Access to hospital
The high cost of parking at Auckland Hospital (NZ Herald, June 17) is not the only issue.
Access to the hospital itself is woefully inadequate, frequently requiring long waits in single-lane queues on main roads for not only a carpark, but also to drop off a patient for
an appointment or bringing someone to the emergency department.
The rabbit warren of steep, narrow, one-way lanes lead back out into the already jammed main roads and there is no safe and easy drop-off zone.
The tree-lined Park Rd has wide footpaths and a bus lane (on one side only) which would be good attributes if it were not for the fact that it also contains the main entrance to the hospital. There is a single lane for all traffic coming up Grafton Rd and along Park Rd, regardless of whether drivers are dropping off someone, or trying the access Carpark A - and when the carpark is full, long queues form with nowhere to go.
This is not only frustrating for many but could have dangerous consequences for those in need of urgent medical assistance.
A review of all access roads to Auckland Hospital is much needed.
Julie Cadzow, Titirangi.
Drug sense
Thank you Professor Michael Baker (NZ Herald, June 18) for your sensible article on the need to reform drug laws. Some of us have been advocating this for 25 years.
Current laws have enriched criminals, caused increasingly violent turf wars, and incarcerated thousands of users, whilst achieving zero reduction in illicit drug use.
We surely have to change our approach.
Chris Elias, Mission Bay.
Addled thinking
Our drug laws are indeed out of date, as Professor Michael Baker points out (NZ Herald, June 18). They are also inconsistent. Alcohol, if it were illegal, would be a class B drug, in the same category as morphine, ecstasy and hashish.
Alcohol can turn mild men into monsters who beat their wives and children. It is reckoned to be a factor in at least 300 offences every day.
The World Health Organisation classifies it as a Group 1 carcinogen linked to the three most common cancers – breast, prostate and bowel.
You can buy it anywhere at almost any time of day, so long as you can convince the vendor you are over 18.
Banning it is not the answer but taking heed of the evidence, as Prof Baker suggests, would lead us to limit its availability and ban advertising – as we have already done with tobacco.
Pat Baskett, Ōkura.
Failed war
How refreshing to have Professor Michael Baker (NZ Herald, June 18) urging a rethink of the failed war on drugs. Back in 2001, the conservative newspaper The Economist produced a 16-page survey of illegal drugs which concluded that the "case for legalisation is difficult, but the case against it is worse".
In 2012, Professor David Nutt, Chair of the British government's advisory panel on the misuse of drugs concluded that the war on drugs had increased harm for pretty much everyone and he was famously censured for comparing the harms of ecstasy with those of horse riding. Nutt created a table of drug-related mortality, rating LSD and mushrooms (legally very high-risk) as least harmful, while tobacco and alcohol (legal) scored among the most harmful.
Whether it be alcohol, prostitution, drugs or abortion, criminalisation will always drive the practice underground into the hands of criminals. Just look at the huge waste in our own local police resources that result from the ever futile "drug busts" which make little difference to availability on the streets.
How much better to treat drug possession and use as a health issue so we can monitor it, control it and maybe even tax it.
Graeme Robb, Te Atatū.
