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.
He hangs around some new age spiritual types like Aubrey Marcus who are big into the plant medicines and healing rituals & practices from indigenous cultures in Central & South America (Ayahuasca etc etc). While I don't doubt that these plant medicines do offer healing to people, I do find this group of people incredibly cringe though because the lives they project are very rich from a material standpoint and the events they put together almost sound like they're big orgies (I have zero evidence that that actually takes place, just the vibes I get when they make these events 'for singles only'). Also that guy has a relative who invented the fleshlight and Aubrey himself made money selling some type of brain food cognition enhancing supplement.
Hey Fleshlights aren't so bad. They've helped a guy I know deal with his divorce (that guy is me).
Oh I mostly just find Aubrey Marcus's penetration into our culture interesting and thought it was rather funny when he endorsed RFK as an answer to our problems. The fleshlight thing was curious to me parallel to the 'singles' healing retreats and it makes me think about how sexuality has been treated in our current culture. Wishing you all you need to get through the divorce! Not an easy thing