Robert F Kennedy Jr, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for health and human services secretary, said in a resurfaced clip that he became a star student after he started taking heroin.
The former 2024 independent presidential candidate, known for his anti-vaccine record and health conspiracies, claimed in a July interview with the Shawn Ryan Show that his grades improved in high school once he started taking the opioid.
“I’ll tell you something about heroin,” he said. “I did very very poorly in school until I started doing narcotics then I went to the top of my class because my mind was so restless and turbulent and I could not sit still,” the HHS secretary nominee.
RFK Jr said today he believes he would have been diagnosed with ADHD.
In school, before he started taking heroin, he described himself as “non-compos mentis,” a Latin phrase meaning “not of sound mind.” But once he started using the drug, he claims he rose in the ranks to the top of his class: “Suddenly I could sit still and I could read and I could concentrate. I could listen to what people were saying and things made sense to me.”
“I was probably at some level medicating myself,” he reflected. It worked for him at the time, and “if it still worked, I’d still be doing it.”
Heroin is highly addictive, and thousands of Americans die of overdoses each year.
“It works really great in the beginning but then it begins exacting a cause,” Kennedy said, “and then the cause gets worse and worse and it kills you. It killed my brother,” he added, referring to his brother David, who died at the age of 29 in 1984 from a drug overdose.
RFK Jr said his foray into drugs began in the summer after his father, Robert F Kennedy, was assassinated in 1968. His older brother’s friend invited him to a party. Hitchhiking home, an “older boy” picked him up and offered him LSD. Later that day, after a 10-hour acid trip, he ran into some boys in the woods who offered him crystal meth. He took some, snorted it and “felt great,” he said.
“Within a month, I was shooting heroin and that was my kind of drug of choice,” RFK Jr said. For the next 14 years, cocaine and heroin became his drugs of choice, he said.
“It hollows out your whole life. You have a one-dimensional life. It was what I would describe as a bundle of appetites that was a full-time job to feed them,” RFK Jr said.
He said his family didn’t know about his drug use; he wrote books and went to law school in the time he was on heroin. He got arrested in 1983 for heroin possession, he said. That’s when he was “able to get sober.”
For years, he was “constantly” trying to quit, he said.
“To me, the most demoralizing feature of that disease was my incapacity to keep contracts with myself. I would tell myself at 9:00 in the morning I am never going to do that again. I would believe it. I would mean it,” he said. “At 4:00 in the afternoon, it was like I had no control over that person that I was going to be at 4.00, you know, when the addict would step into my head and take control.”
The same month of the interview, while running still running for the White House, RFK Jr said he wanted to create “wellness camps” for those struggling with addiction “to spend time as much time as they need, three or four years if they need it, to learn to get re-parented, to reconnect with communities.”
He added: “We have a whole generation of kids who are dispossessed, they’re alienated, they’re marginalized, their suicide rates are exploding – the second largest killer for young people is drug addiction.”
