Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told comedian Theo Von he's "not scared of a germ — I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats" during an appearance on Von's podcast this past Thursday. The 72-year-old Cabinet official was discussing germs when he dropped the line, part of a broader and remarkably candid conversation about his decades-long battle with drug addiction and his ongoing recovery.
Kennedy didn't hold back the details. He told Von that staying sober requires daily vigilance — the kind most people associate with a newcomer, not a man 43 years into recovery.
"Like, if I don't, if I don't treat it — which means for me going to meetings every day — it's just bad for my life."
There was no media strategy in those words. Just a man describing what it takes to stay alive.
Kennedy has been open about his past for years. He was addicted to heroin for 14 years, a spiral that began in the years following the 1968 assassination of his father, Robert F. Kennedy. The NY Post reports that, in 1983, he was arrested and charged with heroin possession in South Dakota. A year later, he pleaded guilty to a felony drug possession charge and received two years' probation and community service.
He has called that arrest "the best thing that could have happened to me" because it forced him into sobriety.
In a June 2024 appearance on Shawn Ryan's podcast, Kennedy went further, describing how drugs temporarily gave him something school never could:
"I did very, very poorly in school, until I started doing narcotics. 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."
Then the kicker:
"It worked for me. And if it still worked, I'd still be doing it."
That's not a man romanticizing drugs. That's a man describing how addiction operates — it solves a problem until it becomes one, and by then it owns you.
Kennedy and Von didn't just meet through media circles. The two crossed paths at a 7 a.m. recovery meeting in the Los Angeles area before the COVID-19 pandemic. That meeting was eventually shut down during lockdowns — another quiet casualty of policies that severed lifelines for people in recovery while politicians congratulated themselves on "following the science."
On Thursday's episode, Kennedy made clear that his commitment to recovery hasn't wavered with the title change:
"I mean for me, I said this when I came in, 'I don't care what happens, I'm going to a meeting everyday.'"
A 72-year-old Cabinet secretary is attending daily recovery meetings while running the Department of Health and Human Services. Whatever you think of his policy agenda, the discipline is real.
The media will clip the toilet seat line and run with it. That's what they do. Strip the context, serve the spectacle, move on. But the actual story here is more interesting — and more useful — than a shock quote.
America has a drug crisis that has killed hundreds of thousands. Fentanyl has hollowed out communities from Appalachia to the Sun Belt. And the person now overseeing federal health policy isn't someone who studied addiction from a policy paper. He lived it. For 14 years. He clawed his way out, and he's still clawing — every single morning.
There's a strain of politics that demands its leaders be sanitized, their pasts scrubbed clean or buried under layers of PR. Kennedy's approach is the opposite. He puts the ugly truth on the table and dares anyone to use it against him. It's disarming precisely because Washington doesn't work that way.
The left spent years telling Americans to "destigmatize" addiction. They built entire policy frameworks around the idea that substance abuse is a disease, not a moral failing. Now a Cabinet official speaks about his addiction with exactly that kind of honesty — and watch how quickly the same voices pivot to mockery.
The contradiction writes itself.
Kennedy lost his father at a young age to an assassin's bullet. He spent 14 years in the grip of heroin. He was arrested, charged, convicted, and sentenced. And then he got up. For 43 years, he's gotten up — every day, one meeting at a time.
That doesn't make him right about every policy. It doesn't make him immune to criticism. But it does make him something Washington desperately lacks: a man who has actually been through the fire and doesn't pretend otherwise.
Forty-three years sober, and he still walks into that room every morning like his life depends on it. Because it does.
