Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), says he had a “wonderful experience” with LSD at 15 years old, which he took because he thought he’d be able to see dinosaurs, as portrayed in a comic book he was a fan of.
Unfortunately, he said that LSD trip led him to later take methamphetamine and, ultimately, go through a decade-long battle with heroin addiction.
At the 2025 Rx and Illicit Drug Summit in Nashville on Thursday, Kennedy spoke candidly about his own journey with certain drugs, offering a window into the HHS secretary’s perspective on substance use as he assumes a critical health and drug policy role in the Trump administration.
Kennedy said he was straight-edge up until he was 15, when he went to a party that became a “melee” and met a person who offered him LSD as they hitchhiked home.
“I would never have taken it,” he said. But in his town, there was a store kids flocked to every week for comic books—and in one of his favorite series, Turok: Son of Stone, the characters took “some kind of hallucinogen” like mescaline and they saw dinosaurs.
Kennedy said he “had a deep interest in paleontology” at the time, and the person who gave him the LSD said it was possible he could see dinosaurs, too.
“I ended up taking it, and I had this wonderful experience of very, very intense hallucinations,” he said. “And in the morning, I was remorseful, and I was kicking myself and saying, ‘You swore you would never do this. You broke your commitment to yourself.’ And I swore to myself I would never take drugs again.”
That personal pledge didn’t last long, however, Kennedy said. Because as he “crashed from the acid” and subsequently met “some older boys in the woods” by his house, they advised him that the come-down would be easier if he took methamphetamine, which he did.
“They said, ‘Try some of this.’ And it was a line of crystal meth,” he said. “And I took it, and all my problems went away—just evaporated. I felt better than I ever felt in my life.”
That feeling was fleeting, however, as Kennedy said that, not long after that experience, he tried heroin and developed a substance misuse issue with the drug “for the next 14 years.”
Kennedy has been transparent about his personal history with substance misuse, including during his time running for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination before he switched to independent and then later joined Trump’s team and became HHS secretary.
But the details of his psychedelics experience are notable. While he’s been largely silent on the issue in his capacity as the leading federal health official, he previously campaigned on a plan to legalize marijuana and certain psychedelics, proposing to use tax revenue from the sales of substances such as psilocybin to support drug misuse treatment.
Last October, Kennedy specifically criticized the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over the agency’s “suppression of psychedelics” and a laundry list of other issues that he said amounted to a “war on public health” that would end under the Trump administration.
A former top U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) official said it’s “very encouraging” that Kennedy supports psychedelics reform—and he hopes to work with him on the issue if he stays on for the next administration.
Meanwhile, the head of VA said recently that he had an “eye-opening” talk with Kennedy about the therapeutic potential of psychedelic medicine. And he said he intends to press Congress to take action on the issue.
Author Michael Pollan, however, said that Kennedy’s placement as HHS secretary could prove “very dangerous” to the psychedelics movement because he was concerned that the official might pursue federal reform in a way that delegitimizes the science behind substances such as psilocybin.
By contrast, Rick Perry—a former governor of Texas who also served in the first Trump administration—said the president’s choices for key health policy positions, including Kennedy, are a “great gift” for the psychedelics reform movement, particularly as it concerns access to ibogaine as a treatment option for serious mental health conditions.
Separately, Kennedy has thrown some advocates off guard since being confirmed by the Senate, saying at one point that he’s “worried about” the normalization of high-potency marijuana and that he feels its use can have “really catastrophic impacts” on people—but that state-level legalization can facilitate research into its harms and benefits.
“Because of the legalization of recreational marijuana in 25 states, we have now a capacity to really study it and to compare it to states,” he said. “We need to do studies. We need to figure it out, and then we need to we need to implement policies to address” any health concerns.
Of course, HHS has already completed a comprehensive scientific study into cannabis that led the agency under the Biden administration to recommend moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).
The secretary’s comments came on the same day that Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) said he received a commitment from Kennedy to “follow the science on the harms of marijuana.”
Ricketts had already disclosed last week that he spoke to Kennedy about the the “importance” of “preventing the expansion of marijuana.” Now he says “RFK committed to me that he would follow the science on the harms of marijuana.”
Despite Kennedy’s history of advocating for cannabis legalization, he said in January that he will defer to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) on marijuana rescheduling in his new role.
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