George Washington was fond of laudanum, John F. Kennedy took a cocktail of narcotics,
and Willie Nelson smoked a joint on the roof. Yes,
there's been drug use in the White House from the very start.
George Washington has been mythologized as the greatest of Americans, but on a more human level,
it turns out he had the same fear that haunts many of us: A fear of dying young. That developed after
losing not only his 48-year-old father but also two of his siblings when they were only 3 and 12
years old. Understandably, he did the best he could to stay healthy. That meant a diet that
was more functional than indulgent, and it was one particular favorite, Brazil nuts, that John Adams
blamed for Washington losing all but one of his teeth in the years leading up to his presidency.
"It plagued him his entire life. He's pouring money into dentistry."
Washington did indulge in some of the best denture technology available to him, but the
hippopotamus-tusk dentures that were fitted over his one remaining tooth were painful to
wear nearly all the time. Laudanum ended up being the solution to the pain that he used throughout
his presidency. The drug is essentially a dose of opium dissolved in alcohol. Also
known as an opium tincture, it was effective as a painkiller, but it was also extremely addictive.
Washington's attempts at self-treatment didn't end there. After his death,
Mount Vernon cataloged nine medical texts in his library and noted that he regularly
ordered a wide array of medicines from Britain. Besides laudanum,
these included Venice treacle, a compound that often contained opium.
Quinine has only recently found itself on a list of banned substances, first barred from
some over-the-counter drugs in 1994, then from other products in 2006. Go all the way back to
the days of Thomas Jefferson, though, and it was a different story. Jefferson famously believed
in the healing power of natural remedies and relied on quinine, a Peruvian bark,
for relief from the headaches he suffered throughout his life. By 1790, it had ceased
to work, though he continued to use the drug at least occasionally during his presidency.
It was only in his later years that he started to rely on laudanum for relief from
chronic diarrhea. At the same time Jefferson was working on piecing together a whole new country,
he was also overseeing the work being done at his home, Monticello. Among the flowers
he ordered planted there were poppies that opium is derived from. It wasn't
until 1992 that anyone really took notice of that fact, and after a nearby drug raid,
the governing board at Monticello had all the plants, flowers, and seed packets destroyed.
By the time John F. Kennedy hit the campaign trail, he was physically a mess. In addition to
getting regular cortisone treatments for Addison's disease, which he was diagnosed with in 1947,
he was also dealing with back problems and complications from multiple spinal surgeries
that included a disk removal in 1944. He suffered from severe allergies and digestive issues,
and that's not even mentioning the sort of diseases they usually warn about in
junior high school health classes. Put all those things together, and it's not
entirely surprising that he relied on a literal cocktail of drugs and physician Max Jacobson.
Kennedy and Jacobson met when the former was on the campaign trail in 1960, and then again
after he re-injured his back in 1961. Jacobson administered his cocktails as the Secret Service
watched, and they weren't thrilled about it. One agent, Larry Newman, described Jacobson as a "bat
wing and chicken blood doctor," but the treatments kept JFK going throughout his presidency.
So, what was in those cocktails? A 1962 attempt at an analysis failed to yield any results and
Jacobson destroyed JFK's medical records, but Jacobson was known to favor mixtures that included
amphetamines, painkillers, and tranquilizers. When Jacobson was raided by New York's Bureau of
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in the late 1960s, they had a lot of illicit substances to seize.
Jefferson Airplane's Grace Slick says that contrary to popular belief, the song "White
Rabbit" isn't actually about drugs, at least, not directly. She told The Wall Street Journal,
"It's about following your curiosity. The White Rabbit is your curiosity. Alice follows
him wherever he goes. He leads her to drugs, though, and that's why the song was written."
Slick also has a hilarious story about drugs in the White House. Slick had attended an all-girls
finishing school called Finch College, and it was also the alma mater of Richard Nixon's daughter,
Tricia. The Nixons were in the White House when Tricia decided to host a tea party for
her school's prior graduates. The list of invitees included Slick, but since she was on the school's
roster under her maiden name, no one realized who she was. For Slick, it was game on. She said,
"So, I called Abbie Hoffman and said, 'Guess where we're going.
I had planned to spike Richard Nixon's tea with acid. But when Abbie and I were on line,
a security guard wouldn't let me in. He said, 'We checked, and you're a security risk.'"
Gerald Ford was sworn in as president in 1974, and it was a little over a year later that his son,
Jack, made some candid comments about his own drug use to the Portland Oregonian. He said,
"I've smoked marijuana before, and I don't think that's so exceptional for people growing
up in the 1960s. The important thing to me is that I do have friends who use drugs,
and I don't think that will exclude them as my friends."
He added that he was stepping forward to make the admission to prevent it from
surfacing later and potentially impacting his father's political
career. As for President Ford's reaction, it was pretty gracious.
Ford went on record to say that although he didn't condone drug use, he did laud his son's honesty.
It's worth noting that Jack wasn't the only member of Ford's White House to speak out about
drug use. It was a little over a year after leaving office that Betty Ford went public
with her addictions to painkillers and alcohol. In addition to entering a treatment facility,
she famously documented her recovery and helped establish the Betty Ford
Clinic. If she was on-site when new patients arrived, she would greet them and remind them,
"I'm Betty Ford, and I'm an alcoholic."
