For the avoidance of doubt, I think that something should be done in this area and I am concerned that the Government’s proposals may not work.
I understood what the Minister read to us, in terms of the guidance on how you would test. It seems to me that the case rests on this: you have a substance that you think is psychoactive and you need to test it, because you need to establish whether it raises or depresses someone’s mental state. Does this mean that it has to be tested on a human being? If so, what are the arrangements for doing it? What are the safety provisions, given that some of these substances are extremely dangerous? Is there, therefore, a process that we can use when we think something is a psychoactive substance but the only way to find out is by finding a human being and testing it on them?
If that is not the case and the intention is to look at whether a substance is chemically similar to something else, you are back in the same routine of demonstrating that this is a small variant on something seen before. That is what I am trying to establish—the practicalities. Here is something. We have found it. We think it is psychoactive. Can we do something about it? Most Members of this House—there are a number of exceptions —think that something should be done. How do we know that something is psychoactive?