President Biden’s younger brother revealed Wednesday that he has spoken to the commander in chief about using psychedelic drugs to treat addiction — and that the 80-year-old is “very open-minded” about it.
Frank Biden told Michael Smerconish, host of SiriusXM’s “The Michael Smerconish Program,” that his battle with alcoholism led him to explore the possibility of whether psychedelics — including LSD, ketamine and ayahuasca, which he referred to as “the godfather of them all” — could be used as medicine to treat mental health issues that lead to addiction.
“I have done a great deal of research, because I’m a recovering alcoholic for many, many years,” the 69-year-old first brother told Smerconish.
“I have looked into, as a result of doing lots of research, into early AA [Alcoholics Anonymous], it turns out that Bill Wilson, the founder of AA, although he was sober for many, many, many years, still suffered from major depression, which is, of course, a mental illness, just like having leukemia or any other physical ailment. And he had no solution. He was introduced in the very early years of lysergic acid and he did acid, and the psychedelic experience ameliorated, if not eliminated his depressive symptoms,” Biden explained.
He went on to describe how the federal government “looked deeply into the application of psychedelics for the treatment of addiction” in the 1950s and had “magnificent success” and that his own research on the subject has led him to hold a “personal belief” that “psychedelic can be considered a medicine.”
Smerconish probed Frank as to whether he’s had conversations with the president on the subject, which the first brother said that he has.
“Yes. He is very open-minded. Put it that way,” Biden said of his brother.
When Smerconish argued that he believes “addiction has driven many of the current event issues that surround your family,” Biden responded, “You got that right.”
While serving in the Senate, Joe Biden pushed for stiffer sentences for drug users as part of his efforts to intensify the War on Drugs.
In 1988, the same year his son Hunter was arrested for drug possession, Biden voted for the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which targeted the use of crack cocaine, making it the only narcotic with a mandatory penalty for possession.
Anti-drug war activists have also accused President Biden of reneging on a campaign pledge to free everyone in prison for marijuana possession, noting that his Oct. 6, 2022, mass pardon of about 6,500 people charged federally with pot possession didn’t free any of the roughly 2,700 people in federal prison for marijuana dealing.
Scandal-ridden first son Hunter Biden infamously struggled with years-long alcohol and crack cocaine addiction that cost him thousands of dollars.
At one point in August 2018, he was recorded begging his sister-in-law-turned-lover, Hallie Biden, to let him use his credit card points to pay for a stay in rehab.
He wrote in his 2021 memoir that he’s even “cooked up” his own crack cocaine to fuel his addiction.
