It was in June 2023 that then-presidential candidate, now–secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. first unveiled his plan for solving America’s addiction crisis. At a NewsNation town hall, later edited into a campaign video featuring stock footage of a young white woman in a plaid shirt caressing a plant, Kennedy proposed opening what he called “healing camps”: farms in rural areas where American children addicted to drugs, as well as those taking prescribed psychiatric medications, like SSRIs and Adderall, could detox while growing organic foods and communing with nature — places where they could “find themselves again and come back and become contributing members of society.”
In the following months, these “healing camps” would be rebranded as “wellness farms” for both children and adults and would become a regular talking point in Kennedy’s campaign. On a podcast in June last year, he described the farms as specifically useful for Black children, saying: “Every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, on SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence, and those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented.” Who would be doing this “re-parenting” was unclear, but the farms would definitely have “no cell phones, no screens.”
It was hard to know how seriously to take all this. Attendance at the farms, Kennedy said, would be voluntary, but the concept had a whiff of “reeducation” — of internment camps and the Federal Indian Boarding School initiative, in which the government forcibly removed Native children from their homes. And why was he talking about recovery from illegal narcotics in the same breath as getting off of SSRIs? Asking neurodivergent people to forgo their medication and do manual labor seemed impractical if nothing else. (If someone tried to teach me how to plant soy beans while I was off my ADHD meds, I’d probably spend most of my time twirling through the fields singing the Rent soundtrack.)
But as with so many ideas espoused by members of the new Trump administration that sound both absurd and half-baked — say, annexing Greenland — there’s reason to believe that wellness farms are a serious part of Kennedy’s plans, and the concept actually has a long history in the U.S. The idea also connects to an impulse in the broader public, beyond just Kennedy’s MAHA acolytes: There’s growing awareness that Americans may be overreliant on psychiatric medications — nearly 25 percent of the population is prescribed the drugs — and some physicians are advocating for “deprescription,” the process of reducing or stopping medication for those who no longer benefit, while more patients seem to be considering going drug free.
For years, Kennedy has expressed the view that psychiatric medications are not only overprescribed — as most public-health experts believe — but also inherently harmful and addictive, linking antidepressant use to school shootings and claiming that SSRIs are more difficult to get off of than heroin. (The first claim has no basis in fact; the second is widely agreed to be false, though the process can certainly be arduous.) Still, when Kennedy was sworn in as HHS secretary in February, an executive order made clear that these views would in fact drive federal policy. One of the primary goals of the new Make American Healthy Again Commission, the order stated, would be to “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers,” and “stimulants.”
Kennedy has yet to publicly mention wellness farms since his appointment, but it’s unlikely they’ve been forgotten. Last year, in the summer of 2024, he released a campaign documentary called Recovering America, “a film about healing our addiction crisis” that focuses in part on a drug-recovery center called Simple Promise Farms, a horse ranch in Elgin, Texas, where residents split their days between overtly therapeutic activities, such as meditation and counseling, and farm chores: tending to the animals, working in the vegetable garden, and cooking meals for one another. Over a gentle soft-rock soundtrack and shots of horses strolling through verdant fields, Kennedy waxes rhapsodic, describing Simple Promise and other “healing farms” as places “where addicts can help each other recover … American kids can reconnect to America’s soil, [and] where they can learn the discipline of hard work that rebuilds self-esteem.”
Simple Promise is beautiful, and the residents — all 20- to 40-something white men in beanies and baseball caps — seem genuinely happy. “Getting my hands in some dirt and getting the blood flowing — it will change even the worst day into feeling like everything’s going okay,” a long-haired denizen declares during group counseling. Treatment is pricey — the average 30-day stay costs $11,000 — and the residents spend a lot of time in the film talking about how rewarding it’s been for them to perform basic tasks, such as sweeping the floors and making their own beds.
Though Kennedy presents Simple Promise as a major departure from standard drug-treatment centers, there’s not much about it that’s truly unique. There’s no shortage of rustic retreats for people trying to get off drugs, and many promote the salutary benefits of manual labor. Simple Promise also uses a curative approach that’s been relatively common for decades: the therapeutic community model, in which residents live and work together long-term and often rely on peer-to-peer counseling. Therapeutic communities were hugely popular in the 1970s and 1980s, but they’ve fallen sharply out of favor due to the fact that they can be poorly regulated and run by people without much — or sometimes any — formal training. (Simple Promise itself doesn’t employ any certified providers and actually isn’t licensed as a rehab.)
