RFK, Jr. Was My Drug Dealer (Atlantic)

[W. Niederhut]

With his pharmaceutical experience, perhaps RFK, Jr. will be appointed FDA Director in Donald Trump's Project 2025 administration.

Afterall, Trump appointed the oil industry lobbyist, Scott Pruitt, EPA Director in 2017.

RFK Jr. Was My Drug Dealer

Kennedy’s endorsement of Donald Trump raises an awkward question.

By Kurt Andersen

Mark Peterson / Redux

 

August 23, 2024, 4:04 PM ET

The leading third-party candidate for president—an environmental lawyer and activist, a son and nephew of legendary liberal Democratic politicians—just quit the race and announced that he is joining the campaign of the most anti-environment president and presidential nominee in recent history, the leader of a Republican Party he has turned into a right-wing, anti-democratic, protofascist personality cult.

I could go on and on and on, cataloging the contradictions and abandonment of principle, all gobsmacking.

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But Donald Trump and Bobby Kennedy—as I’ve referred to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. since we met freshman year at Harvard—have always had many features in common as well. Both are entitled playboy sons of northeastern wealth; both (in Michelle Obama’s words) were “afforded the grace of failing forward” as misbehaving, underachieving adolescents admitted to Ivy League colleges thanks to “the affirmative action of generational wealth”; both were reckless lifelong adolescents, both attention-craving philanderers and liars, both jerks. And Kennedy’s hour-long speech today was nearly as meandering and filled with lies as any average hour of Trump.

On the subject of reckless-adolescent entitlement, I’ve got one Bobby Kennedy anecdote to tell. But it’s actually relevant to his endorsement of Donald Trump for president and his apparent expectation of joining a second Trump administration.

In Kennedy’s speech today, he spoke at length about federal pharmaceutical regulation and programs addressing chronic disease. “I’m going to change that,” he said, promising to “staff” the health agencies very differently. “Within four years, America will be a healthy country … if President Trump is elected and honors his word.” Trump, he added, “has told me that he wants this to be his legacy.”

My Bobby Kennedy story involves pharmaceuticals—not the legal, lifesaving kind, such as the vaccines he’s made a career of lying about, but the recreational kind.

As a candidate, Kennedy got a very sympathetic pass on his years of drug use because he’s an addict, having used heroin from ages 15 to 29. He quit when he was arrested after overdosing on a flight from Minneapolis to the Black Hills and found by police in South Dakota to be carrying heroin; he pleaded guilty and received only probation. Kennedy, as Joe Hagan wrote in a recent Vanity Fair profile, “has made his history of addiction part of his campaign narrative.”

As a teenager in Nebraska, I’d smoked cannabis and dropped acid before I got to Harvard in 1972. Sometime during my freshman year, I tried cocaine, enjoyed it, and later decided to procure a gram for myself. A friend told me about a kid in our class who was selling coke.

The dealer was Bobby Kennedy. I’d never met him. I got in touch; he said sure, come over to his room in Hurlbut, his dorm, where I’d never been, a five-minute walk. His roommate, whom I knew, was the future journalist Peter Kaplan—with whom I, like Kennedy, remained friends for the rest of his life. He left as I arrived. I wondered whether he always did that when Bobby had customers.

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“Hi. Bobby,” Kennedy introduced himself. Another kid, tall, lanky, and handsome, was in the room. “This is my brother Joe.” That is, Joseph P. Kennedy II, two years older, the future six-term Massachusetts congressman.

Bobby Kennedy wasn’t famous, but he was the most famous person I’d ever met.

He poured out a line for me to sample, and handed me an inch-and-a-half length of plastic drinking straw. I snorted. We chatted for a minute. I paid him, I believe, $40 in cash. It was a lot of money, the equivalent of $300 today. But cocaine bought from a Kennedy accompanied by a Kennedy brother—the moment of glamour seemed worth it.

Back in my dorm room 10 minutes later, I got a phone call.

“Hello?”
“It’s Bobby.”
“Hi.”
“You took my straw!”
I realized that I had indeed, and had thought nothing of it. Because … it was a crummy piece of plastic straw. But Bobby was pissed.
“There are crystals inside it, man, growing. You took it.”
Growing? The residue of powdered cocaine mixed with mucus formed crystals over time? What did I know. It reminded me of some science-fair project.
“So … you want the straw back?”
“Yeah, man.”
I walked it back to his room. He didn’t smile or say thanks. It was the last time I ever bought coke from anyone.

A famous rich boy selling a hard drug that could’ve gotten him—or, more precisely, someone who wasn’t him—a years-long prison sentence. His almost fetishistic obsession with a bit of plastic trash. His greedy little burst of anger cloaked in righteousness. His faith that he was cultivating precious cocaine crystals. In retrospect, it has seemed to me a tiny illustration of the child as the father of the man he became: fantastical pseudoscientific crusader, middle-aged preppy dick who takes selfies with barbecued dogs and plays pranks with roadkill bear cubs he didn’t have time to eat.

