Transcript of RFK Jr. Remarks At The Rx and Illicit Drug Summit in Nashville

And I said to the guy, if I take that, will I see dinosaurs? And he said, you might.

And I ended up taking it, and I had this wonderful experience of very, very intense hallucinations. But 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. And I was walking home from the town, which was about three miles from my home. And I was getting darker and darker as I crashed from the acid.

Descent into Addiction

And when I saw it, I had to go home and face my mom. I had violated my curfew, and my mother had invented tough love. And I saw some older boys in the woods near my home. And I went in to see what they were doing, and I told them that I was crashing on the acid. And they said, try some of this. And it was a line of crystal meth. And I took it, and all my problems went away. Just evaporated, and I felt better than I’d ever felt in my life.

And my progression, they say that your addiction is doing push-ups when you’re not doing it and getting strong. And my addiction came on full force. And within about three weeks, I was shooting meth. And by the end of the summer, I was shooting heroin, which was my drug of choice for the next 14 years until I was 28 years old.

And to me, I tried earnestly, sincerely, and honestly to quit constantly. I made pledges to my brothers, to my friends, to my family. I took vows. I wrote out agreements and contracts. I saw a psychiatrist. I did everything that I could think of. And nothing worked. And to me, the most demoralizing feature of this disease was my incapacity to keep contracts with myself. And I would tell myself at 9 in the morning, I’m never going to do that again. And I would absolutely believe it and be committed to it. By 4 o’clock, I was doing it. And I had no control over that person that I was going to be at 4 o’clock.

And, of course, like most addicts, I interpreted this as a moral failure, as a character failure. And that fed this addiction of morosity, of self-loathing, of darkness. And I came in, I got arrested in September of 1983. And at that time, the cat was out of the bag. And I was able to do things, including go to 12-step programs, which I would have never done before. Because of my family and the way that I’ve been raised, the last thing I would do was to share secrets that I had with a crowd that I didn’t know.

So suddenly, I could do that. And I knew that I needed a spiritual awakening. Because I did not want to be the person that I was. I wanted to be just a normal person who didn’t wake up in the morning thinking of drugs and thinking about them all day and devoting my energies to that. I wanted

I didn’t want to be somebody who just got up in the morning and went to work and had a normal life. I didn’t want to be that person. I definitely did not want to be somebody who was white-knuckling it, who’s on the street trying to not take drugs but wanting them all the time. I just wanted to be a different person.

I’ve 12-stepped many people in my program over the years. And a couple of times, people said to me, including a cousin who’s now dead from this disease, he said to me, “I don’t want to go to that program, the 12-step program, because they brainwash you.” But if somebody had said to me at that time, and I could get brainwashed, I would say, bring it on. Because my brain needed washing. I did not want to be that person.

And I had a friend, my little brother’s best friend, who used to take drugs the same way that I did. And, you know, snorting wines and shooting dope. And he became a Mooney. He joined the Unification Church. And he became a follower of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. And he would still hang out with us, but he just didn’t want drugs anymore. And we could do them right in front of him. And he had no compulsion.

And I used to think about him when I first started getting sober. And I would think to myself, because I had a lot of biases at that time, “Oh, I’d rather be dead than be a Mooney.” But I wished there was some way for me to distill whatever he had that made him impervious to that compulsion without becoming, you know, a religious person.

Finding Meaning Through Synchronicity

At that time, I picked up a book that was just laying on a table by Carl Jung called Synchronicity. The only reason I picked it up was because there was an album by the Police at that time by the same name. And it had just come out. And I didn’t know what the word was.

And synchronicity is a coincidence. It’s like the kind of thing that all of us experience at one time or another where you’re, for example, talking about somebody that you haven’t thought about in 20 years. And the phone rings, and it’s that person on the phone.

And Jung, who was a deeply spiritual man and played a key role in developing the spiritual dimensions of the 12-step program, he was a protégé of Freud. And unlike Freud, who was an about atheist, Jung was a deeply spiritual man. And he had authentic spiritual experiences from when he was a little boy.

And he said in this book, he was trying all these ways to, he had a lot of synchronicities in his life. And they were transformational experiences for him. For example, at one point, he was sitting with a patient. And he was on the third floor of his sanatorium, which was the biggest sanatorium in Europe. And it was a female patient, and she was talking about a dream. And the focal of that dream was a scarab beetle, which is a creature that doesn’t exist in Northern Europe. It’s a very common piece of iconography. It’s a spiritual resident on the tombs, the hieroglyphics of Egypt, on the tombs of Neopolis, etc.

And all he’s talking to or hears is a bing, bing, bing on the wall, on the window behind him. And he doesn’t want to take his attention away from the patient to find out what it is. But finally, in exasperation, he stands up and throws open the window. And a scarab beetle flies in and lands on his palm. And he turns to the woman and says, “Was this what you were dreaming about?”

