The north side of the White House is seen from Lafayette Park on June 30, 2023. The White House was briefly evacuated July 2, 2023, while President Joe Biden was at Camp David after a suspicious powder was discovered by the Secret Service in a common area of the West Wing, and a preliminary test showed the substance was cocaine. (Carlos Bongioanni/Stars and Stripes)
The Secret Service is investigating after cocaine was found Sunday at the White House. The white powder was found near an area where visitors to the West Wing leave their cellphones, three people familiar with the matter said, a discovery that caused a brief evacuation of the White House grounds.
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden were not home at the time, having spent the weekend at Camp David. There is no indication anyone was using the cocaine at the White House.
It was not the first time, though, that an illegal drug had made it to the Executive Mansion. Here’s a brief history of drugs at the White House.
Willie Nelson
Country crooner Willie Nelson smoked a marijuana joint on the roof of the White House during a visit to then-President Jimmy Carter in 1980, according to Nelson himself, who has told the story over and over and over. He even puff-puff-passed it to a White House “servant,” Nelson claimed. In 2020, Carter confirmed the “servant” was actually his son James Earl “Chip” Carter III.
Nowadays, recreational marijuana is legal in Washington, except on federal properties such as, say, the White House.
Franklin D. Roosevelt?
Historian Steven M. Gillon made quite a claim in 2012 while researching a book about President Franklin D. Roosevelt. White House records for Dec. 7, 1941 — the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor — show Roosevelt, who was suffering from one of his chronic sinus infection at the time, spent more than an hour that evening with White House physician Ross McIntire.
In a time with no antibiotics, small doses of cocaine were a standard medical treatment for sinus infections, Gillon found. It is not clear whether Roosevelt would have become intoxicated with the doses, or whether McIntire would have even told Roosevelt what he was using for treatment. Whatever the doctor was doing, Roosevelt liked it: McIntire visited the White House frequently and even traveled with the president.
Snoop Dogg
In a 2014 conversation with Jimmy Kimmel on the rapper’s YouTube channel, he claimed to have smoked weed in a White House bathroom — sort of. Dogg appears to have been high while telling the story, and it does not exactly track.
Kimmel: Have you ever smoked at the White House?
Dogg: In the bathroom.
Kimmel: You did? In the White House.
Dogg: In the bathroom. Not in the White House — but in the bathroom. Because I said, “May I use the bathroom for a second?” And they said, “What are you going to do? No. 1 or No. 2?” I said, “No. 2.”
Kimmel: Who said this? The first lady?
Dogg: No. The CIA. Or the FBI. The alphabet boys. So I said, “Look, when I do the No. 2, I usually, you know, have a cigarette or I light something to get the aroma right.” They said, “You know what? You can light a piece of napkin.” I said, “I’ll do that.” And the napkin was this. (takes large drag from a blunt)
Kimmel: This is some story.
John F. Kennedy?
Of all the claims and speculation bandied about in these White House drug stories, the ones about President John F. Kennedy come with the biggest asterisks, or at least “ALLEGEDLY” stamped over them in bright-red ink.
One is that he smoked pot with alleged mistress Mary Pinchot Meyer in a White House bedroom. Another is that a physician nicknamed “Dr. Feelgood” prescribed Kennedy, who suffered from a painful back condition, steroid and amphetamine injections.
British teen idols
Most Americans have never heard of “Grange Hill,” but in Britain, the TV drama set in a North London school was a huge success. The show ran for 31 seasons, from 1978 to 2008, but during its 1980s heyday, the young actors playing students became teen idols, garnering them an invitation to the White House to help first lady Nancy Reagan bring her “Just Say No” campaign across the pond.
In 1998, one of those actors, Erkan Mustafa, was caught by a tabloid saying he and his castmates had smoked pot in the White House garden, and that when he met the first lady, he was “out of it.” However, Mustafa told the Guardian in 2016 that he made the story up to sound cool.
George H.W. Bush’s baggie
President George H.W. Bush did not consume crack cocaine in the White House, but he did bring a bag of it into the Oval Office in 1989 to use as a prop during a speech about the “War on Drugs.”
Holding up the bag, Bush said, “This is crack cocaine, seized a few days ago by drug enforcement agents in a park just across the street from the White House. It could easily have been heroin or PCP. It’s as innocent-looking as candy, but it’s turning our cities into battle zones, and it’s murdering our children. Let there be no mistake, this stuff is poison.”
A few weeks later, The Washington Post reported the drug bust “just across the street from the White House” was a setup. Undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agents, who already had made several transactions with a suspected drug dealer, asked him for another purchase, this time wanting to meet specifically at Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House. In a tape recording of the call, the teenage suspect responded, “Where the (expletive) is the White House?” He was later sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Basketball champ Gary McLain
In 1985, Villanova University basketball star Gary McLain played in one of the most exciting NCAA title games in history, a monumental upset of John Thompson’s Georgetown. Soon after the team’s championship win came a visit to the White House, during which, McLain later revealed in a Sports Illustrated essay, he was “wired” on cocaine.
“President Reagan was welcoming my teammates and me at the White House and giving his little speech about how inspirational our victory was,” McLain wrote. “And the cocaine had me floating in my own private world. . . . I was standing a couple of feet behind him, looking in his hair, thinking, ‘This guy has more dandruff than your average man.’ Thinking thoughts like, ‘I could push him in the head, just a little tap, and make news across the world.’ That’s how high I was.”
Rocker Grace Slick
By the late 1960s, Grace Slick was the famously brash and psychedelic singer of Jefferson Airplane hits such as “White Rabbit,” but once upon a time, she had been Grace Wing, a student at an elite girls’ finishing school. White House daughter Tricia Nixon was also an alum and decided to have a White House tea party for all the school’s graduates. Slick got her invitation for “Grace Wing” and enlisted her activist friend Abbie Hoffman to accompany her.
“I had planned to spike Richard Nixon’s tea with acid,” Slick later told the Wall Street Journal.
Alas, while standing in line for the tea party, security made the connection and denied them entry, she said.
The Washington Post’s Peter Hermann, Justin Wm. Moyer and Abby Ohlheiser contributed to this report.