But the reason I decided finally to share this anecdote is because of a criminal-justice policy advocated by the presidential candidate he’s just endorsed. It’s another of those many spectacular contradictions I mentioned earlier.

That is, Donald Trump, if he becomes president as Kennedy is now working to make happen, wants to start executing drug dealers. He said so in a speech as president in 2018: “These are terrible people, and we have to get tough on those people, because … if we don’t get tough on the drug dealers, we’re wasting our time … And that toughness includes the death penalty … We’re gonna solve this problem … We’re gonna solve it with toughness … That’s what they most fear."

He said it again in 2022 when he announced his current candidacy: “We’re going to be asking [Congress to pass a law that] everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs, [is] to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts.”

Elizabeth Bruenig: Trump dreams of a swifter death penalty

And at a campaign rally this past April, he elaborated at length on his plan to kill drug dealers: “The only thing they understand is strength. They understand strength—and it’ll all stop.” Our policy, he explained, should be like that in the country he otherwise demonizes the most. “When I met with President Xi of China, I said, ‘Do you have a drug problem?’ ‘No no no,’ [he said,] ‘we have no drug problem.’ [I said,] ‘Why is that?’ ‘Quick trial!’ I said, ‘Tell me about a quick trial.’ When they catch the seller of drugs, the purveyor of drugs, the drug dealers, they immediately give them a trial. It takes one day. One day. At the end of that day, if they’re guilty, which they always are … within one day, that person is executed. They execute the drug dealers. They have zero drug problem. Zero.”

And so, one question for reporters to ask the new Trump campaigner and potential Trump-administration official Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is something like this: The candidate you’re campaigning for, in whose administration you apparently intend to serve, wants our laws rewritten so that drug dealers, particularly those who sell narcotics, face capital punishment. Given that you sold cocaine in your youth, how do you feel about his advocacy of a regime that might have resulted in your own execution at age 19?

---

Editor’s Note: The Kennedy campaign did not reply to requests for comment on this story.

 

Edited August 23 by W. Niederhut

[Matt Allison]

 

[W. Niederhut]

14 minutes ago, Matt Allison said:

 

Dr. Fauci was correct when he said that RFK, Jr. is a very disturbed person.

Consider RFK, Jr.'s obsession with pushing disinformation about pharmaceuticals, including vaccines, in light of his long history of heroin addiction, drug dealing, and even using anabolic steroids for body building.  It's weird.

Nor does he have a science or medical education.

[Matt Allison]

I just feel bad for the Kennedy family.

They deserve better than this liar.

 

[W. Niederhut]

Matt,

   RFK, Jr. has a clearly documented history of repeatedly contradicting himself, and lying about his own conduct.  He's either confused, sociopathic, or both.

[Kirk Gallaway]

Trump, RK, Musk, We've entered a period of unfettered, super wealthy hybrid loons!

[W. Niederhut]

[W. Niederhut]

Environmental Group Wants Answers About RFK Jr. Chainsawing a Whale’s Head Off

Charisma Madarang

Mon 26 August 2024 at 8:53 pm GMT-6·2-min read

While Robert Kennedy Jr.’s bizarre run for office has ended following the suspension of his 2024 presidential campaign, his growing list of poor life choices has not.

RFK Jr. — who has made headlines for endorsing Republican candidate Donald Trump, admitting he was the guy who dumped the body of a bear cub in Central Park a decade ago, and recounting doctors once found a dead worm in his brain — is back in the news cycle thanks to a resurfaced 2012 Town & Country interview where his daughter Kick Kennedy revealed he had chainsawed a dead whale’s head off he found in Hyannis Port, bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan, and brought it back to Mount Kisco, New York.

“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick told the magazine at the time. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”

Turns out, that the former independent presidential candidate may have violated a federal law.

On Monday, the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund called on government officials to investigate whether RFK Jr. violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. In a letter to the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Brett Hartl, the national political director of the center, wrote that under both acts, it is “illegal to possess any part of an animal, dead or alive, that is protected under either statute. Continued possession of any whale skull represents a significant and ongoing violation of the law.”

Quoting Kick’s story to Town & Country, Hartl said that while normally an “unverified anecdote” wouldn’t be sufficient evidence as the basis for a probe, RFK Jr. has “admitted that he has recklessly — and with no regard to legal requirements — taken other species of wildlife for his own personal benefit.” He added that his “apparent transport of the marine mammal skull” across state lines from Massachusetts to New York also “represented a felony violation of the Lacey Act, one of the earliest wildlife conservation laws enacted by United States in 1900.”

The letter concludes by emphasizing the group hopes that the NOAA Office of Law Enforcement is “able to ensure that Mr. Kennedy surrenders any and all illegally obtained wildlife that he continues to possess, including the whale skull he took from the Massachusetts beach in 1994” and “consider all appropriate civil and criminal penalties as well.”

[Denny Zartman]

5 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

“illegal to possess any part of an animal, dead or alive, that is protected under either statute. Continued possession of any whale skull represents a significant and ongoing violation of the law.”

Maybe RFK Jr can grab the skull and a bicycle, head to Central Park, and try to make it look like an accident.