Yeah that Campbell Live was probably a bad decision on an icky Tuesday considering what a great weekend it was at UPFM's birthday party and the legendary Split Enz.

John spilt his water all over the table with less than 30 seconds to mop it up with his tie before going to air and things went from bad to worse after that. The plonker saying "LONG TERM EFFECTS ARE ANYBODY'S GUESS" is hopefully looking for employment elsewhere this week...

There is probably some synephrine in the floradrene blend, be interested to see what people say after trying it actually. As others have noted, if you have any medical conditions or are on any medicines, don't take the products.

Does anybody remember GENESIS DISKOTONIK in 1998? Used Sida Cordifolia as a natural source of ephedrine and TURBINA CORYMBOSA for natural lysergic acid with MAYTENUS extract which was similar to Qat (cathis edulis) from which we get cathinone and methcathinone.

Those were some nice pills, way cooler than the CAFFEINE/EPHEDRINE/ ASPIRIN stacker bombs ... but we got shut down by Medsafe in about 6 months with GENESIS and vowed that next time we'd put up more of a fight.

Yeah.

I don't believe that either, but as long as politicians refuse to abolish The Lords Prayer from Parliament you'll never get any joy with a progressive drug policy.

NZ's drug policy already leads and brings me great joy in the respect that:

(1) we already have a restricted substances category for recreational drugs not harmful enough to be made illegal; and
(2) the future direction was clearly signalled by statements made through the Minister that the onus is on sponsors of new products to show safety before their products come on to market;

and this has apparently happened with "The Lord's Prayer."

Hi

The technology is definitely here to improve on BZP as far as drug effects go. We have plenty more, but I don't want to put them out without some control over them this time around.

Improving on the "26m pills consumed on 9.5m occasions by 400,000 kiwis over 7 years" safety record is a different story.

In the past we used to just prohibit substances on some moral basis, blindly following the USA war on drugs philosophy, today we don't buy into USA wars, we look for evidence.

BZP has been a matter of fighting the old politicians on every point to make them do it by the book, and they have cheated. They accepted biased and poor quality research to hype up the harms of BZP and suppressed information they didn't like.

The Expert Advisory Committee on Drugs were uncomfortable with the pressure on them and were divided 5/4 on whether the evidence provided to them was solid enough for a ban. Anderton knew it wouldn't stand up in court so abandoned his process and introduced new legislation to ban it instead.

We got 7 years out of it though and it's challenged the system so much that the entire Misuse of Drugs Act is getting reviewed to place the onus on industry to provide demonstrably safer alternatives to drugs.

At the end of the day the drug problem is a technology problem, some drugs are dangerous, the solution is safer drugs, and that is not something a politician can deliver.

NZ will lead the world in progressive drug policy.

Thought it was something I ate, but the whole house was moving, and I've been on best behaviour for so long, wife decided it was an earthquake.

Let's be really clear about what happened here.

The police seize street ecstasy pills and ESR test them.

The police put out a statement saying:

Recent tests have revealed that pills submitted for analysis as suspected MDMA (commonly referred to as "ecstasy") have been found to contain other illicit drugs and in other cases "party pills", which commonly contain legal benzylpiperazine ( BZP) have been found to also contain illicit drugs.

ESR then clarified that they were not talking about pills bought at shops meaning that the police must have deliberately fudged their wording to create the impression that pary pills contain illegal ingredients.

What annoys me is that the story should have been that:

Around two thirds of ecstasy pills out there contain other dangerous drugs.

I found out from Keith Bedford that rather than MDMA, BZP and P, they are saying that most pills sold as ecstasy (two thirds) contain a cocktail of other chemicals. I can't say exactly what but for example a restricted medicine (not K) plus a phenethylamine plus a new research chemical. Some of the research chemicals are analogues of psychedelics and some are analogues of piperazines.

The interreactions of these chemicals with each other is completely unpredictable. In the past NZ ecstasy has largely been moderate dose MDMA.

What we should have got was a warning of a "Bad E" trend, like the bad acid warning in the woodstock movie, but we got this interference when it filtered through the police spin machine and ended up with a party pill beat up.

Of course if I make this point I set myself up for accusations of vested commercial interest.

Suffice to say that this lack of quality control is a sad side effect of prohibition, the only cure for which is tight regulation and standards around manufacture as proposed here: www.stanz.org.nz

Ah well, don't forget to contact the Ministry of Health and identify yourself as an interested party and ask to be consulted if you are affected by changes in this legislation.

Hi everybody,

Rome wasn't built in a day, we started a new initiative in an unregulated environment and for the most part it worked very well, but while we hoped to see regulation come quickly, alas, that's not what happened. I'm happy with the progress so far though -= We wanted safer drug alternatives to P and G in our clubs and we got them.

We couldn't limit them to our clubs - bummer.

We tried to hold the beast of mammon in chains with self regulation but in a society where company directors are bound by law to maximise return for shareholders wth no regard to social impact and humans being somewhat subject to personal greed, we end up with a myriad of various personal philosophies on what constitutes social responsibility.

The result is that industry self regulation cannot work without some degree of back up from government. We got as far as a statute with empowering clauses which is much further than most other countries, but we didn't get flul regulations in place. Yet.

The next steps are that the regulators need to finish the job and put regulations in place. If this had happened earlier we would have had the opportunity to see whether a robust risk management system around BZP would work or not.

We're getting there.