Those kind of things happen to him all the time. And he believes that that was God’s way of breaking all of his rules, the rules of probability, of chance, of biology, of physics, to reach in and touch his arm or shoulder and say, “I’m here with you and looking at you and watching you. And I’m with you and giving you strength.”

And Jung tried to reproduce that in a clinical setting. He’s a very faithful scientist, as well as a deeply spiritual man. So he put one guy in one room and another guy in another room, and he’d have them pick a card, turn over cards, and try to guess what the other guy had picked. And he felt that if he could break the laws of probability, and he would have proven that there is a supernatural, in other words, the natural laws, and he would have proven that there’s something supernatural.

Now he’s the first at proving the existence of a God, which he was very interested in doing. And he says in this book, which I really respected, that he could never succeed in doing that. But, he said that he was unable to prove the existence of God using empirical spiritual tools, empirical or scientific tools.

Having seen tens of thousands of patients come through his facility, he said he could prove that people who believed in God got better faster, and that their recovery was more enduring. And for me, that was much more impactful than if he had said that he had proved the existence of a God, which I would not believe. What he was saying is that if you believe in God, you’re more likely to get sober, and your sobriety is going to be more enduring.

Rediscovering Faith

And so, you know, I had believed in God from when I was a kid, and now it’s completely integrated into my system. And when you live against conscience for a long period of time, you push any notion of God over the periphery of your horizons. So God, at that point in my life, was a theoretical construct. It wasn’t a being who had any kind of relationship with me on a day-to-day basis.

So I made just an intellectual decision, because at that time I had committed that I will do anything that improves my chance of sobriety, even by one percent. So I just made the decision, I’m going to start believing in God.

And then I was confronted with this dilemma that everybody who makes that kind of decision confronts, which is, how do you start believing in something that you can’t see or smell or touch or taste or acquire with your senses?

And he unsolved that problem. He says, fake it till you make it. Act as if. And the obedience and the faith will precede the evidence. The evidence will become overwhelming. At first, you have to make that choice.

So, I made this decision and, you know, I started behaving like that. I knew what it looked like to have faith, and I put religious iconography, a picture of St. Jude as a state of hopeless causes. St. Francis was my patron saint, and other religious iconography were at my bed. And I knelt and prayed, and I prayed for faith, because I didn’t have any. And I prayed to make it easier for me to believe in something.

Building Character One Decision at a Time

And I started then behaving as if there was a God up there, and he was watching me all the time. And that I had to behave myself, even when I didn’t have an audience. So, I started breaking my day down into about 40 different moral decisions.

Do I get up when the alarm goes off, or do I stay in bed another 15 minutes with my indolent thoughts? Do I make the bed when I go up? I’ve been on the road for two and a half years, living in hotels. And I make the bed every day, which is insane. But I do it. I do it because I made a commitment, and I can keep commitments now.

I do it because what I’m trying to do is to build character, and not to make a big pile for myself, and whoever dies with the most stuff wins. And it’s all about building character, because the wealth you build, the fame, is illusory.

Do I put the water in the ice tray when I put the ice tray back in the freezer? Do I, when I reach into my closet and pull out some blue jeans, and all those little wire hangers fall on the floor, do I shut the door like I used to, and say, that’s somebody else’s job, I’m too much of a big shot for that? Or do I go in and clean up my mess?

Do I put the shopping cart back in the place where it’s supposed to go, rather than leaving it in the parking lot? When I first got

I was sober in probably six or eight weeks, and just a surprise, my life had gotten very, very small from addiction. And it started getting very big again. And I was running through National Airport to catch a plane. It was mission critical that I be on that plane. I was already late and probably going to miss it. And as I was running, I was putting dentine in my mouth. I was thinking, the apocalypse is going to happen if I don’t get on that plane. I was putting pieces of dentine in my mouth, and I pulled up the wrapper. And as I ran, I threw it, and the wrapper did a perfect arc, swished it right into the trash can.

And as I was running by, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that it had jumped back out again. It must have hit something in there. And I said to myself, well, that’s God’s fault, because I made the shot. And I got about 40 feet down that runway, and it just started eating at me. And ultimately, I put on the brakes and went back and put that in. And I made the plane, but the most important thing I did that day was that little act, because that’s how I maintained that posture of surrender.

And for me, surrender was easy when I first came in, because my life made it obvious that I didn’t know how to run things, and I had to let somebody else, which was God, run them. Oh, when the cash and prizes start flowing in, my inclination is to say, thanks, God, I got it from here, and take the wheel of the car and drive off the cliff again. And the challenge for me, and I think for all of us who are trying to maintain long-term society, is how do we stay in that posture of surrender, even when everything’s going well in our lives?

