HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told podcast host Theo Von on Thursday that he continued attending in-person recovery meetings every single day during the COVID-19 pandemic — and punctuated the point with a line only a man who's lived through real darkness could deliver.
I'm not scared of a germ. You know, I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats. And I know this disease will kill me, right?
Kennedy appeared on "This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von," where the two discussed their shared history in recovery from substance abuse. The conversation was candid, unpolished, and miles from the sanitized talking points Washington usually produces.
For Kennedy, sobriety isn't a biographical footnote. It's the architecture of his daily life.
While much of America argued over Zoom church services and whether you could jog without a mask, Kennedy and about fifteen others kept showing up — in person — to recovery meetings. When their usual venue became unavailable, they relocated to the Palisades Playhouse, which later burned down during the Palisades fire.
We still did live meetings every day during COVID. We moved from the bank. There was about 15 of us who moved from the bank and we got into the Palisades Playhouse, which now is burned down during the fire, but it was kind of a pirate group … I don't care what happens, I'm going to a meeting every day.
There's something worth sitting with here. The same public health establishment that shut down schools, closed churches, and criminalized family gatherings had no answer for people whose survival depended on being in a room with other human beings. Addiction doesn't pause for a pandemic. Kennedy understood that. The bureaucrats who locked down the country did not.
Recovery programs were collateral damage of COVID restrictions that the architects of lockdown policy never bothered to account for. Kennedy's "pirate group" of fifteen wasn't defiance for its own sake. It was people choosing life over compliance theater.
Kennedy didn't stop at cocaine. He recounted first taking LSD at age 15 — an experience that, by the article's account, set him on a path to heroin addiction. Daily Caller reports that at HMP Global's Rx and Illicit Drug Summit 2025 in Nashville, he told the story with the kind of dark humor.
"I said to the guy, 'If I take that, will I see dinosaurs?' He said, 'You might.'"
A fifteen-year-old asking if he'll see dinosaurs. It gets a laugh in a room full of adults. It shouldn't. That kid had no idea what was coming.
Kennedy has a family history of addiction, and he's been open about his own journey through decades of recovery work. None of this is new information he's been cornered into revealing. He offers it freely — on podcasts, at summits, in public — because he treats his past as a tool rather than a liability.
The left has spent months trying to frame Kennedy as unfit for his role at Health and Human Services. Too unconventional. Too outside the credentialed class. Too willing to challenge the pharmaceutical establishment.
But here's the thing about a man who's attended recovery meetings every day for decades: he knows what the system looks like from the bottom. He's sat in folding chairs in church basements and borrowed playhouses with people fighting for their lives. He didn't study the addiction crisis from a policy paper. He lived it.
Kennedy explained why the meetings aren't optional for him:
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. And then 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 from self-will.
That's not a man performing vulnerability for a camera. That's a man describing the daily discipline that keeps him alive. The phrase "self-will" tells you everything — Kennedy views recovery as the practice of surrendering the illusion of control. Washington could use more people who've learned that lesson the hard way.
America's political class has a credibility problem. Voters can smell rehearsed authenticity from a mile away. Kennedy sitting across from Theo Von — a comedian and fellow recovering addict — and talking about cocaine on toilet seats is the opposite of rehearsed. It's a man who has nothing left to hide, which makes him very difficult to leverage.
The people most desperate to disqualify Kennedy will clip the cocaine line, strip it of context, and run it as a gotcha. They'll ignore the recovery. They'll ignore the daily meetings. They'll ignore the decades of sobriety. Because the full story — a man who clawed his way out of heroin addiction, stayed sober through a pandemic, and now runs the agency responsible for the nation's health — doesn't serve the narrative they need.
The full story is the point.
