It has recently been reported that RFK Jr. took several phone calls and a meeting with his political opponent, Donald Trump. According to these reports, Kennedy actively discussed dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Trump for President. There was also discussion of finding a role for Kennedy in the billionaire’s next administration. Among the jobs apparently floated were high up positions in the government’s health bureaucracy, including the head of the Health and Human Services Department.
It’s unclear whether Trump officials are seriously vetting Kennedy for a spot in the White House, though it makes tons of sense that RFK would want to work in federal health. After all, he’s made his name politically (and professionally) by casting doubt on medical orthodoxies. Most notably, he’s been labeled a “vaccine skeptic” due to his personal and political association with the anti-vaccine movement. While Kennedy claims that the “anti-vax” label is misleading, there is plenty of evidence that the would-be politician is thoroughly tied up in the kookier elements of the anti-vaccine activist community.
Another unconventional Kennedy health idea (and presumably one he’d try to employ were he ever given a spot in the White House) emerged this week. During a virtual town hall, Kennedy floated the idea of sending drug addicts to government-funded “wellness farms,” rural hideaways where addicts could “grow their own food,” touch grass, and cleanse themselves of societal distractions that might prime them to use again. Kennedy claimed such a project could be paid for by de-classifying marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug (the government is already planning to do this) and taxing the profits from its commercial sales, which, according to him, could bring in as much as $8.5 billion in revenue.
Kennedy says he would want to make these farms available not only to people addicted to illegal drugs but to those who feel they are addicted to legal, prescription drugs, as well. He said:
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.
Mother Jones originally reported on Kennedy’s plan, notably framing it as a freaky, hair-brained scheme. But Kennedy didn’t invent this idea. The concept of “care farms” or therapeutic farming is actually a pretty old one, and it’s even sometimes considered a fairly progressive idea. It’s already practiced quite heavily in Europe—particularly in the Netherlands, where there are as many as 800 such farms, many of which are accredited by the government and funded through its broader healthcare system. Of course, no such system exists in the U.S., although some states, like California, currently have small networks of farms that cater to “marginalized or vulnerable groups of people,” including people with mental health problems, drug and alcohol addiction, and convicted felons.
It isn’t as if the U.S. government’s current approach to drug addiction—either cutting deals with the companies that sell the drugs or throwing addicts in prison—is particularly effective. I don’t know that sending someone to a farm so they can breath fresh air and pet a cow sounds demonstrably worse than that. In fact, it could be a pretty good idea. That said, the government hasn’t tried anything this experimental or ambitious in quite some time, and it’s difficult to imagine how it would work. You can imagine a lot of scenarios in which such a program might go off the rails and do more harm than good and Kennedy is broadly against drugs that demonstrably help people.
The real question is why Kennedy thinks a new Trump administration would let him do anything remotely resembling this. While Trump has disavowed it, the policy blueprint most commonly associated with his campaign is Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-conceived proposal to drastically reorganize (or, more accurately, destroy) much of the government. While Trump claims he doesn’t know anything about it, this policy bible was written by droves of former Trump officials and is designed to defund and defenestrate large parts of the federal bureaucracy, not send vulnerable people to hippy farms where they can relax and heal themselves. Project 2025’s chapter on public health mentions drug addiction exactly zero times, focusing instead on the need to crack down on the availability of abortion pills and deregulate the healthcare industry.
