In dark bluejeans and work shirt, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood in a Texas farm field, faced a camera and outlined his plan to combat drug addiction.
“I’m going to bring a new industry to these forgotten corners of America, where addicts can help each other recover from their addictions,” he said in a 45-minute documentary, “Recovering America: A Film About Healing Our Addiction Crisis,” released in June by his presidential campaign.
“We’re going to build hundreds of healing farms where American kids can reconnect to America’s soil, where they can learn the discipline of hard work that rebuilds self-esteem and where they can master new skills,” he continued.
As Mr. Kennedy prepares for his confirmation hearings to become federal health secretary, he has faced intense focus for his views of vaccines, the pharmaceutical industry, nutrition and chronic disease. But there has been little discussion of his ideas to address the drug crisis, one of the country’s deadliest problems, which he refers to as a “plague.”
According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a federal agency that Mr. Kennedy would oversee if confirmed, roughly 48.5 million Americans have a substance use disorder involving drugs, alcohol or both. According to the most recent provisional federal data, there were nearly 90,000 drug overdose deaths in the 12 months that ended in August 2024.
The way Mr. Kennedy overcame his own addiction to heroin informs his approach to treatment generally. He often invokes his “spiritual realignment,” anchored by a belief in God, and reinforced by more than 40 years of daily 12-step-program meetings.
His proposal for the farms is silent on key issues relevant to addiction treatment, particularly on methadone and buprenorphine, medications that blunt cravings for opioids like heroin and fentanyl.
Those medications are regarded as the gold standard for opioid-addicted patients for which funding has long had bipartisan support. According to a 2019 analysis by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine of numerous studies, the medications reduced drug mortality rates by 50 percent.
But many 12-step followers consider taking drugs in order to heal drug addiction to be abhorrent. Some chapters of Narcotics Anonymous, a 12-step program, do not allow people on the medications to speak at meetings. The recovery communities that Mr. Kennedy often praises, including the Texas farm where he filmed part of his documentary, prohibit these medications on site.
As health secretary, Mr. Kennedy would supervise agencies that award grants to programs that treat addiction, including those that use those medications. But he could not unilaterally overhaul those programs. Moreover, setting up and financing healing farms would most likely require congressional approval.
Mr. Kennedy did not respond to repeated requests to be interviewed for this article, but his comments in the documentary and across social media suggest that his approach to addiction is similar to his approach to other health scourges: clean living.
At drug rehabilitation farms, he has said, residents would grow organic food, receive training in trade skills and “learn to get re-parented.” Cellphones would be prohibited. Residents could remain as long as they wanted. The farms could also be available to young people who no longer wished to take anti-depressants or medications such as Adderall, which is used to treat A.D.H.D.
He has proposed to pay for the farms by levying a federal tax on marijuana, which he would press to be sold in dispensaries nationwide. Some drug policy experts said that seemed ironic.
“Paying for treatment by encouraging marijuana addiction is like paying for hospital costs by encouraging excessive speeding,” said Kevin Sabet, a former drug policy expert in Democratic and Republican administrations.
Treatment experts said that healing farms would have limited utility given the complexity of problems entwined with addiction to drugs and alcohol, including mental illness, poverty and trauma.
“Few people are willing to leave their communities for six months or more to live in a therapeutic community in a national forest,” said Keith Humphreys, a psychologist and drug policy expert at Stanford University.
And without complementary addiction-prevention strategies, Dr. Humphreys added, “this plan has little chance of making a significant impact on the nation’s addiction crisis.”
The programs that Mr. Kennedy praises in his documentary are versions of a longstanding model called a “therapeutic community.” In contrast to conventional inpatient rehab, which typically addresses addiction as a disease and has staff trained in medicine and social services, therapeutic communities see addiction as a symptom of a person’s deeper pain and behavioral problems. They are often run by a hierarchy of peers in recovery, who gain privileges and leadership roles as they progress.
Practices adopted by two communities that the documentary features could shed light on Mr. Kennedy’s priorities.
Neither accepts residents who take addiction treatment medications. Neither has licensed therapists or medical providers on site; instead, they offer group meetings run by peers in recovery. Neither accepts government funding.
“I don’t want my hands tied,” said Brandon Guinn, the founder of Simple Promise Farms in Elgin, Texas, where Mr. Kennedy toured the fields for the documentary. “I feel like sometimes, if we had that government money that maybe it could hinder us,” he said in a recent interview with The New York Times.
