The Supreme Court meets Addiction

Drug addiction cuts across the fabric of society to include First Lady's and the Supreme Court of the United States. The lesson here is that no one can hide from the animal of addiction. For example, the late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist took a powerful sedative during his first decade on the high court and grew so dependent on it that he became delusional and tried to escape from a hospital in his pajamas when he stopped taking the drug in 1981, according to newly released FBI files.

The files also show that during both of Rehnquist's confirmation battles — when he was named to the court by President Nixon in 1971 and when President Reagan nominated him as chief justice in 1986 — the Justice Department enlisted the FBI to find out what witnesses lined up by Senate Democrats were prepared to say.

The FBI this week released files on Rehnquist in response to Freedom of Information Act requests filed after his death in September 2005.

That Rehnquist checked into George Washington University Hospital for a week in late December 1981 to be treated for back pain and dependence on a prescription drug was previously known. Journalists had noted that fall that Rehnquist's speech was sometimes slurred on the bench.

But the files reveal new details about the addiction. In 1986, the FBI concluded Rehnquist began taking the drug Placidyl for insomnia after back surgery in 1971, the year before he joined the court. By 1981, he apparently was taking 1,500 milligrams a day, three times the usual starting dose. Placidyl is a sedative and sleep-inducing drug that is not usually prescribed for more than a week at a time.

It is not an opiate and is not a painkiller, but it is addictive, and withdrawal can cause hallucinations and temporary memory loss.

One doctor told the FBI that when the associate justice stopped taking the drug, Rehnquist thought he heard voices outside his hospital room plotting against him and had "bizarre ideas and outrageous thoughts," including imagining "a CIA plot against him."

At one point, a doctor told the investigators, Rehnquist went "to the lobby in his pajamas in order to try to escape." Doctors began giving Rehnquist the drug again and slowly lowered the dosage until he quit taking it entirely on Feb. 7, 1982.

By 1986, the files show, all the doctors interviewed by the FBI said the former drug dependence should not affect Rehnquist's future work on the court, and it did not become an issue in his confirmation as chief justice.

The Rehnquist files indicate that in 1971, the Nixon administration was deeply concerned about hostile witnesses to Rehnquist, after the Senate's rejection of two previous Supreme Court nominees, Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell.
advertising
Click Here

In 1986, the FBI files show, Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., who was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked the FBI to interview witnesses who might testify about allegations that Rehnquist had "challenged" blacks waiting in line to vote in Phoenix in 1962. Rehnquist was a legal adviser to the local Republican Party at the time.

The request was approved by John Bolton, then an assistant attorney general, who late last year stepped down as U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations after the Senate did not act on his nomination.

Bolton acted despite a warning by an FBI official that the bureau might be accused of "intimidating the Democrats' witnesses."