Just months before Donald Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to oversee US health care policy, the former 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 went to the top of my class. Suddenly I could sit, and I could read and I could concentrate. I could listen to what people were saying.”
This speech was made in July, during Kennedy’s presidential bid, but it has become available on social media now that the president-elect has selected him to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
The former environmental lawyer may be best known for peddling vaccine conspiracy theories and trying to limit access to one of the world’s greatest medical breakthroughs. But he also opened up about his addiction problem.
During a July speech, Kennedy explained how he first tried LSD when he was 15 years old, the summer his father Robert F. Kennedy Sr. they were killed. After LSD, he quickly turned to heroin and cocaine, which were his “drugs” until he got sober 14 years later.
Drugs “tainted” his life and destroyed his relationships, but they made him a star student, he said.
“My mind was so restless and confused that I could not sit still,” he said.
All he wanted was to go outside and play in the forest.
“Perhaps today I may be diagnosed with ADHD. I was hitting the wall,” he added. “So, you know, maybe I was on some level treating myself.”
His struggle to pay attention has not made him a proponent of ADHD drugs such as Adderall, however. Trump’s decision to “make America healthy again” floated the idea of ”health farms” – which sound like labor camps – to wean people off ADHD medication, anxiety medications and antidepressants.
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During his podcast appearance, he even went so far as to blame the pharmaceutical industry — not the gun industry — for the high rate of mass shootings in America.
The number of gun owners has remained stable since the 1970s, Kennedy argued, while more than 100 million Americans now take prescription drugs. (The number of guns in circulation, however, has increased since the 1990s, and the weapons have become more lethal.)
“I have a scientific mind, and I look at this and say, ‘It’s not just a gun,'” he said, before complaining that the National Institutes of Health won’t investigate whether a drug turns people into mass murderers.
In every mass shooting, Kennedy doesn’t ask whether the shooter used an assault weapon—even if the mass shooting happened after the federal gun ban ended in 2004. His first question is whether the shooter was on an SSRI. or benzos.
But one of King’s positions on the future of health care seemed to be based on medical reality instead of “just asking the questions” speculation.
When Ryan reluctantly asked Kennedy to comment on rumors that he supported long-term abortions, Kennedy explained that his thinking on the issue changed after learning that many short-term abortions are medical risks.
“No woman wants to get pregnant, carry a child for nine months, and then abort the day before. Who would do that?” he said.
In almost all late-term abortions, the mother’s life or health is in danger, and in that case, she doesn’t want the government to make the decision for her, she said.
If confirmed, he will have to make this case in the Cabinet Room, where he may be sitting across the table from the makers of the famous abortion Project 2025 policy agenda. The West Wing may be about to get very interesting.