Revealed: RFK, Jr’s Best Dope Stories

RFK Jr. used to shoot heroin with Keith Richards, which I guess is about as cool as shooting heroin gets.

Despite his experience with needles, “Bobby” (as his friends call him) gets a lot of grief from Democrats, medical experts, and his family for being an antivaxx conspiracy monger.

Bobby’s druggie past is no secret—his 1983 heroin bust was on the front page of The New York Times. And since endorsing Trump on August 23, his smack-shooting days have been making news again, my favorite example being The Atlantic’s tabloidy headline “RFK Jr. Was My Drug Dealer.”

However, the media always fail to mention the Keith Richards stuff, which is really the best part. For that, we must turn to the remarkably sordid memoir called Papa John, by John Phillips, leader of the popular 1960s folk-rock vocal quartet The Mamas and the Papas.

For the benefit of the media, MAGA, and CounterPunchers, I’ve copied the relevant excerpts straight from Papa John’s out-of-print book and pasted them below. You’re welcome!

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“One of my new acquaintances was Bobby Kennedy, Jr. Bobby would usually come by alone to do drugs…. Sometimes he would come by several nights a week, hang out, get high, then go out again.”

“Bobby was always welcome. He seemed to have life in balance. He could shoot drugs intermittently for a week and then shoot white-water rapids in some far-flung wilderness.”

“Bobby had a taste for shooting speedballs that mixed the hazy euphoria of heroin with the clearheaded invincibility of coke. He could handle himself quite well. We would sit up for hours and discuss politics, literature, jazz, blues, art…”

“Bobby had gotten to know Mick and Keith and when they were over, we would stay up to all hours, take out the guitars, and sing blues songs all night. Bobby loved acoustic-style blues the way Keith and Mick would play them, with the Mississippi Delta influence of Robert Johnson.”

“Ironically, Bobby and Mick shared an even more obscure field of knowledge: opiate substitutes. He and Mick both — at different times — asked me to supply them with the methodone-like Dolophine…. Almost no one had even heard of the Nazis’ World War II morphine substitute.”

“Most coke addicts experience the same bizarre hallucination: disgusting bugs either crawling over them or, in my case, crawling under my skin all over my body. It was the most harrowing aspect of shooting coke and it blew open the door into the void of insanity. The more I shot coke, the more often I saw them: horrible white bugs, like maggots, that wiggled and crawled just below the surface of my skin. Freud knew of this psychotic reaction and it has since been called formiphobia, from the French word for ant, fourmi. I believed not only that they were real, but that they lived in my eyes…. I once made Bobby Kennedy stare at my eyes for fifteen minutes in the bathroom after shooting up–so he could see them come out.”

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