 the first time I went down to a national drug intelligence aide-lite and TBW, and walked in. I wondered if I should perhaps maybe be taking my toothbrush with me and I wondered if maybe I was going to get out. But my experience of dealing with the NZ police over the last year has actually been very positive, and enforcement have shown a genuine amount of goodwill to work with this act and to work with this industry. Last year when I went to the Federal Police Conference in Australia Senya police officers from the Australian Federal Police were there, and detective Inspector Stuart Mull stood up from New Zealand and tried to explain to his peers in Australia why we were regulating low-risk psychoactives. You can imagine the looks he had. I thought they did a bloody good job, to be honest, and it's a real privilege and pleasure for us to have New Zealand police here today. Please put your hands together for Inspector Rob Dondam. Right, my name's Rob Dondam. I'm an inspector based at Police National Headquarters in the criminal investigations group. I'm not here today to debate drug policy or decriminalisation of cannabis or all the wider issues around drugs, but I've been provided here to talk about our role in terms of the introduction of this act and what's been happening up until this time. So hopefully it will be an informative session, and I look forward to meeting up with other people later on. So why am I here today? Explain the police's role in respect of the act and secondly provide details of how police believe they're fulfilling their responsibility to the community by enforcing key provisions within the act. So the current situation, the act was passed into law in July last year, and it'd be fair to say we're still in the middle of a shakedown period in terms of the act, which you've just heard about. There has been the establishment of a licensing regime, approval of substances by a new authority. This is the introduction of retailing, supply and manufacture of approved substances. There's a code of practice for manufacturing that's been introduced. We've gone through a stage of firstly education and secondly enforcement, and there's an increasing amount of community awareness, high visibility, dialogue and feedback happening. It would be fair to say there has been a lot going on in a very short time. Just to put some context around where we've got to at the moment, some background. Prior to the act, new psychoactive substances were emerging and derivative forms. The issuing of notices to bring them within the existing legal framework at the time for enforcement purposes was becoming quite difficult. Products began flooding the marketplace that were new and in some cases had potential harm. Risk to health, involvement by vulnerable young persons in particular, addiction to support habits was causing widespread community concern. The impact on law enforcement, the good side of this from our point of view is that the situation has become a lot clearer because you've now got an act and you've got some structure around this. You've got regulated manufacturing and supply undertaken now by a fairly small group of people. So again, you've got a higher level of visibility. There's several offences that have been created which is easier now to prosecute than it was under the old legislation that we were working with. Potentially the bad side could be that unapproved substances may transfer to the illicit market out of sight, out of mind. Or the illicit market may try to take up a share in the illegitimate market. While we've seen synthetic cannabinoids being sold by some criminal groups, in general, the transfer does not seem to be significant at this stage. However, if illicit sales do take place, police now have greater powers to prosecute those. So if you don't have a licence, it's illegal unapproved substance sales, then that's illegal. Some police action. Police alerted retailers early, and in fact, even before the release of the act, I recalled just a few weeks beforehand, regarding upcoming changes so that the advent of non-trading from juries and convenience stores, for instance. And that was done for the purpose of getting the retailers' heads around what issues were going to be coming up here and indicating there would be future requirements. So when it was introduced, police and DHB staff made regular visits checking on licences and products. Most people dealing with retailers from that point onwards till today are from dedicated harm reduction units, and they also deal with alcohol. So the benefit of that is that they've actually got previous knowledge of the effects of alcohol abuse and working with a sector and a group and the issues that then bounce back into the community. As the most recent periods concluded, police have made retailers fully aware that they would be asking for a high level of compliance, and that offences detected after this time would be fully investigated and prosecution action taken, or the psychoactive substances licensing authority would be notified in respect to their licence and etc. The current industry picture. As you can see, we've come from an unregulated environment of three to four thousand places where you could obtain substances, which were around convenience stores etc., down to 150 licences, 200 plus unregulated products down to 42 at the moment, and unknown or very little information about who is manufacturing, importing, wholesaling or actually bringing the product to the market. Whereas now there's quite a small number of licence holders. Current enforcement situation. There's an ongoing focus