Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the famed anti-vaxxer poised to take over the United States Department of Health and Human Services, seems to be convincing the public that coerced treatment for substance use disorder is a helpful thing. Or maybe just confusing them about what exactly it is.
In 1983 Kennedy pled guilty to felony drug possession and was sentenced to two years’ probation, as an alternative to the two-year prison sentence he’d have gotten instead. Two days after he was arrested he began a five-month stint in a residential treatment program, then six months of post-release treatment. His two-year probation sentence was ultimately reduced to one year.
“In his twenties he was arrested for possession of heroin, he was a heroin addict. He actually has hep C from using needles, I’ve talked to him about that,” New York Times journalist Susanne Craig told MSNBC on December 3, in reference to a recent article she coauthored that explores Kennedy’s history of substance use. “But then what you see is he became an addict, and he went through rehab, and he came out of that and he says he hasn’t used drugs since then.”
Well, Kennedy appears to have declined to talk to her for the profile and also appears to not have hep C. He reportedly did contract it in the ’80s, and was cured with Interferon. Craig previously reported that according to court documents Kennedy “said he had been treated [for hep C] and had no lingering effects.”
But what’s really concerning is the failure to clarify the circumstances under which Kennedy arrived at rehab. The NYT profile states that “he checked himself in” after an “episode.” Later on it references “probation and community service,” but you’d never know that drug treatment was apparently a condition of his probation.
The framing glosses over the central problem with these programs: Most people don’t want to be there.
It’s of course possible that Kennedy wanted to complete that treatment program and would have even if the “episode” had never happened. But the framing glosses over the central problem with these incarceration-alternative programs: Most people don’t want to be there.
Kennedy has been quiet on medications for opioid use disorder, which isn’t necessarily surprising. He’s been very vocal about his participation in 12-step meetings—nine of them per week—as well as his dislike of the pharmaceutical industry and various medications like antidepressants. But since June, with the premiere of the documentary Recovering America, Kennedy has been telling anyone who will listen about the potential of “healing farms” as incarceration alternatives.
In July, he told the Latino Capitalist podcast that prisons are “the biggest industry now in rural areas” and that he intended to change that with these farms. “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.”
One could say the same thing about prison or jail, yes?
“Prisons are not recovering people, they’re not designed to. They’re warehouses for people,” Kennedy said in October. “This is an alternative to prison.”
Kennedy spoke enthusiastically about programs that offered people facing drug charges “a deal that they can’t refuse.”
In Recovering America he spoke enthusiastically about programs that offered people facing drug charges “a deal that they can’t refuse”—treatment or jail.
“Today the biggest industry in America’s depressed rural areas are prisons,” he said. “I’m going to bring a new industry to these forgotten corners of America where addicts can help each other to recover from their addictions. 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.”
Hm. So we’re pouring millions into the construction of new labor camps—excuse me, “farms”—that we’re going to fill with the nation’s economically disenfranchised youth. Who are not allowed to go home, just to the farm or prison or jail. But this is not incarceration, this is different. How long exactly will it take to teach them the discipline of hard work?
“We’ll put no time limit on recovery,” Kennedy continued, “as everyone’s journey is different.”
Ah.
Mandatory treatment has not been shown to be effective, and has in many cases been harmful. But the same is true of coerced treatment, where the participant technically had a choice not to participate and that choice was getting locked up instead.
If Kennedy is confirmed by the Senate in January 2025, once president-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated, the agencies he will oversee include the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. We have some idea of how he intends to allocate Medicaid funding. It involves building abstinence-based programs that are alternatives to prison or jail, while glossing over the fact that most people won’t want to be there.
Image via City of Upper Arlington
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