However, I personally am appalled by her choice. Is she comfortable in enabling these dreadful diseases to affect the weak and those too young to be immunised?

  In the future, hopefully there will be a vaccination against HIV, cancer or dementia. Will she be so willing to deny her children protection against these?

Audrey Doyle, Woonona

Every day, as I drive to work along Keira Street, I often get caught at the traffic lights at the intersection with Crown Street.

 The same group of dodgys congregate there getting their cheap coffee. They are often smoking.  This morning they were all smoking around a young child in their midst.

 I blame the council who have designated a no-smoking area but have little in the way of signage promoting the fact. They need to put up bigger no- smoking signs in more suitable places and follow up by having the rangers police the area.

These people are like children, they need picture signs and training to comply with social norms.

Andrew Reveley, Keiraville

The spaghetti-like intersections associated with Memorial Drive at Bulli is already a traffic infrastructure nightmare; so consider the chaos to come when the Bulli Woolworths Mall begins operation! 

It will be interesting to see which of the planning bureaucrats who signed off on this impending traffic shemozzle will admit to their ill-considered decision as Memorial Drive morphs into a constant traffic jam.

  In the light of a transport infrastructure disaster soon to come, member for Keira Ryan Park’s push for the extension of Memorial Drive to Bulli Pass (Mercury, April 17) has great merit. Unfortunately as committed and energetic as Ryan Park quite clearly is, history is against him in terms of Memorial Drive extensions.

 For decades, extensions to the then Northern Distributor were continually offered up as election sweeteners by cynical politicians of both persuasions. 

Barry Swan, Balgownie

John Pronk alleges that stoned drivers have ‘‘no fear of anything’’. A 2002 review of seven separate studies found that ‘‘crash culpability studies have failed to demonstrate that drivers with cannabinoids in their blood are significantly more likely than drug-free drivers to be culpable in road crashes’’. 

The researchers put this down to the fact that cannabis users are very aware of their impairment and compensate by going slower and drive with greater anticipation of events. This is unlike people under the influence of alcohol who usually  drive more recklessly.

  I would not condone the use of cannabis at work or before using machinery, but  being ‘‘bleary eyed’’  is more likely after a night on the turps as the effects of alcohol last much longer than those of cannabis.

It is now largely accepted that the war on drugs has failed and that it might be time to look at harm minimisation. Unfortunately, the horse has bolted and there’s no putting it back in the stall.

William Bielefeldt, Kembla Grange