine and that we can see that in party scenes in Lisbon and Porto the two main cities of Portugal so most part of the time is there's some kind of placebo effect that you know caffeine produce on people so and that's quite interesting to see at the same time so this doesn't do doesn't have anything to do with decriminalization you know people can always twist drugs can always you know produce in small labs at their own kitchens and so on so it's a different I think story the second thing I think it's more directed to you the pine also specifically mainly to the European ones we know that EMCDDA is the European monitoring center for drug control is trying to increase more and more drug drug testing at the European level but at the same time the national agencies even in Portugal they are attacking drug testing because they are afraid of drug testing they say for example it happened with us with uptash they say that if we do drug testing we are promoting drugs so how do you think we can overcome this kind of paradox you know we have the European agency saying we need drug testing to control drugs the quality of drugs the quality of use but at the same time the national agencies they are attacking that great question I would say that you know the drug testing is always going to be controversial but in the end if you can provide a test for somebody you could potentially save their life I think one of the I was at the psychoactive substance conference for the EMCDDA recently and one of the things that really came out was the lack of markers that was available for a lot of these novel psychoactive substances and that's definitely a problem I mean the interesting thing about these we were finding that some of the law enforcement in various countries were actually buying off silk road and they were actually developing markers from the drugs they were buying from silk road so it wasn't necessarily for seizures but it was famous as a harm reduction measure to actually know what's actually out there and that was the only way that we're doing it but now it's gone so we don't know that's a very tough question that I think we're also going to keep addressing and probably in two years when we do the session again it will still be a question that we're wondering about I'm sorry let me just add something I think that maybe a response that is pragmatical because in Portugal what happens is that just testing is part of the measures you can adopt in the harm reduction laws so it is contemplated in the law but then of course as José said there are practical problems in what concerns the manipulation of substances that transportation the actual manipulation of the products by the by the people that are that are doing the testing so I believe perhaps the way is to be pragmatical about it and to educate law enforcement because we have a decriminalization law it has over 10 years of implementation it has been successful up to date or until economic deprivation has arrived at least and but this doesn't necessarily mean that criminal justice judges prosecutors police agencies are totally aware of the harm reduction message and the implications of the of the of the drug so if if that alliance can be established with with drug info with law enforcement it probably solves the problem so I think it's a matter of investing in their education and being pragmatical about it boom has been successful in doing that kind of partnership with the local enforcement law enforcement agencies surrounding the festival and this has proven beneficial because they don't interfere really what happens inside a festival and they're very cooperative and also the festival the promoters themselves cooperate with law enforcement to help identify problematic trafficking situations and other relevant law enforcement issues but inside the festival these measures are not threatened because of this cooperation and understanding of the purpose of the festival and the purpose of this intervention so but of course this is in it a new which is this secluded area in Portugal where everything is easy to to to get to go to to implement I gotta we have to go to a broader level perhaps I'm intrigued by the idea of you know working with law enforcement to to really to really grow in this area in the United States and other countries that don't have the drug checking sort of put in place at festivals and nightlife areas so I think that's an area that that we can grow here in the United States and I think it might you know it can be it can be approached as an a way of better understanding what's out what's happening out there you know because right now we're relying in the United States we're relying on DEA data and and that's more or less an understanding that's more or less all we have and so for the most part so I think that's an interesting area to look into hi my name is Peter Charles I come from Hungary a discussion you were talking about legal highs only in the context of dance festivals and people attending dance clubs but in my country and in some other countries of the eastern and central part of Europe there is a big number of people who inject legal highs like thousands of of marginalized drug users injecting legal highs and it has completely different you know implications for example heroin user injects three or four times but a methadone injector injects 15 times a day so it it it has a lot of risk of HIV and hep C so do you have any experiences with injecting legal highs in in your countries I did a study in 2011 and if I'm correct I think I think Ireland was the first place to actually see injecting methadone um I yeah I mean it was amongst a bunch of home it was maybe amongst a homeless population and it was there but you know there was there was obviously um fairly sort of psychotic effects you know effects from these from this again we were sweet we were seeing um people injecting 15 16 17 times a day where there's a number of people I was spoken to would have had um been on HIV treatment would have just left the head tried for HIV treatment um they could have been and what we also seen we were we were seeing a lot of um abscesses um and I suppose injecting related injuries we would never have seen before and the one of the suppose is as a harm reduction measure if you are if you are objecting with meth if you are working with methadone users is that a lot of the methadone people would actually think that I need to cook up the methadone but the methadone you don't have to cook up you actually it's water soluble and the problem is when when the when um methadone is actually heated it solidifies and what we were actually finding it was actually either solidifying in the barrel or actually in people's veins and the I'm not going to be grossed um but the way the spots or the abscesses will grow they would actually grow in rather than out and so it was that you know people would like switch squeeze the spots and the whole thing would just literally just burst open with gangrene and you know I saw a number of people would have had their um there was a couple of that amputations like you know that that would I would have seen as well not seen it so much now um but I think the interesting thing about it is the methadone we were seeing at the time was from China which was which was since the since the days with bromine so that was that was causing the the the rebounds and the that rebound effect now since then so I suppose through investigation we actually see a lot of methadone being synthesized in India and it seems to be purer and it's more of an MDMA effect rather than this this stuff that coming through from China I don't know if that helps you or not but I mean from a from a New Zealand perspective back in the what we might call the wild west it was always made very clear by the Ministry of Health that presenting a legal high for injection was unacceptable and that any product that was presented in that way would be banned immediately um under the new regime it's been sort of equally made informally pretty clear that substances that you inject that are presented for injection or that are used with a syringe or even that are snorted for that matter they won't get past the front door you know that's it's never been I think a huge a huge issue but the view has always been from a New Zealand context that injection in the context of legal highs is just not on the table at all from a regulatory perspective anyway okay so um we are almost at time I want to just close by saying I want to I want to make it really real for you guys um this is a very contemporary issue like this is a very important contemporary issue that I think we're gonna have to come back to a lot during this session I actually received a text message from my fellow organizers that we had somebody um collapse actually here at the conference and they think that it was spice that that person was on and so they've been transported to the hospital at this point and we just hope things are gonna go well for them but I just think it it really brings home the conversation that we are having in this room right now and the need for more conversations like this to happen education to get out there and for us to really focus on how to do the best we possibly can with harm reduction practices and outreach so I want to thank these panelists for their contributions thank you to the audience and that's it oh and don't forget to fill out your evaluations sorry have to throw that in