USA: Marijuana Policy Project Slams ‘Booze Fortune Heir’ P. Kennedy

by Ted Nesi | 1.8.2013

Patrick Kennedy made news this week by announcing he’s forming a group to lobby against the legalization of marijuana, a stance that’s gotten him in the cross-hairs of the nation’s largest pro-pot group.

“Former Congressman Kennedy’s proposal is the definition of hypocrisy,” Mason Tvert, the Marijuana Policy Project’s communications director, said in a statement issued Tuesday afternoon. “He is living in part off of the fortune his family made by selling alcohol while leading a campaign that makes it seem like weed - an objectively less harmful product – is the greatest threat to public health.”

The group’s Twitter feed was more acerbic, describing Kennedy as a “booze fortune heir.” His grandfather, family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy, made a fortune in part by thanks to alcohol distribution rights (though apparently he wasn’t a bootlegger).

The new national organization Kennedy is chairing, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, is scheduled to release its proposals on Wednesday in Denver. “Let’s not just throw out the baby with the bathwater,” he told Reuters last weekend. Kennedy has been making a number of media appearances promoting the group, which also counts former Bush speechwriter and Republican apostate David Frum among its board members.

The Marijuana Policy Project has also created a Change.org petition calling on Kennedy to “to drop out of SAM or explain why he is working to keep a less harmful alternative to alcohol illegal.”

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