Just a few months before Donald Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to oversee U.S. health policy, the former presidential candidate was painting a shocking picture of heroin’s effectiveness as a study aid.
“I was at the bottom of my class,” he said during a podcast appearance on the Shawn Ryan Show. “I started doing heroin, and I went to the top of my class. Suddenly I could sit still, and I could read and I could concentrate. I could listen to what people were saying.”
The interview aired in July, during Kennedy’s unsuccessful run for president, but has resurfaced on social media now that the president-elected has nominated him to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
The former environmental lawyer is perhaps best known for peddling vaccine conspiracies theories and trying to limit access to one of civilization’s greatest medical achievements. But he’s also been open about his struggles with addiction.
During the July interview, Kennedy explained how he first tried LSD when he was 15, the summer his father Robert F. Kennedy Sr. was assassinated. After LSD, he quickly moved on to heroin and cocaine, which were his “drugs of choice” until he finally managed to get sober 14 years later.
The drugs “hollowed out” his life and destroyed his relationships, but they made him a star student, he said.
“My mind was so restless and turbulent I could not sit still,” he said.
All he wanted to do was go outside and play in the woods.
“I would probably today be diagnosed as ADHD. I was bouncing off the walls,” he added. “So, you know, I was probably at some level medicating myself.”
His struggle to pay attention hasn’t made him a proponent of ADHD medications such as Adderall, though. Trump’s pick to “make America healthy again” has floated the idea of “wellness farms”—which sound a lot like labor camps—to get people off of ADHD medication, anxiety medication and antidepressants.
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During his podcast appearance, he even went so far as to blame the pharmaceuticals industry—not the gun lobby—for the proliferation of mass shootings in America.
Gun ownership rates have remained relatively stable since the 1970s, Kennedy argued, while more than 100 million Americans now take medication. (The number of guns in circulation, however, has skyrocketed since the 1990s, and the weapons themselves have become much more deadly.)
“I have a scientific mind, and I look at this and say, ‘It can’t just be the guns,’” he said, before complaining that the National Institutes of Health won’t investigate whether medication turns people into mass murderers.
Anytime there’s a mass murder, Kennedy doesn’t ask himself whether the shooter used an assault-style weapon—even though mass shootings really took off after the federal assault rifle ban expired in 2004. His first question is whether the shooter was on an SSRI or benzos.
But at least one of the maybe-future health czar’s policy positions seemed to be based on actual medical facts instead of “just asking questions” conjecture.
When Ryan reluctantly asked Kennedy to comment on the rumors that he supported late-term abortions, Kennedy explained that his thinking on the issue had changed after learning that most late-term abortions are medical emergencies.
“No woman wants to get pregnant, carry a baby for nine months, and then the day before have an abortion. Who would do that?” he pointed out.
In virtually all late-term abortions, the mother’s life or health is in danger, and in that case, he doesn’t want the government making the decision for her, he said.
If confirmed, he’ll have to make that case in the Cabinet Room, where he’s likely to be sitting across the table from the architects of the famously anti-abortion Project 2025 policy agenda. The West Wing could be about to get very interesting.
