Letters to the editor: Swapping one bad habit for another

Cannabis is a subject up for debate leading into this year's election and referendum. Photo / File

After 300 years of smoking, authorities have raised the price of tobacco so that smoking is almost a prohibitive luxury.

Never mind, because now authorities are probably going to make an illegal substance legal.

This seems to be swapping one bad habit for an even worse one.

It is an offence to smoke while driving your car with young passengers.

How about driving your car while stoned?

It seems an anomaly that authorities are regulating against tobacco smoking while potentially legalising smoking marijuana, which can have even more dire effects, especially for those under 25 whose brains are still forming.

This appears to be a backward step and once started, especially allowing people to grow their own plants, may well be just as impossible to stop as tobacco smoking obviously has been.

D Warner
Papamoa

Shame should reign

I support the condemnation of the shipment of thousands of cattle on long ocean voyages (however well monitored) to countries such as China with non-existent animal welfare laws.

The Ministry for Primary Industries and the Government should, in my view, be ashamed that it still allows this practice, as well as the caging of hens and the keeping of farrowing pigs in small crates, all for the mighty dollar.

We like to be proud of New Zealand, but this is not justified whilst such practices continue.

Joy Maskell
Rotorua

Climate change a hot topic

Once upon a time, people lit fires for shifting agriculture and to forestall the build-up of fuel in lands that became Australia and the American West. Then farmers came from damper climates and stopped the burn-offs. Now climate change is lighting infernos in the unburnt fuels.

What is in store for Aotearoa?

Mark Collet
Rotorua