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 whether the president was on medication after watching his performance at the State of the Union address in March.

“There was a Joe Biden who was not at all like what we’ve seen on a daily basis for the last three and a half years,” he said. “And there’s probably no way to explain that other than he was taking something. They gave him medication.”

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.”

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

Jackson's accusations seem a little too fair given that he himself was embroiled in an alleged drug scandal after serving as head of the White House medical unit.

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

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

Jackson was the chief White House physician under Presidents 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 from 2017 to 2019, under the Trump administration, White House doctors liberally prescribed controlled substances to their Washington aides, in violation of federal law, while maintaining poor records of drugs dispensed.

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 during much of the period from which the documents cited in the report came.

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