The next U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to make waves whenever he mentions his past. This week, one statement in particular by the former independent candidate, who later became one of Trump’s leading supporters, caught the attention of social media users.
A video from last June began circulating on X, in which RFK talked about his drug addiction in his youth, where he said that heroin use helped him become an honor student and get top grades.
“I’ll tell you something about heroin. I did very very poorly in school until I started doing narcotics, then I went to the top of my class. My mind was so restless and turbulent and I could not sit still,” Kennedy says in the clip excerpted from an interview with him on the Shawn Ryan Show, “Suddenly I could sit up and read.”
However, the parts where the former independent candidate explains that drugs were ruining his life were cut out of the video. “It kills you, it destroys your relationships, it hollows out your whole life, you have a one-dimensional life”, RFK said during the interview.
Nevertheless, despite the fact that it was clear that the clip that went viral on the web was only an excerpt from Kennedy’s full conversation, social media users did not spare the next secretary of the HHS, criticizing him harshly for praising the effects of heroin. The Republicans Against Trump account, for example, in a post that has received more than 3.5 million views said: “Trump’s nominee to lead the HHS says that heroin helped him study.”
In his 1 million-view re-post, on the other hand, epidemiologist Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding wrote, “RFK Jr. says the shooting heroin helped him read again. My God.”
Kennedy recounted that he began taking drugs in the summer after his father’s assassination in 1968. A friend of his older brother invited him to a party: hitchhiking home, an “older boy” offered him LSD. Later, he ran into some friends who gave him methamphetamine. “Within a month, I was shooting heroin and that was my kind of drug of choice,” RFK Jr. said. He continued to abuse substances for the next 14 years.
Meanwhile, as the Web chastises him for praising the effects of heroin on his high school career, Kennedy may soon be forced to defend himself against far more serious allegations leveled against him by a woman, Eliza Cooney.
In the 1990s, the latter worked as a babysitter in his home: the 49-year-old woman claimed that she had been the victim of harassment by the future secretary of the US HHS, and that she was prepared to testify about it under oath.
The woman made these allegations in an interview last July: the former independent candidate later sent her a message in which he claimed not to remember the incidents described, writing to her: “I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended or hurt your feelings. I never intended you any harm. If I hurt you, it was inadvertent. I feel badly for doing so.”
Now, with Kennedy set to lead HSS, this story may be back in the spotlight again, opening up possible new scenarios.
