That of President-elect Donald Trump choose to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has many dangerous notice on health care – and its drug reviewsaddiction and rehabilitation should give anyone pause, perhaps especially if they are dependent on a prescription for Adderall.

Earlier this year, Mother Jones I spotted a weird statement The former presidential candidate spoke about so-called “wellness camps” for people undergoing treatment for ADHD and other common medications — which he said was hard to ignoreit looked an awful lot like labor camps.

“I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can get rid of illegal drugs, opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric medications, if they want to,” he said during a recorded podcast interview presented as a “Latino City Hall” event, “stop the SSRIs, stop the benzos, stop the Adderall, and spend as much time as necessary – three or four years if they need it – learning to reparent themselves, to reconnect with the communities.”

Needless to say, there are many amazing things to be revealed in these brief remarks. Are these “wellness camps” a service that people participate in voluntarily or are they forced? Are they presented as people’s last choice outside of prison? What happens if someone shows up and doesn’t work hard enough?

And perhaps most importantly, when he cites Adderall, benzodiazepines, and serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) – all pharmaceuticals currently legal for legitimate medical purposes – as the reason for ending up on these farms, What does RFK Jr. signal about his leadership? in a federal ministry? Will he push for these drugs to become illegal, or restricted, or harder to prescribe, or unavailable through insurance?

These are outrageous questions that need to be asked barely a month before Trump takes office. But underscoring RFK Jr’s lack of seriousness as a candidate or appointee, he never appears to have said anything substantial about what he actually wants to do about these drugs – beyond a campaign of Vaguely worded fear, of course.

“Our kids are all on Adderall. They’re all on SSRIs (antidepressants). Why?” Kennedy told a podcaster March. “Doctors didn’t start prescribing them for no reason. We harmed this entire generation. We poisoned them.”

Poison? This is overkill – SSRIs are open to criticismand Adderall and benzodiazepines are abused, but all three medications unquestionably help many Americans lead functional lives. (And let’s not forget that RFK Jr. made an exception to his anti-drug messages for his own testosterone therapy habit.)

We reached out to both the Kennedy and Trump campaigns to ask for clarification on the candidate’s positions regarding Adderall and these so-called “farms,” ​​and received no response as of press time.

A quirk of RFK Jr. is that he often mixes perfectly reasonable assertions with bizarre or conspiratorial ones. In the summer of 2023, for example, it said the Daily Mail that its “farms” would serve as an alternative to the “warehousing” of the “desperate and alienated” United States.

“One of the things I’m going to do is start a series of healing farms in rural areas all over the country,” Kennedy said, “in places where the only industry now is prisons.”

“We are witnessing today an epidemic of addiction, of alcoholism, but also quite simply of loneliness, of despair, of dissociation, of alienation,” he continued. “People feel dispossessed and we need to start healing them.”

In one sense, of course, he’s absolutely right: people fall into addiction when they have no chances in life, and prison tends to push the most vulnerable even further into self-destructive habits.

But RFK Jr.’s continued adulation of Trump – whose election provoked the the number of for-profit prisons will explode as investors struggled in the face of mass incarceration of immigrants and other marginalized groups – suggests a man with very little conviction.

For example, he often positions himself as an enemy of processed fast food – but who could forget the photo of RFK Jr. with Trump and his band that emerged this week, all posing on a private jet with fresh shit from McDonald’s? (let’s not forget that Trump’s White House was ‘flooded’” in Adderall, benzo-like Xanax, and other questionably prescribed substances.)

Ultimately, the fact that RFJ Jr. has offered almost nothing in the way of details about his radical rhetoric means that a threat now looms over everyone in America who relies on these drugs. If nothing else, leaving them in limbo is a profound failure.

Learn more about RFK Jr.: RFK Jr. grimaces while eating McDonald’s with Donald Trump and Elon Musk