Former White House doctor's alleged pill scandal resurfaces as he asks Biden to take drug test

Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) raised questions about his own alleged drug scandal after accusing President Joe Biden of planning to take “performance-enhancing drugs” ahead of his debate against Donald Trump this week.

Jackson, a former White House physician, announced he would ask Biden to take a drug test before and after the debate, while speaking to Fox News' Maria Bartiromo during an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures” this weekend.

Jackson told Bartiromo he had “no choice” but to ask if the president was taking medication after witnessing his performance at the State of the Union address in March.

“There was a Joe Biden that came out that was not at all similar to what we've been seeing on a daily basis for the last three and a half years,” he said. “And there's surely no way to explain it other than he was onto something.” That they had given him medicine.

Jackson offered a detailed description of how he thought the president's doctors would treat him, saying Biden's trip to Camp David before the debate would give his team a chance to experiment to “get the doses right.”

When asked what medications the president might be taking, Jackson listed medications from a pharmacy, including drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, as well as stimulants like Adderall and Provigil.

Jackson's accusations seemed a little too far-fetched given that he was embroiled in his own alleged drug scandal after leading the White House medical unit.

In 2018, a report was released by the office of Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mt.), ranking member of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, which claimed that Jackson allegedly gave a “significant reservation” to a member of the military office of the White House. of the opioid Percocet without going through the appropriate procedures.

The report also claimed that White House staffers nicknamed Jackson “Candyman” after witnessing his loose approach to prescribing controlled substances.

Jackson was the top White House physician under President Barack Obama and Trump. He left that post in 2018 and became Trump's chief medical adviser a year later.

In January, a report from the Defense Department's inspector general found that between 2017 and 2019, under the Trump administration, White House doctors liberally prescribed controlled substances to Washington aides, violating federal law, while keeping poor records of dispersed drugs.

In response to the report, which did not directly name Jackson, a spokesperson for the doctor told NBC News that he was not director of the White House medical unit for most of the period from which the documents cited in the report came from.

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