It seems that Trump White House allegedly had drugs via Yahoo.
It should be mentioned that the inspector general of the Defense Department published a report in January that described how, under the Trump administration, the White House Medical Unit delivered controlled medications with little monitoring and even worse record keeping. It was repeatedly observed by investigators that the unit had ordered thousands upon thousands of doses of modafinil, a stimulant used for decades to help military pilots stay attentive during extended flights.
According to interviews, employees who required a pick-me-up to get through another day at a particularly demanding work or who needed an energy boost after a late night frequently received the stimulant. The White House was “awash in speed” at the time, a former official tells Rolling Stone.
According to informed sources, stimulant samples were circulated among those who contributed lines to significant Trump speeches, worked late into the night on foreign policy projects, dealt with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, handled the barrage of media questions regarding that investigation, and much more. (When an email was sent requesting comment for this story, the Trump campaign did not reply.)
Trump officials, both young and old, often obtained other prohibited substances besides modafinil, also marketed under the name Provigil. It resembled the Wild West in certain ways. Everything was rather loose. One individual recalls, “We were going to fill this, whatever someone needs,” having intimate knowledge of the situation.
According to three individuals, Xanax, an anti-anxiety medicine, was also a well-liked and easily obtained narcotic during the Trump administration. The Pentagon paper makes no mention of Xanax or its generic equivalent, alprazolam. According to two individuals with firsthand knowledge of the events, senior officials obtained Xanax from the White House Medical Unit and distributed it among their peers.
The Trump administration gained notoriety for its disorganized policymaking process and paranoid culture, in which employees frequently revealed the secrets of their coworkers and bureaucratic factions frequently focused more on sabotaging one another than on pressing national security issues. It’s hard to say how much of that was caused by Provigil and Xanax being readily available.
But what’s clear is that there was a breakdown of medical standards and safeguards at the highest levels of the American government; some staffers even believed that confidential information about their mental health was at risk. With Trump pushing to return to power on an agenda even more vicious than his first, a full accounting of the misuse of powerful stimulants and sedatives by his staff isn’t just a matter of historical interest. It’s a preview of a very possible future.
During Trump’s presidency, two sources say, senior staffers would repeatedly down Xanax with alcohol. Such a combination increases the risk of “serious, life-threatening side effects,” according to the National Library of Medicine. Nevertheless, senior officials would use Xanax and alcohol together to soothe themselves while enduring the sky-high levels of stress that come with working at the highest pressure environment job in America — with the added pleasure of serving the whims of the infamously volatile, intemperate Trump.
As one former senior administration official puts it: “You try working for him and not chasing pills with alcohol.”
THE WHITE HOUSE MEDICAL UNIT has been handing out prescription medications to staffers for decades — especially when they’re traveling abroad, and need to combat jet lag.
“I think any White House staff knows that overseas trips are very grueling,” Stephanie Grisham, Trump’s former White House press secretary, recalls. “For us, you’d be on a flight with a president who never sleeps, and then you hit the ground running in a foreign country, and you have to be alert and ready for the president and other foreign leaders.”
She describes a procedure broadly familiar to staffers across administrations: On overseas trips, physician to the president Dr. Ronny Jackson “would come around Air Force One asking Donald Trump’s senior staff if they needed anything. This included Provigil and [the sleep aid] Ambien, and he would hand them out, typically in the form of packets with two or three pills in them. When this happened on Air Force One, a nurse would be trailing him, writing down who got what.”
It’s back home where things got sloppier, the Defense Department investigation and our sources note. Pills were often handed out without a specific need or diagnosis. Black-and-white procedures that doctors and pharmacists routinely follow when prescribing controlled substances were ignored. Orders for pills were often written down incorrectly, or not at all. One former White House Medical Unit staffer told Pentagon investigators that the unit “work[ed] in the gray… helping anybody who needs help to get this mission done.” Another said, “Is it being done appropriately or legally all the time? No. But are they going to get to that end result that the bosses want? Yeah.”
So while prescription drugs have long been in the White House — John F. Kennedy reportedly took a cocktail of uppers and downers to fight back pain, and Richard Nixon allegedly took an anti-epileptic drug “when his mood wasn’t too good” — they have rarely been dispensed as widely as they were in the Trump years.
