Marijuana Moment
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.
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