Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.), President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is going viral once again after a months-old clip of him praising heroin resurfaced online this week.
The footage, which comes from a June interview with popular podcaster Shawn Ryan, shows RFK Jr. crediting the narcotic with boosting his performance in school.
“I was at the bottom of my class,” he says. “I started doing heroin and I went to the top of my class. Suddenly, I could sit still and I could read.”
Unsurprisingly, the clip swiftly drew widespread attention on social media.
A slew of memes argued that RFK Jr.’s remarks were ironic given his conspiratorial health views, especially in regard to vaccines.
“RFK Jr. thinks vaccines are unsafe, but he couldn’t stop doing heroin,” X user @Out5p0ken wrote.
Did RFK Jr. use heroin to treat ADHD?
RFK Jr. has long been open about his previous struggles with heroin. In the Shawn Ryan interview, RFK Jr. said he believes he may have had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and that the opioid likely helped relieve his symptoms.
“I would probably today be diagnosed as ADHD. I was bouncing off the walls. I couldn’t sit still. I just wanted to get in the woods,” he said. “That’s all I thought about all day at school—when can I go into the woods and start turning over rocks and catching animals and fishing? That’s the only place that I felt comfortable.”
Expanding on his heroin use, RFK Jr. added that he now believes he was using the drug to self-medicate his assumed neurodevelopmental disorder.
“In school, I was non-compos mentis, and I had no idea what was happening. I was at the bottom of my class. I started doing heroin—I went to the top of my class,” he added. “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.”
RFK Jr. did stress, however, that the fix was only temporary, noting that “if it still worked, I’d still be doing it.”
“It starts, you know—it works really great in the beginning, but then it begins exacting a cost,” he said. “And then the cost gets worse and worse, and it kills you. It killed my brother, and it destroys your relationships. It destroys your whole life.”
RFK Jr.’s admission of using heroin to treat his self-diagnosed ADHD runs counter to his claims that pharmaceutical drugs are a detriment to school children in need. RFK Jr. has even gone as far as to blame pharmaceutical drugs, particularly anti-depressants, for school shootings, despite no evidence showing a link between the two.
But he also may have stumbled into a solution to America’s concurrent opioid and ADHD crises.
“All you kids out there listen to RFK…support your local heroin dealer and you will excel in the classroom,” X user @rummy15 said.
Yet between RFK Jr.’s brain worm and bizarre history with animal mutilation, his heroin use might be the most normal thing about him.
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