In a virtual event last week that was billed as a “Latino Town Hall,” presidential candidate and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. unveiled his plan to overhaul addiction treatment programs. Speaking during a live recording of the Latino Capitalist podcast, Kennedy described opioid, antidepressant, and ADHD “addicts” receiving treatment on tech-free “wellness farms,” where they would spend as much as three or four years growing organic produce.
How to pay for these farms? Kennedy had an answer. With money generated through a sales tax on cannabis products, Kennedy said, “I’m going to dedicate that revenue to creating wellness farms—drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country,” he said. “I’m going to make it so people can go, if you’re convicted of a drug offense, or if you have a drug problem, you can go to one of these places for free.”
On the farms, he said, residents would grow their own organic food—which would help them recover from addiction, “because a lot of the behavioral issues are food related. A lot of the illnesses are food related.” The idea that addiction is connected to consuming non-organic food is not backed by robust science—but it’s in line with many other unfounded claims that Kennedy has made in the past about pesticides and non-organic food causing chronic disease, behavioral problems, and autism.
Cell phones and other screens, he said, would be prohibited. “We’re going to re-parent people and restore connection to community,” he promised. “We have a whole generation of kids who are dispossessed, they’re alienated, their marginalized, their suicide rates are exploding; the second largest killer for young people is drug addiction.” Kennedy has suggested in the past that 5G cell phone technology could cause health problems.
The range of people receiving such treatment could potentially include wide swaths of the population, since the wellness farms wouldn’t just be for people addicted to illegal drugs, but also for people who are taking antidepressants and ADHD medications. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 11 percent of Americans ages 12 and older take antidepressants, and about 4 percent of Americans between the ages of five and 64 take medication for ADHD.
I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need—three or four years if they need it—to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.
Last year, Kennedy posited during a Twitter spaces event with Elon Musk that antidepressants could be to blame for school shootings.
The Kennedy campaign didn’t respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment on the remarks that Kennedy made during this event.
I guess I just have an easier time imagining myself in a position of power going “yeah, the status quo is tragic, but I’m making a lot of money off of it” as opposed to stumbling into a position of power by playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey completely blind to people’s problems. Maybe they didn’t ask “why?” enough as a child. It seems so insular! You’d have to have even avoided interacting with the opioid epidemic because there’s plenty of stories of in-group people getting a broken ankle playing tennis, taking some prescribed opioids, and getting got. If you ever dare to ask “why were there so many opioids?” you’d find yourself back at capitalism. I pray to be awakened from any biases that would worm up my brain like that.
Anti-intellectualism is a key feature of American culture.