Patrick Kennedy: Biggest threat to mental health is marijuana. fuck off, patty. [View all]

[cali]

He's such an unmitigated asshole. This little fuckwad cruised through years in the House fucked up on everything he could lay his hands on, but now he's been saved.



Treatment or Jail: Patrick Kennedy Wages Fierce Anti-Pot

As a hard-partying teenager, Patrick Kennedy met President Reagan at a fundraiser for the JFK Library, a meeting captured in a photograph that the former Rhode Island congressman now hangs in his home office. He used to think of it as a funny episode, a collision of Camelot’s cocaine kid and America’s foremost opponent of illegal drug use. But Kennedy took his last hit of anything in 2009, and he’s since honed an anti-drug message that sounds a bit like Reagan with a Boston brogue.

Kennedy believes there is "an epidemic in this country of epic dimensions when it comes to alcohol and drugs.” He'd like to treat it all, but he’s convinced that the single biggest threat to America’s mental health is free-market marijuana. So even as Democrats favor the legalization of pot—by a 34-point margin, according to the latest WSJ/NBC News poll—the scion of America’s most famous Democratic family has broken ranks, criticized the White House, and aligned with the likes of Newt Gingrich to warn voters against trying to tax and regulate today’s psychoactive chlorophyll.

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“The science tells the story,” he says, breaking into an attack on the idea that marijuana is safer than alcohol. He ticks through studies showing that smoked marijuana is “associated with” or “linked to” IQ loss, psychosis, and self-reported dissatisfaction with life. “It takes you to the same place as cocaine or heroin,” he often adds. “It just takes longer.”

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But instead of handcuffs, Kennedy and Sabet propose a mandatory screening for marijuana addiction, according to the “Legal Reform” section of their website. That could lead to “marijuana education,” and ultimately a year in a “probation program to prevent further drug use.” And if the pot smoker still insists on getting high? It’s handcuffs time.

“Incarceration is a powerful motivator,” says Kennedy, who after a prescription drug-related car crash in 2006 spent a year urinating in front of a probation officer three times a week. He faced a jail term if he relapsed. “That does it for a lot of people,” he added. “That’s the turning point: hearing that judge say treatment or jail.”


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http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/legal-pot/treatment-or-jail-patrick-kennedy-wages-fierce-anti-pot-crusade-n22256