Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies during a Senate confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill Jan. 29, 2025. Francis Chung/Politico via AP
A few hours into his confirmation hearings on Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, had a tense exchange with Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN). The subject was Kennedy’s misleading claims that antidepressants caused teenagers to commit school shootings. As Smith pointed out, reams of evidence dispute that claim.
Yet Kennedy persisted in his crusade against SSRIs. “Listen, I know people, including members of my family, who’ve had a much worse time getting off of SSRIs than they did than people have getting off heroin,” he told Smith. (Kennedy himself was once addicted to heroin.)
When Smith brought up Kennedy’s controversial plan to treat SSRI “addicts” at government-sponsored wellness farms, he attempted to distance himself from that idea. “You described Americans who take mental health medications as addicts who need to be sent to wellness farms to recover,” Smith said. “Is that what you believe?” Kennedy promptly denied ever having said “that antidepressants are like addicts.”
But as I reported in July, he actually did lump users of SSRIs and ADHD medications together with people who are dependent on opioids and benzodiazepenes, referring to that broad group as “addicts.” On an episode that month of the Latino Capitalist podcast that was billed as a “Latino Town Hall,” Kennedy unveiled his plan to overhaul addiction treatment programs. He 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.
The farms would be funded, he said, with money generated through a sales tax on cannabis products. (As of now, cannabis is still illegal at the federal level; sales taxes are state and local.) “I’m going to dedicate that revenue to creating wellness farms—drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country,” Kennedy 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.”
More on Kennedy’s wellness farms plan here:
SCOOP: RFK Jr. suggests creating “wellness farms” to “reparent” those struggling with addiction by growing organic food and taking away screens.
But it’s not just addiction. He says it’ll also be a place for people with ADHD and depression to get off SSRIs and antidepressants. pic.twitter.com/3oUmznEGwP
— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) July 24, 2024