RFK Jr. proposed sending addicts to taxpayer-funded wellness farms to tackle drug crisis

While President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services nominee, Robert F.Kennedy Jr., has been scrutinized over his views on vaccines, farming, abortion and more, his perspective on treating one of the nation’s foremost health crises has received far less attention.Before joining Trump’s team, Kennedy campaigned for president on a plan to treat addiction by creating “wellness farms” funded by tax revenues from federally legalized marijuana sales.

“I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go and get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also legal drugs,” Kennedy said at a virtual event during his campaign, billed as a “Latino Town Hall.” Kennedy himself struggled with addiction when he was younger, including to cocaine and heroin, which he has spoken about publicly.He has heralded his faith and commitment to Alcoholic’s Anonymous’s 12 Step-program as his saving grace.

Kennedy is a strong proponent of clean living as well, and said that the addiction treatment wellness farms he imagines would also treat people who are trying to get off anti-depressants, or other medications like those for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).Wellness farms are not an entirely novel idea.They are based on a framework known as a “therapeutic community” model, which relies heavily on peer-to-peer support and behavioral solutions for addiction, as compared to medication-based treatment strategies like methadone or buprenorphine therapy, which work to cut out the intense cravings from opioids, to which addicts often attribute relapses.

Many in the medical community, including researchers at the National Institutes of Health, consider such medication-assisted treatment to be the gold standard in addiction treatment. AA also warns against the use of medications like buprenorphine to treat addiction.  Kennedy actually visited two places that align with this framework for a documentary he created about the crisis of addicti...