Ninety years ago, when therapeutic communities were a new idea and they were believed to teach addicts accountability, the government tried its hand at running one, opening a facility that matches Kennedy’s proposed wellness farms to a tee: Narco, or the Federal U.S. Narcotics Farm, in Lexington, Kentucky. Beginning in 1935, residents — a combination of voluntary patients and drug offenders diverted from prison — picked kale and milked cows by day. At night were often free concerts, with performances by famous musical inmates such as the jazz greats Sonny Rollins and Chet Baker. (The program was so well-known for hosting such icons that it was not uncommon for aspiring musicians to feign heroin addiction or get themselves arrested so they could be sent to Narco and jam with the pros.)
It all seemed like a great idea, but, Herzberg says, “In terms of getting people to stop using drugs, it was utterly ineffective.” The relapse rate was 90 percent. Doctors at Narco also regularly tested experimental drugs on residents, sometimes rewarding them with heroin or cocaine in exchange for their participation. It shut its doors in 1976 following a congressional inquiry into human-rights abuses — which was, coincidentally, led by RFK Jr.’s uncle, Ted Kennedy.
Could some modern iteration of this therapeutic community–farm hybrid fare better? Judging based on Kennedy’s chosen example of Simple Promise, it’s impossible to say. The farm’s founder, Brandon Guinn, says he doesn’t keep track of statistics like relapse rates. “A bigger measure of success,” he says, is that when former clients “have a slip-up, they will call us.” “Statistics can be skewed.”
Claire Clark, a scholar of behavioral science who studies the history of therapeutic communities, thinks the answer is no. Though there are plenty of residential facilities for people struggling with addiction (this is what most people think of when they think of rehab), she believes, based on current research, that it’s more effective for addicts to be treated within their own communities rather than moving them to alternative environments. As for the farming element of Kennedy’s proposal, Clark believes that would be a “disaster”: She doesn’t believe the facilities could remain voluntary and attract enough clients to stay open, leading to their becoming, essentially, labor-camp alternatives to prison. “Historically,” she says, “people don’t go to these places willingly.” David Herzberg, a historian who specializes in drug policy, says that the farms sound like “an abuse potential nightmare” — sending “vulnerable young men and women to be in secluded places where people have enormous power over them.”
As for Kennedy’s idea that people would use wellness farms to get off legal, prescribed psychiatric medications, the medical experts I’ve spoken to are wary. Despite some public interest in going pharmaceutical free, there isn’t any one-size-fits-all solution to mental health, and many patients have no reason to stop their prescribed drugs: For millions of people, they’re life-saving, and for many, quitting cold turkey could be quite dangerous. (One New York–based psychiatrist responded to Kennedy’s proposal calling him “a bozo.”) Dr. Mena Mirhom, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, worries that Kennedy’s ideas could encourage people to stop their meds without physician involvement, leading to worsened depression, anxiety, and even risk of suicide. “Being off medication isn’t the primary goal” of treating mental illness, he says. “The goal is health.”
But Kennedy’s proposal — like so many coming out of the MAHA movement — taps into viscerally powerful ideas about what health really is, and into valid concerns about the path psychological treatment has taken in recent decades. Many psychiatric drugs of course do have serious potential side effects that can significantly impact quality of life; SSRIs specifically have a slew of associated risks, including, most worryingly, a heightened risk of suicidal thoughts in children and young adults under 24. In addition to advocating for fewer psychiatric prescriptions, in recent years, many mental-health experts have taken to prioritizing alternative treatments: classic talk therapy, meditation, diet, exercise, and in some cases psychedelics, such as psilocybin and MDMA.
The idea that health may be arrived at by a type of purity, by throwing away chemical compounds and healing ourselves with fresh air and hard work, has deep emotional appeal. When people are struggling, it’s tempting to believe that the forces of the outside world — rather than of the mind and the self — are the real culprit, and that breaking free from modern interventions might save us. It also seems to make real intuitive sense that pharmaceuticals could just be one more part of the vast landscape of poisons we live within now, akin to the toxins in our food, water, and air. But in the realms of health and medicine, what makes intuitive sense can lead us far astray. Intuition severed from science cannot solve the mental-health crisis.
Kennedy’s genius, if one could call it that, lies in his ability to make his preferred solutions — often restriction and abstentions, saying no to vaccines, for example — sound liberating. But wellness farms, like so much else proposed in the second Trump administration, could quite possibly become the opposite: a means of control.