The president’s top health official has revealed the reason why he isn’t afraid of germs.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 72, got candid about his history with drug addiction on This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von—including why past choices made Kennedy unafraid of contracting illnesses. The admission was part of a sprawling interview with host Theo Von that covered Kennedy’s new food initiative starring Mike Tyson.
Barely two minutes into the hour-long episode, Kennedy dropped a tidbit from his earlier life while recounting how he became friends with the 45-year-old podcast host.
The MAGA pals revealed that they met through an addiction recovery program and regularly attended meetings together until the pandemic.
“We still did live meetings every day during COVID… it was kind of a pirate group,” Kennedy recalled to Von. “I said, ‘I don’t care what happens. I’m going to a meeting every day.’ And I said, ‘I’m not scared of a germ.’ You know, I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.”
“I know this disease will kill me, right?” Kennedy continued, referring to his drug addiction. “If I don’t treat it—which means, for me, going to meetings every day—it’s just bad for my life. So for me, it was survival.”
Kennedy has long spoken openly about his years-long addiction to heroin and cocaine, which he began taking as a teenager shortly after the assassination of his father, Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968. The Kennedy scion pleaded guilty to possessing heroin on an airplane in 1984.
One of Kennedy’s former classmates at Harvard, author Kurt Andersen, previously claimed that the future health secretary sold him cocaine.
Andersen told The Daily Beast Podcast that in the 1970s, the future health secretary “put out a line of coke and we tried it with his little—he hands us a little piece of, you know, one-inch straw that he’d gotten from... the freshman eating place next to his dorm."
“And apparently I had pocketed—not wanting to steal Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s special cocaine straw—but it turned out it was his special cocaine straw, because he believed, as he explained to me, it had crystals growing in it," Andersen added. “Meaning, somehow the repeated use of mucus and cocaine buildup made it something that it was very precious to him.”
Kennedy told Von that he has been in recovery for more than four decades. Kennedy’s ex-digital lover, journalist Olivia Nuzzi, alleged in her book that Kennedy took psychedelics such as dimethyltryptamine as recently as 2024.
Kennedy said the “secret sauce” of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings was the companionship they found in the group.
“The opportunity to help another alcoholic, that’s the secret sauce of the meetings, and that’s what keeps us all sober and keeps us, you know, from self-will,” he told Von.
“For some reason, in my addiction, it’s like there’s a part of me that forgets that people care about me and that I care about them,” Von replied. “But when I go to meetings, it immediately fills that whole backlog in, you know, but I have to go and kind of recharge that battery a lot.”
