Patrick Kennedy spouts nonsense on Amendment 64 (Legal Cannabis in Colorado) [View all]

[RainDog]

Earlier this week I posted about Kennedy's alignment with David Frum (former Bush staffer) and their attempts to FORCE people who are found in possession of ANY amount of marijuana to go into a treatment program. SAM is the group he's shilling for.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022155872

Then Patrick went to Colorado to tell people there they didn't know what they were doing when they made their historic votes to legalize cannabis in November, 2011.

http://blogs.denverpost.com/opinion/2013/01/11/patrick-kennedy-spouts-nonsense-amendment-64/32000/

op in the Denver Post -

In Denver on Thursday, the former Rhode Island congressman and son of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, made an absurd claim. According to The Denver Post, he said marijuana legalization “slipped under the radar” both in Colorado and Washington and that organizations bent on countering the idea didn’t have time to mobilize. As a result, voters “didn’t know what their stake was in the debate.”

Kennedy is free to claim that Colorado voters didn’t understand the issues as well as they should, because that’s a matter of opinion. But “slipped under the radar”? Amendment 64 got huge amounts of publicity precisely because its favorable polling prompted the media to take it seriously.

...as Mason Tvert of the Marijuana Policy Project reminded me today, parts of Colorado have “been having a pretty significant discussion about marijuana policy” even longer, at least since “Denver became the first city in the world to approve a measure removing all penalties for marijuana possession” in 2005. Tvert estimates “there have literally been upwards of 1,000 print and TV news stories in the state [on policy affecting marijuana] in just the past few years.”

This was not an isolated claim by Kennedy, either. He earlier told the Boston Globe much the same thing in explaining why he was now committed to opposing pot legalization. “I can’t stand by and let this move forward without any kind of debate or questioning,” he said. “This thing could pass right underneath the radar and we will wake up one day and say what were we thinking?”

http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_22350842/former-congressman-patrick-kennedy-launches-sam-project-meets

Before former Rhode Island congressman Patrick Kennedy Jr. could introduce his new national initiative to educate the public and policymakers about the health risks of pot use, he was asked to step down as head of Smart Approaches to Marijuana.

"If Patrick Kennedy and his new organization want people to be educated about marijuana, he should start with himself," said Mason Tvert, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project and a leader in the successful campaign to legalize recreational pot use in Colorado . "The evidence is clear — marijuana is far less addictive and less harmful to the body than alcohol."

Tvert said that anyone attempting to be a public educator about the health risks associated with marijuana must openly and honestly address how much more dangerous legal controlled substances like alcohol and tobacco are to public safety.

"Like everyone else who woke up after Election Day and saw that (marijuana legalization) was moving fast in states like Colorado, I realized it looked as though the domino effect could move to other states quicker," Kennedy said. "I want to slow this train down and begin a discussion before other states rush to judgment."

So, Kennedy wants to pretend his actions are warranted because others are too stupid to know what they were doing. What a conservative pov - to think you know better and must force your view on others who disagree.

Again, I cannot state how ironic it is to have a kid whose inherited wealth rests upon smuggling alcohol attempt to prevent others from choosing another source of intoxication. Maybe his vision has been distorted. Maybe it's a problem with the northeastern US and their long association with alcohol via rum running, immigrants and urban life. Who knows. All I know is that this stance and action by Kennedy is a joke to anyone who has followed this issue for any length of time.