Robert Kennedy Jr., the nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, said in an interview in July that he became a star student in high school after he started taking heroin.
Before the heroin use began, Kennedy 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.”
Kennedy, with an anti-vax and conspiracy theory record, said today he thinks he would’ve been diagnosed with ADHD.
“I was probably at some level medicating myself,” he said. It worked for him at the time, and “if it still worked, I’d still be doing it.”
“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.
RFKJ said he began using drugs the summer after his father was assassinated.
A friend of his brother invited him to a party, and hitchhiking home another boy offered him LSD. After a 10-hour acid trip, some other boys in the woods gave him crystal meth, which he snorted and liked. A month later he was shooting heroin, and for the next 14 years his drugs of choice were cocaine and heroin.
Kennedy said he was able to hide his use from his family while attending law school and writing books. Only in 1983, when he was arrested for possession, was he able to get sober. He said he was trying to quit for years.
