Did RFK jr claim heroin made him a class topper? Here’s the actual fact – Times of India

In a podcast in July, RFK Jr said how he fought his drugs addiction for 15 years.

The old video of Donald Trump’s health secretary nominee RFK Jr saying that he became a topper of his class after he started doing heroin has resurfaced and gone viral. It was his appearance on the Shawn Ryan podcast in July when he was running independently for the president. “I was at the bottom of my class. I started doing heroin, and I went to the top of my class. Suddenly I could sit still, and I could read and I could concentrate. I could listen to what people were saying,” Kennedy Jr said.
It was the same interview where Kennedy explained that he first tried LSD when he was 15, the summer his father Robert F Kennedy Sr was assassinated. After LSD, he tried heroin and cocaine and it was only after 14 years that he became sober. In the interview, however, he was not promoting drugs; he was explaining how drugs hollowed out his life and destroyed his relationships. The only good thing drugs did was to make him a star student, he said. “My mind was so restless and turbulent I could not sit still,” he said.

“I would probably today be diagnosed as ADHD (Attention Deficit/ Hyperactive Disorder). I was bouncing off the walls,” he added. “So, you know, I was probably at some level medicating myself.”
He said his family didn’t know about his drug use; he wrote books and went to law school at the time he was on heroin. He got arrested in 1983 for heroin possession, he said. That’s when he was “able to get sober” after years of constantly trying to quit.
“To me, the most demoralizing feature of that disease was my incapacity to keep contracts with myself. I would tell myself at 9:00 in the morning I am never going to do that again. I would believe it. I would mean it,” Kennedy Jr said explaining his addiction. “At 4:00 in the afternoon, it was like I had no control over that person that I was going to be at 4.00, you know, when the addict would step into my head and take control.”
Experts think as the health secretary, Kennedy Jr will cut prescription drugs and increase weed and psychedelics access. He has taken a strong stance against Ozempic, the viral drug for weight loss, and said Americans should focus on getting good food, three meals a day and the epidemic of obesity and diabetes will be solved.