RFK Jr. fact-checks: Antidepressants are harder to quit than heroin
What does Kennedy’s drug policy for opiate addiction actually tell us about his political legacy and what he’s trying to do about it?
“I think [Kennedy’s plan] would be an enormous step backward,” said Maia Szalavitz, an author and activist who used heroin and other drugs before entering recovery.
“We have spent the last 15, 20 years trying to move away from treating addiction as a sin rather than a medical disorder,” she said. “We’ve spent many years trying to get people to take up these medications that we know cut your death risk in half, and he seems to want to go backwards on all that.”
The vast majority of researchers, doctors and front-line addiction treatment workers agree that scientific data shows medications like buprenorphine, methadone and naloxone are game changers when it comes to treating the deadliest street drugs, including fentanyl and heroin.
Kennedy repeated an incorrect claim that the addiction and overdose crisis isn’t improving. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fatal overdoses have fallen nationally from June 20 to September 15 of this year, and have never gone below 90,000 deaths in a 12-month period.
Kennedy studied law and politics before he became an activist on subjects such as pharmaceuticals, vaccines and the american diet, but he has refused to speak out about science-based medical treatments for opiate addiction.
A scene in his campaign film blamed methadone, a prescription drug used to treat opiate addiction, for some of the high-risk street-drug use seen in San Francisco.
“What we have mostly heard from Kennedy is a skepticism broadly of medications and a focus on the 12-step and faith-based therapy,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on drug policy at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
“That appeals to a lot of crucial groups that have supported President Trump in the election. But we know what is fundamental for recovery and stabilization of people’s lives and reducing overdose is access to medications,” Felbab-Brown said. “Unfortunately, a lot of the 12-step programs reject medications.”
She’s worried that under Kennedy’s leadership the Department of Health and Human Services could eliminate funding for science based medical treatment and instead focus on faith based help for a small percentage of people who experience addiction.
Source: RFK Jr. says he’ll fix the overdose crisis. Critics say his plan is risky
The need for a network of farms to expand the therapeutic community for recovering addicts: RFK Jr.’s challenge to the HHS secretary
“I’ve seen this beautiful model that they have in Italy called San Patrignano, where there are 2,000 kids who work on a large farm in a healing center … and that’s what we need to build here,” Kennedy said during a town hall-style appearance on the cable channel NewsNation last year.
According to Kennedy’s plan, if Americans experienced addiction, they would either go to camp voluntarily or be pressured to accept care and be sent to jail if they refuse.
The San Patrignano program was used in a documentary that included images of people with addiction who were held in cages or shackles. The farm’s leaders said the documentary was biased and unfair.
“I’m going to build these rehab centers all over the country, these healing camps where people can go, where our children can go and find themselves again,” he said.
The Italian program does not include opioid treatment medication, as noted by the author and activist who is herself in recovery. She said that Kennedy’s fascination with the model was because of a lack of medical and scientific expertise.
“It really is great to include people who have personal experience of something like, say, addiction in policymaking. But you don’t become an addiction expert simply because you’re someone who struggled with addiction,” Szalavitz said. “You have to engage with the research literature. You have to understand more than just your anecdote. Otherwise you’re going to wind up doing harm to people.”
Kennedy’s plan to build a network of farms doesn’t appear to include facilities that provide medical treatment for people facing severe addiction.
A leading national drug policy researcher said that he clearly cares about addicted people. “But in terms of the plans he’s articulated, I have real doubts about them.”
RFK Jr is recovering from an illness. He wants to expand the therapeutic community model for recovering addicts,” Tom Wolf, a San Francisco-based activist who is in recovery from fentanyl and opioid addiction, wrote on the social media site X. “I support him for HHS secretary.”
Some addiction activists — especially those loyal to the 12-step faith- and values-based recovery model — have praised Kennedy’s approach and are actively campaigning for his confirmation.
Kennedy has made previous statements about his approach to recovery from addiction, promoting the concept of “healing farms,” where people struggling with addiction would live and work. This approach to recovering from addiction focuses on the moral dimensions of recovery, rather than medical best practices, leading many who study substance-use disorders to doubt it.
While campaigning for the White House last year, Kennedy, now 71 years old, laid out a plan to tackle the United States’ devastating fentanyl and overdose crisis, proposing a sprawling new system of camps or farms where people experiencing addiction would be sent to recover.
If confirmed as head of the Department of Health and Human Services after Senate hearings scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, Kennedy would hold broad sway over many of the biggest federal programs in the U.S. tackling addiction: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Kennedy said that he was a drug junkie when he was 15, in an interview last year. “I was addicted for 14 years. When you’re an addicted person, you try to push God to the fringes of your life, and that’s against your conscience.
Kennedy testified that the outdoor work should be available to people with substance use disorders, but they shouldn’t have to kick and scream.
On the Relationship Between Antidepressants and Heroin: The Case for Subscribing to SRIs versus Opioids
A study published in the medical journal the Lancet found significant withdrawal symptoms only affect about 1 in 35 people who use antidepressants. It is important to be in a doctor’s care when going off SSRIs and to taper off gradually.
“Antidepressants and heroin are in different universes when it comes to addiction risk,” says Keith Humphreys, who studies addiction at Stanford University. “In my 35 years In the addiction field, I’ve met only two or three people who thought they were addicted to antidepressants versus thousands who were addicted to heroin and other opioids.”
“I know people, including members of my family, who have had a worse experience with SSRIs than heroin”, Kennedy said in the hearing.
Though he lacks medical training, he has been a critic of antidepressant medications — a class of drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs.
US President Donald Trump’s nominee to be the country’s Health and Humans Services Secretary Joe Kennedy has been criticised for his plan to build “healing farms” for people affected by addiction. Maia Szalavitz, author and activist who used heroin and other drugs before entering recovery, said, “I think [ Kennedy’s plan] would be an enormous step backward.”