Washington – 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 when he stopped taking the drug in 1981, according to newly released FBI files.
The FBI this week released 1,561 pages from its files on Rehn quist in response to Freedom of Information Act requests filed after his death in September 2005. Privacy laws forbid disclosure of such files during the person’s lifetime.
During its 1986 investigation, when President Reagan nominated Rehnquist as chief justice, the FBI concluded that 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 each night, three times the usual starting dose.
Doctors interviewed by the FBI said that when he stopped taking the drug, he suffered paranoid delusions. One doctor said Rehn quist 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” and “seeming to see the design patterns on the hospital curtains change configuration.”
At one point, a doctor told the investigators, Rehnquist went to the lobby in his pajamas “in order to try to escape.”
Ultimately, doctors concluded that the withdrawal symptoms were so severe that they began giving Rehnquist the drug again and slowly lowered the dosage until he quit taking it on Feb. 7, 1982.
