I read an interesting article about an Auckland legal academic who is promoting the legalisation of cannabis using a flawed rationale.

She estimated there are 300,000 regular users in New Zealand and then traced the eventual imprisonment of mainly young men who had been expelled from schools for cannabis related offences, which then put them on the path to crime. She advocates that legalisation will stop this pathway to prison.

That is not a solution. It will only cause more trouble for schools and the families of offenders. A major problem in our society today is a lack of self-discipline. Surely the answer to this particular criminal pathway is to have a much more stringent system of enforcing those expelled from school to attend rehabilitation programmes, even to the extent that there is some type of imprisonment without a criminal record.

The correspondent alleges that most of us are largely unaffected by the impact of the current laws. That is nonsense, particularly if there really are 300,000 New Zealanders regularly frying their brains.

My view is that the legalising of cannabis will be a disaster for New Zealand as it is proving in several so-called ‘enlightened' other countries.

B Capamagian, The Avenues (abridged).