And my life started going well, and it beat these miracles. When I first came in in September 1983, I go to a meeting every day. I got off the plane last night and I went to a meeting. And when I came in 42 years ago, I said to a guy, how long do you have to keep coming to these meetings? And he said, just keep coming until you like it. I’ve been coming 42 years, and I still don’t like it. But I go every day because when I go, the rest of my life works. The lights turn green from a parking place open up. People answer the phone. The projects that I work on get over the goal line. And it’s kind of this magic that it makes no sense logically.

And then when things do go wrong, I know how to handle crises. I know what to say to people when they have a loved one lost. I know how to handle failure in my own life. And I learned that God talks to me through other human beings. God talks to us through many vectors, through each other, through organized religions, through the great books of those religions, through wise people, through art, literature, music, poetry, through nature. But nowhere was there kind of texture and grace and precision and joy as through other human beings.

Connecting with Community

And addiction is about isolation. Addicts end up in jails, institutions, and death. And even when I was surrounded by people which was the truth for much of my life, I was still alone because I was looking at life and relationship through this mesh of dishonesty, of vanity, of arrogance, and a complete lack of intimacy, a complete, real, authentic connection to community.

And part of this program that I work is about increasing my connection to community and seeing God in every person, even people that I don’t particularly like. In fact, God talks to me most through those people. So when somebody gives me the finger on the street because they don’t like my driving, I have to say, that’s God talking to me. And what does he want me to learn? What does he want me to learn from this interaction? What am I supposed to do in this interaction? Should I pray for that person? Or should I pull him out of the car, which is what I used to do. And it has a magical impact on me.

America’s Addiction Crisis

Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. We have an addiction and overdose crisis in this country. I think last year we lost 106,000 kids. This is double the number that we lost during the 20-year Vietnam War. And we need to pay the same attention to this crisis, which is a national security threat, and a threat to everything we love about our country as Vietnam.

And you know, President Trump was in the U.S. three weeks ago. He met with Claudia Scheinbaum, the new president of Mexico. And he said to her, all of the drugs are coming through your country. Do you have an addiction problem? And she said, no, not really. And he said, why is that? And she said, because we have strong families in this country.

And one of the things that… You know, addiction is a source of misery. It’s also a symptom of misery. And it’s a source that makes the addict miserable, and it makes everybody whose relationships are miserable. It’s also a symptom of misery, of grief, of trauma, of loneliness, of alienation, of dispassion.

One of my favorite quotes from C.S. Lewis is he said, I spent so much time with grief that I… I spent so much time with anger that I came to know that her name was grief. And all of us have… All of us have grief in our lives and trauma in our lives. Everybody.

And the… You know, for me, my solution for trauma was I felt like I was born with an empty hole inside of myself, and that I had to fill it with things outside of myself. And those are the only things that work for me. And every addict feels that way in one way or another, that they have to fix what’s wrong with them. And the only thing that works are drugs. And so if the threats that you might die, you’re going to ruin your life were completely meaningless to me, because I needed relief from that pain.

The Power of Connection

And the only… I found that in the 12-step program. The 12-steps are about getting rid of isolation, overcoming isolation, and reestablishing our connection to community. And, you know, I see each of us as a vessel of godliness, and that we’re connected to all these different relationships. Some of them are big, very big, like PVC pipes coming into this vessel. Those are our wives, our children, our parents, our aunts, our mothers, our best friends. And then some of them are little tiny pipes, like the guy who gives a finger to me on the street.

They’re all relationships, and if we’re working well, then there’s liquid flowing through that into us, and our job is to amplify it and send it back out to the world. That’s God’s power. What addiction does is our character defects, our pride, anger, lust, envy, gluttony, avarice, flaws, dishonesty, selfishness, arrogance, we plug up each of those channels. And by the end, we’re alone. And that vessel is stagnant. And that’s the definition of insanity.

And the 12-step programs that I practice are about going out, admitting and dealing with your own character defects, acknowledging them and even learning to love them, and then unclogging all of those channels by going out and making amends to people we’ve harmed. And in that way, God’s power comes back into us.

National Policy Implications

Now, what does that mean for national policy? What it means is we have to do all of the nuts and bolts of things that you are all involved with, the practical, pragmatic things that we need. Suboxone, we need methadone, we need an alternative. We need an archon. We need good fentanyl detectors that can detect it on pills, etc. so the kids are less likely to overdose. We need prevention. We need education. And we need treatment. And we have $4 billion at my agency to finance those solutions and those attacks on addiction and overdose.

