Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared more about his past struggles with alcohol and substance use.
Kennedy, 72, appeared on the Thursday, Feb. 12 episode of Theo Von’s podcast This Past Weekend and recalled first meeting Von, 45, at morning recovery meetings. He said that when the meetings were shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, he and others began gathering privately instead, forming what he described as a “pirate” group that continued to meet in person.
“I said I don’t care what happens, I’m going to a meeting every day,” Kennedy said of his decision at the time. “I said, ‘I’m not scared of a germ.’ I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.”
He added that the routine felt essential. “I know this disease will kill me, right? Like if I don’t treat it, which means for me going to meetings every day, it’s just bad for my life,” he said. “For me, it was survival.”
Kennedy also emphasized the value of supporting others in recovery. “That’s the secret sauce of the meetings, and that’s what keeps us all sober,” he said, adding that it helps keep people from relying on “self-will.”
He has spoken publicly about his addiction history on multiple occasions. During his 2024 presidential campaign, he described how drugs affected his schooling.
“I did very, very poorly in school, until I started doing narcotics,” Kennedy said on the Shawn Ryan Show podcast. He claimed that once he began using, he rose to the top of his class because his mind felt too “restless and turbulent” to focus otherwise.
“It worked for me,” he added of his past heroin use. “And if it still worked, I’d still be doing it.”
In an April 2025 appearance at the Rx and Illicit Drug Summit in Nashville—two months after he was confirmed as President Donald Trump’s health secretary—Kennedy said, “The only way I stay sober is through taking responsibility for my daily actions.”
Kennedy has also said his addiction began in the months after his father, Robert F. Kennedy Sr., was assassinated in 1968. He described trying LSD at a party, then taking opioids while walking home. During the April 2025 speech, he recalled being offered crystal meth: “I took it, and all my problems went away,” he said, adding that his addiction quickly escalated. By the end of that summer, he said, he was using heroin—his drug of choice for the next 14 years.
In a July 2024 interview, Kennedy described substance abuse as a “compulsion” that eventually “hollows out your whole life.” He became sober in 1983 and has credited a heroin possession arrest while traveling to Minnesota that year as the turning point—calling it “the best thing that could have happened to me” because it pushed him to get help and stop using.