Instead, 12 residents — all men, with addictions to opioids, alcohol, cocaine and methamphetamine — pay $11,000 for monthly room and board. In addition, they pay off-site therapists directly.
The typical stay is 60 days, said Mr. Guinn, a former kindergarten special-education teacher. The men learn how to tend to livestock, operate tractors and repair barns. Referring to working on the farm as “therapeutic gardening,” Mr. Guinn drew an analogy between weeding, digging and planting and the hard work of addiction recovery. The day also includes meditation, 12-step meetings and yoga.
“The important work is being done in those conversations that happen from peer to peer, not with your therapist or your sponsor or your mentor, but from the shared experience of people that are struggling with addiction,” he said.
The other program Mr. Kennedy features is not a farm. The Other Side Academy in Salt Lake City requires its 135 “students” — men and women — to commit to living in the community for at least 30 months. Room, board and group therapy are free, in exchange for which residents work at the many businesses the academy runs, including thrift shops, a construction company and a moving and storage business. After 18 months, they are given “walking-around money.” Employment, at the academy or local businesses, is available upon graduation.
The academy program follows its own 12 principles, which underscore work, accountability and respecting others. These are emphasized during morning meetings, breakout sessions and two longer weekly gatherings, during which participants critique one another’s community behaviors.
The executive director, Dave Durocher, does not categorically reject opioid treatment medications. For some applicants, he will arrange detox placement, where they can be prescribed those medicines for a few weeks. But to enter the academy, a student must be off all drugs, including anti-depressants.
About half the residents face prison terms and apply to the academy as an alternative to incarceration. Mr. Durocher who said he served four prison terms for selling drugs and firearms, was facing a 22-year sentence when he applied to the Delancey Street Foundation in California, a therapeutic community. He remained for nearly nine years, rising to managing director of its Los Angeles program.
The academy has many fervent supporters but also critics. Some former residents have complained on social media about having to work without pay and about a daily routine so strict that some opt to return to jail.
Mr. Durocher said that, yes, the rules are strict but tough love is the way to go: no fighting, no positive drug tests, no dating between residents. “It’s the culture of accountability, the reason why people can change and become a 2.0 version of themselves,” he said.
Assessing success rates of these two programs is difficult: Mr. Guinn said he did not have the capacity to keep tabs on the 413 residents who have graduated since 2019.
Mr. Durocher said that about 50 percent of residents last the full 30 months and that about 200 had graduated since the doors opened in 2015. Of those who drop out, about 80 percent do so in the first two weeks.
Though Mr. Kennedy’s embrace of recovery farms may be novel, the concept stretches back almost a century. In 1935, the government opened the United States Narcotic Farm in Lexington, Ky., to research and treat addiction. Over the years, residents included Chet Baker and William S. Burroughs (who portrayed the institution in his novel, “Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict”). The program had high relapse rates and was tainted by drug experiments on human subjects. By 1975, as local treatment centers began to proliferate around the country, the program closed.
In America, therapeutic communities for addiction treatment became popular in the 1960s and ’70s. Some, like Synanon, became notorious for cultlike, abusive environments. There are now perhaps 3,000 worldwide, researchers estimate, including one that Mr. Kennedy has also praised — San Patrignano, an Italian program whose centerpiece is a highly regarded bakery, staffed by residents.
“If we do go down the road of large government-funded therapeutic communities, I’d want to see some oversight to ensure they live up to modern standards,” said Dr. Sabet, who is now president of the Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions. “We should get rid of the false dichotomy, too, between these approaches and medications, since we know they can work together for some people.”
Should Mr. Kennedy be confirmed, his authority to establish healing farms would be uncertain. Building federal treatment farms in “depressed rural areas,” as he said in his documentary, presumably on public land, would hit political and legal roadblocks. Fully legalizing and taxing cannabis to pay for the farms would require congressional action.
In the concluding moments of the documentary, Mr. Kennedy invoked Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist whose views on spirituality influenced Alcoholics Anonymous. Dr. Jung, he said, felt that “people who believed in God got better faster and that their recovery was more durable and enduring than people who didn’t.”
And so, Mr. Kennedy told the dozen residents of Simple Promise Farms gathered around him: “I just started living my life as if there was a God up there, as if He was watching me all the time. And I had to behave myself as if I was being watched.”
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