Letters to the editor: Houses should not be commodities

Houses are not commodities, says a reader. Photo / File

Re Saturday's front page on rents and house prices taking their toll, when will they ever learn?

If you have a commodity on the stock market that is open to speculators then people will vie with each other to buy and sell. This will increase the value of any commodity being traded - ergo the item in question will increase in price.

This is not rocket science, it is big business and it is the sole reason why houses are impossible to rent and getting very hard to buy in Rotorua, if not the whole country.

We have to stop using houses as commodities if we are going to control the cost of housing people in Rotorua.

There must be a change in the law to stop speculators in regard to housing.

Jim Adams
Rotorua

On cannabis

I get tired of reading about these people who want to legalise cannabis.

There are well-proven facts that taking cannabis interferes with the normal growth and development of reproductive organs even to the age of 30; has a very adverse effect on normal personality, damaging brain areas used for rational decision making and impulse control; and, more seriously, causes a predilection to move on to harder drugs.

I have worked at the adolescent units at Wakari Hospital, Dunedin, and at Auckland Hospital and all my younger patients started out on cannabis before becoming addicted to harder drugs, leading to an extensive and costly cure.

These were the lucky ones. Many youngsters died without receiving treatment.

There are many modern and effective non-addictive painkillers available now without being drugged on cannabis or its derivatives.

Keep cannabis illegal.

I Clayton-Bray, clinical psychologist
Tauranga

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