After this stint in D.C., Kudlow returned to the private sector in 1987, headed to Wall Street and spent some years like every other debauched executive with an excess of cash and a waterbed in the tail end of the Me Decade: on weeklong cocaine binges. His drug problem caused him to resign from the investment bank Bear Stearns in 1994.

Conservative intellectual godfather William Buckley, never one to let a fine right-wing mind go to waste, soon scooped him off the sidewalk and appointed him senior economics editor at National Review, the nation’s preeminent conservative publication.

“I loved that, because of National Review’s intellectual atmosphere and interesting people,” Kudlow told the Catholic publication Crisis Magazine in 2000. “And there is a certain Catholicism that permeates the place.”

But Kudlow kept drinking and snorting, and National Review fired him after a year. He hit rock bottom in 1995 and shipped out for five months in a Minnesota rehab. There, he ditched the coke and booze for good. Upon leaving rehab, he signed up for some Catholic Opus Dei retreats and found he liked the rigor of a conservative, and what some call "cult-like," group that has been likened to Scientology, with ties to fascist organizations in Italy, and which offered spiritual succor to the likes of the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

http://www.newsweek.com/larry-kudlow-donald-trump-economic-adviser-459226