JD Vance Takes a Hard Stance on Drugs. What Does His Adviser’s Past Mean for His Campaign?

Makena Kelly: Hey, it’s good to be back.

Leah Feiger: So happy you’re here. And Tim Marchman, WIRED’s director of science, politics, and security. Hey, Tim.

Tim Marchman: Hey, I’m so glad to be here.

Leah Feiger: I am so glad that you are both here today. We have so much to discuss. Makena, you wrote this piece, which our listeners can check out on WIRED.com. It’s in the show notes. But let’s start with the basics here. Who is Aaron Kofsky and what does he do for JD Vance?

Makena Kelly: Aaron Kofsky is a financial adviser for JD Vance. Vance, of course, is on the Senate Banking Committee, so he does a lot of work on crypto policy, banking policy. When Silicon Valley Bank failed, Politico wrote that Kofsky was very key to Vance’s thinking when it came to new regulations in that space. Before joining Vance’s staff, was on Pat Toomey’s staff, and then before that he was at the SEC as well.

Leah Feiger: And it goes without saying that should the Trump-Vance ticket win, he would very possibly very likely be following Vance straight to some more senior policy positions.

Makena Kelly: Right. The SEC commissioner that he worked for, Mark Uyeda, he is being talked about and is seen amongst some Bitcoin folks as being at least a temp SEC chairman if Trump were to win.

Leah Feiger: Wow. So why do we care about this guy? Why are we talking about Kofsky today?

Tim Marchman: Well, as Makena’s investigation shows for over a decade, he’s been posting on Reddit about his use of a genuinely staggering range of drugs, including cocaine, various opiate derivatives, MDMA.

Leah Feiger: I mean a whole host of drugs that we were not even familiar with when this story began.

Makena Kelly: Research chemicals.

Leah Feiger: Research chemicals.

Tim Marchman: One is tianeptine which is also known as gas station heroin. It’s illegal in 12 states. It’s an unscheduled, an unregulated antidepressant that you can buy in convenience stores and creates an opioid-like effect and has a reputation for causing really nasty withdrawal symptoms. And the other drug is kratom, which is again, a bit of… It mimics the effect of opioids. It’s very lightly regulated, unregulated, commonly bought in convenience stores. I’m sure a lot of people have seen it when they just go to the gas station in some parts of the country. So over this period of time, he wasn’t just writing about how he had maybe done some drugs here and there. He was writing in detail and as recently as three months ago about how to smuggle them through TSA, about their effects on him, about how he was experiencing withdrawal and in general writing as if he was addicted to gas station heroin and kratom. And the point of this reporting isn’t to judge him for what he does recreationally. The point is that this is someone who is in a very powerful and fairly senior position. So this raises serious questions about, among other things, Vance as a manager and he’s a very, very inexperienced politician. And here he has a very key staff member who’s posting all over the internet, all sorts of things that led a breadcrumb trail that Makena was able to connect to Kofsky personally. There are a lot of questions there about how this could go on for so long.