That alone, throwing money at it, is not alone going to work. We need to really focus on reestablishing this historic tribes community. We have this whole generation of kids who have lost hope in their future. In 2013, there was a poll in which people under 40 years of age were asked, Are you proud of the United States of America? And 90% of them said yes. The same poll taken last year, 17% said yes. So you have

This whole generation of children has lost faith in our country, lost because they’ve lost faith in their own futures. And they’ve lost their ties to community. And one of the things we need to do, by the way, we live our own lives individually, but also through policy changes, is to try to reestablish for those kids one, hope for the future, but also a sense of connection and usefulness to community. And there’s many ways that we can do that, particularly through service.

Bill Wilson established the AA program. He went to the Oxford Group, which was the predecessor organization, which had eight steps that are part of the AA program, but originally there was just eight. And they were designed to induce a spiritual awakening, and he had a spiritual awakening. His desire, like for me, the day I had it, I never had a desire for drugs and alcohol. And the same thing happened to him.

And he was six months down the road, could not imagine that he’d ever drink again. It was incomprehensible to him that anything like that would ever happen. He went out to Akron, Ohio to an ink deal to buy the big vendor for Firestone and Goodyear, which had made him a millionaire during the height of the Depression. And he had spent his entire fortune preparing for that deal. When he got out there, another company came in and undermined it, and they signed the deal.

And he had a moment standing in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel in Akron, and the entire compulsion to drink came back to him in full force like he’d never experienced it before. And he was 20 feet from the lounge. He could hear the clinking of the ice in the glass. He could hear the laughter of the patient. And it was summoning him to go back into that bar.

And he had the central revelation of all the 12-step program, which was the only way he was going to stay sober that night, is that he found another alcoholic to help. And he went into a phone booth and started frantically dialing preachers, Salvation Army hospitals, looking for an alcoholic in Akron. And he found Dr. Bob. Dr. Bob agreed to meet with him. Dr. Bob had heard it all and was not interested, but he agreed. This was a nice guy. And when he walked in, he said, you’ve got 15 minutes. They ended up talking all night, and that was the first day they met.

And they agreed the next day, the only way we can tell him to stay sober is by helping another alcoholic. So, service. And so, Wilson, realize you can’t live off the laurels of the spiritual awakening. You get a daily reprieve. You have to renew the spiritual awakening every day, and the way that you do that is being useful to another person.

The Power of Service to Others

And, you know, I tell people who are unhappy with their lives, who lost a boyfriend or a girlfriend, who are in a depression, I say, one of the best ways to deal with that is to wake up in the morning and instead of saying, what can I do to make myself happy? What can I do to make myself more loved? What can I do to get my boyfriend back? I say, when you get up in the morning, you have to ask one question. You have to say, reporting for duty, sir. And then you have to ask one question and say one prayer. Please make me useful to another human being today.

I would encourage you all to think broadly about what our mission is, because it’s not just about making sure every paramedic has naltrexone. That’s important. And it’s not just prevention on the border. That’s important. It’s not just making sure that every addict, when they have those moments, when they’re willing to ask for help, that there’s a rehab ready for them to go to. And that is critically important. But there are bigger issues. How do we restore our families? How do we restore that commitment to community?

Technology and Authentic Connection

You know, I was in Virginia the other day, and I went to a school where they have a cell phone use ban. It’s a public school. The grades have skyrocketed. The test scores have skyrocketed. The violence has dropped. And I walked through the lunchroom and saw kids talking to each other. Nobody was looking at a cell phone.

I went to a Mennonite community a couple of weeks ago. The same thing, there were kids, they discouraged the use of cell phones. The kids, we had a huge mass there with 400 people. The kids were all sitting together talking and laughing. They were out playing in the parking lot with each other, and nobody was looking at a cell phone.

And these little devices that we have are taking us away from each other. And that feeds the addiction crisis. And what we need to learn to do is to, one of the great things that they told me there is they said, you know, when I was at Louisa County in Virginia, they said the parents, I talked to the parents, and they said it’s so great because now the kid, it’s much easier to tell the kid, don’t use the cell phone from your drive. Use it at the dinner table. And they have dinners with each other where they actually talk with each other.

And all of us in this age have a hard time being parents. But we can also educate the parents. Yeah, have a meal. Sit down with your kids. Have a conversation with them. Cell phones are bad. And then give them opportunities for service. Because everybody wants to be effective in their lives. Everybody wants to be useful.

And when you’re serving other people, it has a magical impact on your life. It takes away the depression. The self-will run riot. You focus instead on another person’s problem, at least for a few moments of the day. And that is a reprieve.

And we need to think creatively about providing them those opportunities. You know, banning cell phones in school is one of the things that we need to do to remedy addiction. Not just all the standard nuts and bolts things, which we need to do. But we need to do everything we can to reestablish hope in our kids, to reestablish a sense of mission in their lives, a sense of purposefulness, and opportunities for them to act as part of a community.

So thank you all very much for your commitment to this issue, and God bless you.

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