Treatment or Jail: Patrick Kennedy Wages Fierce Anti-Pot Crusade

NBCnews ^

[gooblah]

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.

[Orangedog]

That you dispute something does not change the empirical evidence, you are speaking from OPINION.

You made a gratuitous assertion. The rules of logic dictate that any gratuitous assertion can be equally gratuitously denied.

Obviously your opinion has more validity than research by Psychiatrists

More than psychiatrists? You're setting the bar kind of low by trotting out a profession where vital information in making a diagnosis involves deep study of how the patient learned to poop what they can subconsciously compare to a penis. But I would really like to know what respected phrenologists have to saw on the whole "gateway drug" matter.

[NonValueAdded]

Wow ... Patches ... if it is heartfelt, then it is something to consider