Cocaine in the White House? Chances are it’s not the first time – and the drug could well have been used by at least one past president, according to a leading presidential historian.
Lab tests confirmed that a white substance found inside the building on Sunday was indeed cocaine, the Secret Service told reporters. The discovery, on the floor near an entrance to the West Wing that’s commonly used by tour groups, led to a security alert and a brief evacuation of the executive mansion. Authorities are working to figure out who brought the drug into the building. (At the time, Joe Biden and his family were at Camp David in Maryland.)
Still, there’s good reason to think that coke has entered the US presidential office on past occasions – and that its most famous user may have been Franklin D Roosevelt.
Professor Steve Gillon, a US historian at the University of Oklahoma, says he was “shocked” to make the discovery while researching his 2011 book, Pearl Harbor: FDR Leads the Nation Into War.
In addition to hypertension and heart disease in his later years, the president had chronic sinus conditions. Cocaine is a powerful vasoconstrictor, which means it tightens blood vessels, unlike many other topical anesthetics, which loosen blood vessels and can make bleeding worse. And in the 1930s and 1940s, when Roosevelt held office, the go-to treatment for nasal swelling was a watered-down cocaine solution, applied by a cotton swab, to quickly shrink and numb a patient’s nasal tissue, before inserting a needle to drain out sinus fluid.
Roosevelt’s official physician was a respected ear, nose and throat doctor named Ross McIntire, who would use cotton swabs to clear the president’s sinuses, a process witnessed by the attorney general Francis Biddle, who described in his notes McIntire “swabbing out FDR’s nose”. Gillon consulted medical journals and spoke to top ENT doctors familiar with the profession’s history who agreed: “Cocaine was the drug of choice” for the procedure back then, making it likely that Roosevelt had received it. “It was nothing unusual, it was common practice, and it wasn’t illegal,” Gillon says. (Even today, cocaine is a controlled substance that doctors can legally use in situations like sinus surgery.)
We may never know for sure if Roosevelt was given cocaine, because his medical records went missing shortly after his death in 1945 – probably destroyed to cover up evidence that doctors knew how sick he was when running for a fourth term, Gillon says. But the president’s official schedule shows that he regularly met with McIntire for sinus treatments – including a session lasting over an hour on 7 December 1941, after learning of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
“It was surprising to me that on this momentous day in American history, Roosevelt takes time in the middle of the day to have this treatment,” Gillon says. But if Roosevelt was indeed receiving cocaine at the time, he says, we don’t know “whether it had any impact on his personality or the decisions he made that day”.
Even if he was receiving it, there’s a good chance Roosevelt wouldn’t have known about it. According to the prevailing medical literature of the day, doctors were advised not to tell patients that they were receiving cocaine (“The habit-forming properties of this drug are well known and must be ever guarded against,” read one textbook). “Unless Roosevelt had asked, he would not have been told,” Gillon says.
Since FDR’s days, there have been a few other tales of drugs in the White House.
John F Kennedy was rumored to have smoked pot in a bedroom with his mistress Mary Pinchot Meyer. He was also said to have been given regular amphetamine shots by Max Jacobson, a controversial physician nicknamed “Dr Feelgood”, to treat chronic back pain. “I don’t care if it’s horse piss,” Kennedy reportedly told his brother Bobby. “It works.” (Like cocaine, amphetamine is also a controlled substance that can be legally prescribed for certain medical conditions.)
The most legendary White House substance story may be the singer Willie Nelson’s account of smoking weed on the building’s roof during Jimmy Carter’s administration, “late at night with a beer in one hand and a fat Austin Torpedo in the other”, he wrote in his 1988 autobiography. “I let the weed cover me with a pleasing cloud … I guess the roof of the White House is the safest place to smoke dope.”
The story was confirmed in 2020 by Carter himself, who explained that Nelson had been up there smoking with Carter’s son Chip. (In 2014, Snoop Dogg also claimed to have lit up a joint in Barack Obama’s White House, though his account was never verified.)
In 1998, the British actor Erkan Mustafa, who played Roland Browning in Grange Hill, claimed to tabloids he had smoked weed and snorted cocaine in Ronald Reagan’s White House in 1986, on a visit with the cast of the teen drama to promote Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug initiative. “When I met Nancy, I was out of it. I didn’t really care who she was or about the ‘just say no’ message,” he said.
But Mustafa later disavowed the story, explaining that he and other cast members had made up the story after becoming tired of being repeatedly asked the same questions. “I came up with a story that bit me on the arse. Looking back, you live and learn,” he told the Guardian in 2016. “How is a 16-year-old kid meant to be doing that? You couldn’t even go for a pee without security.”
