Just a few months before Donald Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to oversee US health policy, the presidential candidate was painting a shocking picture of heroin's effectiveness as a learning 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 came out on top of my class. Suddenly I could sit still, and I could read and concentrate. I could listen to what people were saying.”
This interview was broadcast in July, when Kennedy did not win the presidency, but it has reappeared on social media since the president-elect was appointed to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
The former environmentalist is perhaps best known for peddling the vaccine conspiracy and trying to limit access to one of civilization's greatest health achievements. But he also opened up about his addiction problem.
During a 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 was sober 14 years later.
Drugs “imprisoned” his life and destroyed his relationships, but made him a star student, he said.
“My mind was restless and so frustrated I couldn't sit still,” he said.
All he wanted to do was go outside and play in the forest.
“Maybe today I will be diagnosed with ADHD. I was bouncing off the walls,” he added. “So, you know, maybe I was on another level medicating myself.”
His struggle to pay attention hasn't made him a proponent of ADHD medications like Adderall, though. Trump's choice to “make America healthy again” has floated the idea of ”health farms”—which sound like concentration camps—to get people off ADHD drugs, anxiety medications and antidepressants.
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During a podcast appearance, he even blamed the pharmaceutical industry—not the gun lobby—for the rise in mass shootings in America.
Gun ownership rates have remained stable since the 1970s, Kennedy argued, while more than 100 million Americans are now on prescription drugs. (However, the number of guns in circulation has increased dramatically since the 1990s, and the weapons themselves have become more dangerous.)
“I'm scientifically minded, and I look at this and say, 'It can't just be guns,'” he said, before complaining that the National Institutes of Health won't investigate whether drugs turn people into mass murderers.
Whenever there's a mass shooting, Kennedy doesn't question whether the shooter used an assault-style weapon—even though the shootings began after the federal gun ban expired in 2004. His first question is whether the shooter was using an SSRI. or benzos.
But at least one of the governor's possible health policy positions in the future seemed to be based on actual medical facts instead of just “asking questions.”
When Ryan reluctantly asked Kennedy to comment on rumors that he supported late-term abortions, Kennedy explained that his thinking on the matter had changed after learning that late-term abortions are often medical emergencies.
“No woman wants to get pregnant, carry a child for nine months, and then have an abortion the day before. Who would do that?” pointing.
In almost all late-term abortions, the life or health of the mother is at stake, and if so, she doesn't want the government to make the decision for her, she said.
If confirmed, he'll have to make that case in the Cabinet Room, where he'll likely be sitting across the table from the architects of the popular anti-abortion policy agenda Project 2025. The West Wing would be a lot of fun.
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