The emergency doctor who called for MDMA to be legalised says New Zealand's tolerance for alcohol, and its social fallout, is stifling informed discussion around safer recreational drugs.

Last week Wellington Hospital emergency department specialist and clinical toxicologist Paul Quigley said there was mounting evidence that MDMA was one of the safest intoxicants around, especially when compared with alcohol.

"There's a degree of hypocrisy where we're accepting of alcohol and the harms it causes, but the same people that literally won't take the steps to reduce alcohol harm – like raising prices and the drinking age – are the same people who treat the idea of introducing something like MDMA as the worst thing in the world," Quigley said.

MDMA is the active chemical in the party drug ecstasy. Quigley's controversial call for it to be legalised sparked widespread discussion, which he said had created "a very positive feeling" around both the concept of testing it under the Psychoactive Substances Act (PSA), and for the idea of eventually legalising it.

Associate Health Minister Peter Dunne said he had an "academic discussion" this week with Quigley, talking "in principle" about the possibility "a range of drugs" on the lower end of the classification schedule being declassified under the Misuse of Drugs Act and being shifted to the PSA.

"But that's a long way in the future, and I'm not going to speculate about which drugs those might be," Dunne said.

Prime Minister John Key said last week he thought it unlikely his Government would legalise MDMA. "Anything I've seen in relation to this drug has been deeply negative, so I can't see why it would be."

Quigley said the issue of drug regulation was seen as a "poisoned chalice" for politicians, and he was not sure Key "had done his research" on MDMA, which has been used as a therapeutic tool in treating post-traumatic stress disorder. It was outlawed in the United States in 1985 and New Zealand in 1987.

"Alcohol has been with us for so long that the idea of change or something new is frightening to politicians," Quigley said.