Willie Nelson first told the story of smoking a joint at the White House in his 1988 memoir,
and at the time, Nelson wrote that he was joined by a member of the staff. It wasn't
until later that a little bit more of the truth went from rumor to confirmed fact,
and in the documentary "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President," it's Carter himself who says,
"That is not exactly true. It was actually one of my sons."
Who would have thought the story was going to get any better? The son in question was Chip Carter,
who specified that the infamous incident happened when Nelson was at the White House playing a
set during Carter's re-election campaign. Chip explained to the Los Angeles Times,
"In the break I said, 'Let's go upstairs. We just kept going up 'til we got to the roof,
where we leaned against the flagpole at the top of the place and lit one up. If you know Washington,
the White House is the hub of the spokes — the way it was designed. ... You could sit
up there and could see all the traffic coming right at you. It's a nice place up there."
In 1989, President George Bush sat in the Oval Office and looked into the camera to
deliver a passionate speech. He held a plastic bag marked "Evidence," saying,
"This. This is crack cocaine."
He continued,
"[it was] seized a few days ago by drug enforcement agents in a park just across
the street from the White House. ... It's as innocent-looking as candy,
but it's turning our streets into battle zones."
It didn't take long for more to come out about the drug seizure
that had happened in a pretty safe, drug-free area of Washington, D.C.
The drug dealer in question was a high school senior named Keith Jackson,
whom DEA agents had pressured into meeting in Lafayette Park. He was arrested and sentenced
to 10 years in prison. This was despite the fact that a DEA agent admitted to
The Washington Post in a 1989 interview that they'd orchestrated the buy to fit
in with Bush's plan to claim crack could even be bought near the White House. The agent admitted,
"We had to manipulate him to get him down there. It wasn't easy."
QZ.com revealed that even the judge had problems with
the setup. He remarked at his sentencing that,
"[Bush] used you, in the sense of making a big drug speech."
Jackson was only released in 1998. Even at the time, Bush made his stance very clear.
When reporters from the Washington Post asked about what had happened, he replied,
"The man went there and sold drugs in front of the White House,
didn't he? I can't feel sorry for this fellow."
Should the use of illicit drugs follow a person forever? That was the question asked by the
Clinton administration in 1996. Secret Service agents went before Congress to testify that, yes,
they had given White House employees clearance despite background-check flags that included drug
use. The decision had been made to grant access to those individuals with a history of drug use,
but require stricter-than-normal drug testing in some cases.
It was wildly controversial. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich made statements
that accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of having largely staffed the White House with people who
shared their beliefs. The Clinton administration held fast, though, with some people coming forward
to out themselves, including press spokesman Mike McCurry. He told the Los Angeles Times,
"I was a kid in the 1970s. You know, did I smoke a joint from time to time? Of course
I did. ... But that doesn't disqualify me from serving here. The point is:
If I use drugs now in any way, shape, or form, I'm gone. I'm history."
And the administration did fire at least two people for failing drug tests, noting
that they had been put in their positions by the previous administration. Still,
the controversy wasn't helped any when Clinton granted his brother,
Roger, a presidential pardon for a 1985 cocaine-related conviction.
In 2021, President Biden's White House found itself facing questions similar to those that
had been asked in the Clinton era, and it all went public with a report from The Daily
Beast. That story alleged that prospective White House employees were initially told
that past marijuana use would be overlooked, but were later fired or forced to resign over
those same claims. In a press conference, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said only five
employees were impacted. Another informant told The New York Times that other deciding factors
came to light when the employees were more closely examined for higher-level clearances.
"There were other security issues that were raised."
Psaki also confirmed that the White House would be taking a more lenient stance on
recent marijuana use, especially considering the fact that many states were legalizing
it. Anyone hired would not be allowed to use marijuana while employed by the White House,
but officials said that they foresaw a new era where,
"Well-qualified applicants with limited marijuana
use will not be barred from serving the American people."
In 2021, Hunter Biden released his memoir, "Beautiful Things." In it, he shared his
decades-long struggle against addiction. It was an addiction that only strengthened
its hold on him after the 2015 loss of his brother, Beau. He recounted stories of loss,
profound grief, and overwhelming love. But he also told NPR in an interview,
"And even with all of that love, the feeling that overcame that love was
my need for another hit, which is a hard thing to live with."
For decades, addiction was something seen as taboo, but in an op-ed piece for The New
York Times, Nicholas Kristof put forward the idea that the Biden family was on the verge
of doing some serious good by going public with their private struggles. Hunter has described
what he hopes to see happen down the road saying he wanted addiction to be discussed
"as a mental health issue." He went on to say he'd written his book because it would,
"Give hopefully some people hope. ... And I don't just mean the people that
are stuck at the bottom of the well like I was, but the people that stand at the top of
that well and realize unless we go down with the lantern, he's never going to find his way out."
In June of 2023, news outlets reported that a dime-sized bag of cocaine had
been found in the White House. Fox News reported that bookies had Hunter Biden
down as a favorite for the source of the cocaine, despite President Biden's
claim that his family was out of town at the time of the drug's discovery. White
House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre followed that up with a request saying,
"Let's let the Secret Service do their job, which we believe and have all the
confidence that they will get to the bottom of this episode."
As unthinkable as it might seem, considering just how strict security is in the White House,
an unnamed expert also told Politico that it was unlikely they would ever
learn just who had brought cocaine into the building, revealing,
"Even if there were surveillance cameras, unless you were waving it around,
it may not have been caught. It's a bit of a thoroughfare. People walk by there all the time."
If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues,
help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).