All cocaine use, regardless of class – in fact all illicit drug use, regardless of class – causes misery through the supply chain (Middle-class cocaine use fuels misery, says Met chief, 1 August). Worse, it lines the pockets of some of the nastiest people on the planet. The answer, of course, is to treat adults as adults and legalise, regulate and control the supply. That way everyone, the middle classes included, can enjoy their recreational drug of choice, and might even be able to choose fair trade cocaine if they so wish.
Edward Collier
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire
• Regarding your feature “Why it takes Beyoncé to get a black photographer on the cover of US Vogue” (Shortcuts, G2, 1 August), I don’t want to suggest that photography as a profession is in any way liberal or enlightened, but for the record it should be noted that Gordon Parks worked for Vogue back in the 1960s.
Neil Burgess
Director, NB Pictures
• Manchester University students are quite right to have a preference as to whose writings appear on their union wall (Letters, 23 July). But would Maya Angelou herself have approved of their tactics? For she wrote, of a difficult time in her life, “I could, and often did to my baby and myself, recite … Kipling’s ‘If’” (in Gather Together in my Name). She also wrote, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, that she “enjoyed and respected Kipling”.
Mike Kipling
Chairman, The Kipling Society
• Your further reading list (The New Silk Road, Briefing, 30 July) omitted The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan, a superb and vivid geographical and historical introduction to countries along the route.
Liz Byrne
Letchworth, Hertfordshire
• Fascinating to read about the whale-dolphin hybrid (Report, 1 August). I wonder if they mated by accident, or if it was on porpoise?
Richard Barnard
Wivenhoe, Essex
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