As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared for his first Senate confirmation hearing to be the U.S.'s top health official in January 2025, some people online called attention to his past as an alleged heroin user.
Posts on platforms like X, Facebook and Bluesky drew attention to the claim.
While RFK Junior was at Harvard University, he was a heroin drug addict.
— ?❤️?Mia?❤️? (@mommamia.bsky.social) January 29, 2025 at 10:15 AM
Kennedy was indeed addicted to heroin beginning as a teenager, based on his own admissions in the confirmation hearing and numerous interviews. As such, this claim is true.
Kennedy said in the confirmation hearing:
I was a heroin addict for 14 years. I've been 42 years in recovery. I go to 12 step meetings every day, so I hear the stories every day.
Months earlier, on June 17, 2024, Kennedy appeared on the "Shawn Ryan Show," a podcast hosted by a former Navy SEAL. Kennedy spoke at length about how his heroin addiction helped him in his school studies:
I'll tell you something about heroin for me. I did very very poorly in school, until I started doing narcotics. Then I went to the top of my class because my mind was so restless and turbulent and I could not sit still. […] I'd 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. […] I started doing heroin, I went to the top of my class. Suddenly I could sit still, I could read, and I could concentrate, I could listen to what people were saying, things made sense to me. […] It worked for me. And if it still worked, I'd still be doing it. […] It killed my brother, and it destroys your relationships. It hollows out your whole life. You have a one-dimensional life. I was a bundle of appetites and it was a full time job to feed them, with drugs and sex and alcohol and extreme behavior.
He admitted that he was "functional" while addicted, and while his family had an idea that something was wrong, they didn't know how "badly off" he was. He also was arrested on a possession charge aboard an airline flight in 1983.
He makes the above remarks at the 1:21:00 mark:
According to a 1984 New York Times article, Kennedy pleaded guilty to a felony charge of possessing heroin. His lawyer at the time said he was traveling to South Dakota ''for treatment, realizing he had a problem'' with drugs. Kennedy admitted himself to a drug treatment center in New Jersey just days after the arrest.
Kennedy's addiction lasted 14 years, by his own admission, and he started using heroin when he was 15, according to this 2023 interview:
In a 2004 profile of Kennedy by Outside magazine, he was described as the "alpha male" of his generation of Kennedys, who consumed more drugs than his brothers and cousins and often led them into using heroin, while keeping up his grades.
In the book "The Kennedys: An American Drama" by David Horowitz and Peter Collier — a well-regarded biographer of prominent dynastic families — Kennedy (referred to below as "Bobby") was frequently using heroin in the company of other boys in his family, including his cousin Chris Lawford:
Jennifer [a singer who briefly dated Lawford] saw immediately that Chris and Bobby were addicts—not mainlining heroin addicts, perhaps, although heroin was the summa drug for them—but addicted to narcotics in general: "Christopher and Bobby liked heroin. But they'd settle for a cupful of Valium, some Percodans, or whatever else was there. Drugs were obsessive. There was a desperate need to escape." […] Chris tried to keep up with Bobby but he couldn't. He became more and more dependent on heroin, less and less able to "handle it."