Absurdity of Patrick‘s latest anti-cannabis outburst almost matches cousin Robert’s vaccine stance
Every family has its assholes and its disagreements, but the Kennedy clan has a lot of both, and it has them in public.
Before you cry for the American royals, I’m not talking about unwanted attention. I’m referring to actions that involve fundraising, press releases, and campaigns for public office.
The latest spat comes on the heels of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—the nutjob antivax Kennedy who is married to actress Cheryl Hines from Curb Your Enthusiasm, for those keeping tabs—announcing his run for president in Boston last week.
The following day, Patrick Kennedy responded to the relative longshot election news from a conference stage in Washington DC, where he was addressing a group called Smart Approaches to Marijuana that he co-founded to oppose cannabis legalization. A reformed party tank who has spent the last decade-plus making strangers suffer for his sins while lining his own pockets with prohibitionist payola, Patrick strained himself to link his own cause with his cousin’s crusade while casually dismissing the latter.
“There is no greater cause for intellectual-developmental disabilities than both fetal alcohol syndrome and exposure in the womb to drugs in this country—far exceeding all the debunked claims that are out there about vaccines,” MSN.com reported Patrick saying. “I only wish we spent half the time arguing about the corruption in government and corporate America that is represented by the power of the marijuana industry as we do the power of the vaccine industry.”
Huh? And it got worse. Way worse …
“My father was the leading opponent of the tobacco industry, with people like Henry Waxman,” said the former Rhode Island congressman. “Democrats used to be on the side of public health in taking on the corporate greed of Big Tobacco. I want to say today, unfortunately, it’s become an article of faith of the Democrats to be for commercialization of marijuana, and that saddens me.”
Meanwhile, Kennedy, who famously ran his car into a barricade on Capitol Hill in 2006 while reportedly dizzy on two scripts, has much less to say about pharmaceuticals than he does about natural plants. While he works to “deter the special interests driving Big Marijuana,” his antidrug initiatives—SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana) and Advocates for Opioid Recovery—have worked on behalf of Big Pharma. As reporter David Armstrong revealed for STAT: “A company that sells a new opioid-addiction medication is a secret funder of an advocacy group fronted by Newt Gingrich and Patrick Kennedy that is pushing for more government funding and insurance coverage of such treatments.”
Like I’ve said before, all of this amounts to Patrick Kennedy either being a complete fraud who understands that he’s a shill for questionable companies and a front group led by docs who lie about the harm of cannabis, or just a total dummy who doesn’t pay any attention to which special interests are actually funding his pet projects.
Without the Kennedy name, Patrick’s just another two-bit prohibitionist punk claiming that weed is addictive and pushing junk science.
Sort of like his cousin Robert.
