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The leading third-party candidate for president, an environmental lawyer and activist, son and nephew of legendary liberal Democratic politicians, has just dropped out of the race and announced that he is joining the campaign of the most anti-environmental president and presidential candidate in recent history, the leader of a Republican Party he has transformed into a right-wing, anti-democratic, proto-fascist personality cult.

I could go on and on listing the contradictions and rejections of principles, all of which are astonishing.

But Donald Trump and Bobby Kennedy, as I’ve called Robert F. Kennedy Jr. since we met freshman year at Harvard, have always had a lot in common. Both are spoiled, playboy sons of wealth from the Northeast; both (in Michelle Obama’s words) were given “the grace to fail forward” as underachieving adolescents who were admitted to Ivy League colleges thanks to “the affirmative action of generational wealth”; both were reckless lifelong adolescents, both attention-seeking cheaters and liars, both assholes. And Kennedy’s hour-long speech today was almost as meandering and full of lies as a typical Trump hour.

On the subject of reckless adolescent rights, I have one anecdote to tell from Bobby Kennedy. But it is actually relevant to his endorsement of Donald Trump for president and his apparent expectation of joining a second Trump administration.

In Kennedy’s speech today, he spoke at length about federal pharmaceutical regulations and programs that address chronic disease. “I’m going to change that,” he said, promising to “staff” health care agencies very differently. “In four years, America will be a healthy country … if President Trump is elected and keeps his word.” Trump, he added, “has told me that he wants that to be his legacy.”

My story about Bobby Kennedy is about pharmaceuticals. Not the legal, life-saving kind, like the vaccines he has made his profession, but the recreational kind.

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As a candidate, Kennedy got a very sympathetic pass for his years of drug use because he is an addict, having used heroin from age 15 to 29. He dropped out when he was arrested after overdosing on a flight from Minneapolis to the Black Hills and was discovered by police in South Dakota to have heroin on him; he pleaded guilty and received only probation. Kennedy, as Joe Hagan wrote in a recent Vanity Fair profile, “has made his addiction history part of his campaign story.”

As a teenager in Nebraska, I smoked pot and took LSD before I went to Harvard in 1972. Sometime during my freshman year, I tried cocaine, liked it, and later decided to get a gram for myself. A friend told me about a boy in our class who was selling coke.

The dealer was Bobby Kennedy. I had never met him. I contacted him; he said, OK, come to his room in Hurlbut, his dormitory, where I had never been, five minutes walk away. His roommate, whom I knew, was the future journalist Peter Kaplan, who, like Kennedy, I remained friends with for the rest of his life. He left when I got there. I wondered if he always did that when Bobby had clients.

“Hi, Bobby,” Kennedy introduced himself. There was another boy in the room, tall, lanky, and handsome. “This is my brother Joe.” That is, Joseph P. Kennedy II, two years older, the future six-term congressman from Massachusetts.

Bobby Kennedy wasn’t famous, but he was the most famous person I ever met.

He poured me a line to taste and handed me a one-inch plastic drinking straw. I snorted. We chatted for a minute. I paid him, I think, $40 cash. That was a lot of money, the equivalent of $300 today. But cocaine bought from a Kennedy accompanied by a Kennedy brother—the moment of glamour seemed worth it.

Ten minutes later, when I was back in my room, I got a phone call.

“Hello?”
“It’s Bobby.”
“Hi.”
“You have my straw!”
I realized that I had done that, and hadn’t thought about it. Because… it was a worthless piece of plastic straw. But Bobby was pissed.
“There are crystals in it, man, growing. You taken It.”
Growing? The residue of cocaine powder mixed with mucus formed crystals over time? What did I know. It reminded me of a science fair project.
“So… you want the straw back?”
“Yesman.”
I walked back to his room with it. He didn’t smile or say thank you. It was the last time I ever bought a coke from anyone.

A famous rich kid selling a hard drug that could have gotten him – or, more accurately, someone who was not it—a years-long prison sentence. His almost fetishistic obsession with a bit of plastic waste. His greedy little rages cloaked in righteousness. His belief that he was growing precious cocaine crystals. In retrospect, it seemed to me a small illustration of the child as the father of the man he became: a fantastical pseudoscientific crusader, a middle-aged preppy prick who takes selfies with barbecued dogs and plays pranks on roadkill bear cubs he didn’t have time to eat.

But the reason I finally decided to share this anecdote is because of a criminal justice policy advocated by the presidential candidate he just endorsed. It’s one of the many spectacular contradictions I mentioned earlier.

That is, Donald Trump, if he becomes president as Kennedy is now trying to bring about, wants to execute drug dealers. He said as much in a presidential speech in 2018: “These are terrible people, and we have to get tough on these people, because … if we don’t get tough on the drug dealers, we’re wasting our time … And that toughness includes the death penalty … We’re going to dissolve this problem… We’re going to solve it with toughness… That’s what they’re most afraid of.”

He said it again in 2022 when announcing his current candidacy: “We’re going to ask (Congress) to pass a law that ensures that anyone who sells drugs, and is caught selling drugs, will face the death penalty for their heinous acts.”

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And at a campaign rally last April, he elaborated on his plan to kill drug dealers: “The only thing they understand is strength. They understand strength — and it will all stop.” Our policies, he explained, should be like that in the country he demonizes the most. “When I met President Xi of China, I said, ‘Do you have a drug problem?’ ‘No, no, no,’ (he said,) ‘We don’t have a drug problem.’ (I said,) ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Speedy trial!’ I said, ‘Tell me about a speedy trial.’ When they catch the drug seller, the drug supplier, the drug dealers, they give them an immediate trial. It takes one day. One day. At the end of that day, if they’re guilty, which they always are… within one day that person is executed. They execute the drug dealers. They have zero drug problem. Zero.”

One question journalists might ask new Trump campaigner and potential Trump administration official Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is something like this: The candidate you are campaigning for, whose government you apparently want to serve in, wants to rewrite our laws to give drug dealers, particularly those who sell narcotics, the death penalty. Given that you sold cocaine in your youth, what do you think of his advocacy for a regime that could have led to your own execution at age 19?

Editor’s note: The Kennedy campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this story.