Is your opinion, then, that all users of Ambien are stupid and exercise bad judgement? They all are at risk for these side effects. I may be wrong, but cars that can operate at night tend to be fairly common, and most people don’t have time locks on their bedroom doors.
AFAICT, Mr Kennedy is not at any greater risk to have an episode like this one than anybody else who uses Ambien. Therefore, I would not expect him to take more precautions than anybody else using this very popular drug.
If the drug is so dangerous that people need to take extraordinary precautions to keep the populace safe, then it should not be on the market. I can’t fault Kennedy for that, it is the FDA’s job. I feel weird saying that taking an FDA approved medicine is, in an of itself, an irresponsible act.
Voluntary intoxication is generally not a defense. That is… if you get drunk, you cannot then use your drunkeness to say, “Hey, I was so drunk, I didn’t know what I was doing, so I couldn’t form the requisite intent to commit a crime!”
As you might imagine, though, it’s not voluntary intoxication if someone slips you a drug in your Shirley Temple.
The question is whether you knew, or should have known, that what happened could result from what you took. In this case, it’s quite a stretch to say that Rep. Kennedy should have known that taking a legal sleep aid could result in this sort of result. NOW, of course, he knows; if he drives into some concrete barriers next month and points at the Ambien, it’s not reasonable. But to expect him to know about this somewhat rare potential side-effect ahead of time is not reasonable. And legally speaking, if it’s not reasonable for him to have known, then his actions cannot be criminal.
You could be right, but there just isn’t any way of knowing. Ambien is a legal sleep aid, prescribed (I assume) by Kennedy’s doctor. Now, if he slipped himself an ambien after he got behind the wheel, that might be another matter. I just don’t see how you can fault the guy for taking it at home, though.
So, are you saying that he can be criminally charged if he takes ambien again and ends up in a similar situation? That’s basically saying that he can’t ever take ambien again.
Right. If, for example, evidence should come to light that last month, he had a blackout-driving episode on Ambien and it was hushed up, then the whole picture changes. And, as I suggested above, if he NOW has an episode of some kind, he can’t raise the Ambien issue as a defense.
But so far as I’m aware, this is the first and only instance of the medication causing him problems.
If we accept that Patrick has no memory of anything that happened after he got home and took his Ambien, how do we account for the glaring discrepancy between his statement that he drove home after the votes on Capitol Hill and his presence in the Hawk & Dove that evening?
Either he drove home, took an Ambien, went to bed, and then by purest coincidence became one of the not-exactly-commonplace-but-still-not-all-that-common people who suffered from the publicized effects of Ambien. So he involuntarily got up and drove to the Capitol (nearly crashing his car) under the impression that there was a vote scheduled at 2:30 in the morning. He has absolutely no memory of the evening, except that he wasn’t drinking and went straight home, and that the hostess who saw him drink and the cop who arrested him are both mistaken that he had been drinking,
or
A cocaine addict/alcoholic/pain pill addict suffering from bipolar disease and whose family of origin has a long history of chemical addiction and dependency and who has a history of bizarre behavior had a relapse and blackout.
Hmmm…
Incidentally, is there any hard evidence that he did take an Ambien that night?
If you are merely going to make things up, it might save server resources if you didn’t bother quoting me. Especially if the words are too hard for you, containing as they do more than two syllables.
It is entirely clear (as if there were any doubt) that you are too stupid to understand normal conversation, or indeed any concept beyond potty training.
If that.
Fortunately, it serves to demonstrate the depths to which mouth-breathers such as yourself must descend to insulate themselves from inconvenient facts.
Well, there you have it. Shodan’s insults are bigger and angrier, he must be right!
BTW, count me amongst the persons who is unable to find support for the notion of the Kennedy family buying influence in the linked article. A little help would be appreciated.
Of which you have provided precisely none. You made a claim, I called you on it, and you provided a bogus cite which did not support the claim you made. Everyone is waiting for you to put up or shut up. Being incapable of doing the former, the interests of this board would be far better served if you did the latter.
Since it didn’t go to trial, it is certainly not clear that he assaulted anybody.
Uh, because he was not charged with a crime. He was sued in civil court, which more often than not ends in a settlement between the parties. NOthing untoward here at all.
Now, if Shodan can prove that he was not charged because the authorities were paid off by the Kennedys, as he alleged, then we would be getting somewhere. I won’t hold my breath.
My point is that you can’t lie about an opinion, by its very nature. If I say that I think OJ did it I’m giving my opinion on the information, I don’t think that if someone asked me for a cite I would have to substantiate it because it’s my opinion.
Anyway, the bottom line is that what went down appears to be shady, which is not unheard of with the Kennedys (my opinion).