While President Donald Trump’s nominee for health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has come under scrutiny for his views on vaccines, agriculture, abortion and more, his prospects for treating one of the nation’s biggest health crises have received far less attention.
Before joining Trump’s team, Kennedy campaigned for president on a yes plan 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 get rid of illegal drugs, opiates, and legal drugs,” Kennedy said at a virtual event during his campaign, called a “Latino Town Hall.”
Kennedy himself struggled with addiction in his youth, including addiction to cocaine and heroin, which he spoke about publicly. He announced his faith and commitment to the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous as his saving grace. Kennedy is also a strong proponent of clean living and said the addiction wellness farms he envisions would also treat people trying to get off antidepressants or other medications like those for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
DATE SET FOR CONFIRMATION OF HEALTH SECRETARY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
Drug addicts in Kensington, Philadelphia, occupied a street corner. (Meg Myers/Fox News Digital)
Wellness farms are not an entirely new idea. They are based on a framework known as the “therapeutic community” model, which relies heavily on peer and behavioral support for addiction, compared to drug-based treatment strategies such as methadone or buprenorphine therapy, which work to reduce intense opioid cravings, which addicts often attribute relapses. Many in the medical community, including researchers at the National Institutes of Health, consider such drug-assisted treatment to be the gold standard in addiction treatment.
AA also warns against using drugs like buprenorphine to treat addiction.
Kennedy actually visited two places that fit this framework for a documentary he made about the addiction crisis while running for president, called “Recovering America – A Film About Healing Our Addiction Crisis.” Their addiction treatment framework, like Kennedy’s wellness farms, includes a focus on peer recovery by giving addicts jobs and relearning how to live in a drug-free society. Kennedy said his farms would rehabilitate addicts growing organic crops, receive training in trade skills and learn other ways of living in society without the use of illicit drugs.
A warning sign about the dangers of opioid addiction in Canada that promotes medically assisted treatment.
One of the programs Kennedy visited in his addiction treatment documentary was a farm where men learn how to herd cattle, drive tractors and fix barns. Their days also consist of meditation, 12-step meetings and yoga, but addicts must go off-site to receive therapy and must not take any medications, such as antidepressants or buprenorphine.
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The program, called Simple Promise Farms, is located in rural Texas. Simple Promise does not employ staff licensed therapists or medical providers on the spot, according to The New York Times, which spoke with the program’s founder, Brandon Guinn.
Guinn is for The The New York Times that these peer-to-peer conversations are where “the important work is done … not with your therapist or your sponsor or your mentor, but from the shared experience of people struggling with addiction.”
The Twelve Steps originated in the now-global peer-to-peer addiction support group known as Alcoholics Anonymous, founded in the 1930s by a New York stockbroker named Bill W. and an Ohio-area surgeon, Dr. Bob S. (Photo by John van Hasselt/Corbis via Getty Images)
Keith Humphreys, a psychologist and drug policy expert at Stanford University, said that while there is nothing wrong with “therapeutic community” models, he questions the exclusion of evidence-based treatments that have been proven to help people get off the harmful drugs that cause addiction. heroin addiction.
“Considering how much is known, there is almost more than what is being described [an] A sort of 18th century sanctuary. Given how much has been learned about the nature of the condition, the things you can do with psychotherapy, the things you can do with medicine, why not have that? Why wouldn’t you want that?” Humphries asked.
“It’s not like it wouldn’t benefit anyone,” Humphries added. He noted that the complex nature of addiction is difficult to address without modern advances in treatment and suggested that city dwellers may lack the desire or resources to move to remote farms for treatment.
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Humphries said programs that turn away patients who take antidepressants or other medications are actually quite common in the US. He pointed to a program that federal government founded in the 1930s in Lexington, Kentucky, which followed this model but also noted that its success rates were low.
“George Vaillant did a study of 400 consecutive admissions [to the Lexington program]and 400 of them got sick again after that,” Humphries pointed out. “So, of course, we know a lot more than we did then. So why not take advantage of it?”
Miami, Florida, Biscayne Boulevard, Vita Recovery, a luxury addiction treatment center. (Photo by Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Humphries also said that Kennedy’s plan to fund programs through revenues from legal marijuana would be such a bureaucratic hurdle that it would be a difficult and lengthy process to get those programs up and running. “There are about 500 practical steps and hurdles between all of that, but I don’t think this is going to happen,” Humphries said.
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Fox News Digital reached out to Kennedy’s representatives for comment, particularly on his stance on medically assisted treatment therapies, but had not heard back by press time.