on retail outlets and compliance with the Act. One of the ways that we're tackling the issue with the vulnerability of people under the age of 18 that's been written into the Act is around undertaking controlled purchase operations as we do for alcohol currently. We're finding that quite effective. It's focusing the retailers on the fact that, look, we've got to be checking ID. There's some issues here. And we will take action if we find people selling to people under 18. Prosecutions. There are prosecutions for deliberate non-compliance. Lessons learned on issues that have had a negative impact on customers and the community of being examined and used to inform potential regulation changes. Some of these could include hours of opening, volume of sales, barcoding of products in terms of the manufacturing process. There's quite a number of areas that the regulations will be looking at. And will we liaising with the Ministry of Health around our learning on this and leave that with them. A number of workarounds to avoid compliance by retailers have been discovered, but we've taken action against those. And I'm talking about things like repackaging of products where you may put unapproved old products into new products, under counter sales. We had one instance of a person working in a dairy who was selling out of their own pocket. Not the owner, but somebody else. So you are going to get these workarounds, but we are advised of this quite often, and we take some action against it. We have recently seen an increase in some individuals with abuse or addiction-styled problems, and they have become more obvious, and there's plenty of coverage in the media recently about issues outside retail shops and people who have been found affected. There are a small number of people who wish to profit from on-sales to minors. So in other words, buying a significant amount of product and then finding their own way to go and sell it. And we've been following up on any of those cases that come to our attention because they are potentially serious. Current prosecutions and licence refusals, latest fragrance from about a week ago, I suppose it may have slightly changed by now, but this 52 charges under the Act so far are pretty much across the board. There's been several licences refused or suspended. The refusals and suspensions included applicants who provided false or misleading information or who were deemed to have premises that just weren't suitable under the Act. Six products have been recalled, mainly due to bad reactions, and 13 convictions so far are in court. The current situation is, from the police perspective, there are many... Oh, police have a responsibility to the community where there's disorder of crime or harm. And therefore, when we're notified of incidents that may be occurring close to retailers or in a public space, we will respond, and we have been responding and dealing with whatever is confronting us at that time. Many media articles have highlighted continuing addiction issues and some violence associated with it with temporarily approved products. Local area laws to try to prohibit them from as many areas as possible have begun to emerge. Police will continue to respond to community concerns, maintain the peace and advise on enforcement-related issues as the debate unfolds and the Act starts to bend into place. Police definitely acknowledge community concerns about the availability of products from retail outlets and will continue to respond accordingly. We're also maintaining a close watch on any developing trends affecting the wider drug sector and the influence that the Psychoactive Substances Act is having. The industry. There have been some early teething problems, but there is by now a higher level of awareness around compliance issues and undertaking and undertaking the business that they're in. The introduction of regulations to support the provisions within the Act should hopefully help to make our enforcement practices clearer and be a lot clearer for retail licence holders in particular. The code of manufacturing is now developed and being implemented. And one question that I have for the industry really is, is there a need for further industry standards to address community concerns over sales to vulnerable people? Because this seems to be the major tension that's sitting in communities at the moment that the police are having to respond to continually. Police will continue to expect a higher level of compliance with the provisions of the Act. That is the underlying feature. Next steps, police will maintain their core role of enforcement. That is our core role in terms of this Act coming in and we will assist the Ministry of Health who are the lead agency for the Act in terms of enforcement and work with them. We will listen to and respond to community concerns and we always have and we always will and we're definitely interested in any issues around harm and particularly young people. And we also pledge to work with others to help reduce harm that may be caused. Lastly, how can you or how can anyone help? We want to know about, in particular, unlicensed retailers or prohibited premises, sales to under-18s and sales of illegal products because these are the lead factors that can create the most harm. And we also want to know about ongoing concerns of the community. What are they seeing, hearing? How is this impacting on people? We'd really like to know about that because then we can analyse it and share it with others. So lots of numbers you can call there. Crime stoppers and the psychoactive substances hotline. And that's it from me.