Kennedy’s Plan for the Drug Crisis: A Network of ‘Healing Farms’

Although Mr. Kennedy’s embrace of restoration farms could also be novel, the idea stretches again virtually a century. In 1935, the federal government opened the US Narcotic Farm in Lexington, Ky., to analysis and deal with habit. Through the years, residents included Chet Baker and William S. Burroughs (who portrayed the establishment in his novel, “Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict”). This system had excessive relapse charges and was tainted by drug experiments on human topics. By 1975, as native therapy facilities started to proliferate across the nation, this system closed.

In America, therapeutic communities for habit therapy turned widespread within the Sixties and ’70s. Some, like Synanon, turned infamous for cultlike, abusive environments. There are actually maybe 3,000 worldwide, researchers estimate, together with one which Mr. Kennedy has additionally praised — San Patrignano, an Italian program whose centerpiece is a extremely regarded bakery, staffed by residents.

“If we do go down the street of enormous government-funded therapeutic communities, I’d wish to see some oversight to make sure they stay as much as fashionable requirements,” stated Dr. Sabet, who’s now president of the Basis for Drug Coverage Options. “We should always do away with the false dichotomy, too, between these approaches and medicines, since we all know they will work collectively for some folks.”

Ought to Mr. Kennedy be confirmed, his authority to ascertain therapeutic farms could be unsure. Constructing federal therapy farms in “depressed rural areas,” as he stated in his documentary, presumably on public land, would hit political and authorized roadblocks. Totally legalizing and taxing hashish to pay for the farms would require congressional motion.

Within the concluding moments of the documentary, Mr. Kennedy invoked Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist whose views on spirituality influenced Alcoholics Nameless. Dr. Jung, he stated, felt that “individuals who believed in God received higher sooner and that their restoration was extra sturdy and enduring than individuals who didn’t.”