If You Take Adderall, Rfk Jr. Should Probably Make You Quite Nervous

President-elect Donald Trump's pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has a lot of dangerous opinions about healthcare — and his comments about drugs, addiction, and rehabilitation should give anybody pause, perhaps especially if they rely on an Adderall prescription.

Earlier this year, Mother Jones spotted a bizarre claim the former presidential candidate made about so-called "wellness camps" for people taking the ADHD treatment and other common drugs — which, it was hard to ignore, sounded an awful lot like labor camps.

"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," he said during a recorded podcast interview billed as a "Latino Town Hall" event, "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."

Needless to say, there's an astonishing amount to unpack in those brief remarks. Are these "wellness camps" a service that people attend voluntarily, or are they forced? Are they presented as folks' last choice besides prison? What happens if someone shows up and doesn't work hard enough?

And perhaps most of all, when he calls out Adderall, benzodiazepines, and serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) — all currently legal pharmaceuticals with legitimate medical purposes — as a reason to end up on these farms, what is RFK Jr. signaling about his leadership at a federal department? Will he push for these medications to become illegal, or restricted, or harder to prescribe, or unavailable on insurance?

These are outrageous questions to be asking with scarcely a month to go before Trump takes office. But underlining RFK Jr's lack of seriousness as a candidate or appointee, he never appears to have said anything substantive about what he actually wants to do about these drugs — beyond vaguely-worded fearmongering, that is.

"Our kids are all on Adderall. They’re all on [anti-depressant] SSRIs. Why?" Kennedy told a podcaster March. "Doctors didn’t just start prescribing these for no reason. We have damaged this entire generation. We have poisoned them."

Poison? That's a stretch — SSRIs are open to critique, and both Adderall and benzodiazepines are subject to abuse, but all three drugs unquestionably help many Americans live functional lives. (And let's not forget that RFK Jr. makes an exception to his anti-drugs messaging for his own habit of testosterone therapy.)

We reached out to both Kennedy and Trump's campaigns to ask for clarification on the nominee's stances regarding Adderall and these so-called "farms," and received no response by press time.

A quirk of RFK Jr. is that he often mixes perfectly reasonable claims with bizarre or conspiratorial ones. Back in the summer of 2023, for instance, he told the Daily Mail that his "farms" would serve as an alternative to "warehousing" America's "desperate and alienated."

"One of the things I'm going to do is to launch a series of healing farms in rural areas all across the country," Kennedy said, "in places where the only industry now are prisons."

"We're now seeing an epidemic of addiction, alcoholism, but also just loneliness, despair, disassociation, alienation," he continued. "People feel dispossessed, and we need to start healing people."

In a sense, of course, he's totally right: people fall into addiction when they don't have any sense of opportunity in their lives, and prison tends to push the most vulnerable even further into self-destructive habits.

But RFK Jr.'s ongoing adulation of Trump — whose election caused the stock of for-profit prisons to soar as investors slavered over the mass incarceration of immigrants and other marginalized groups — suggests a man with very little depth of conviction.

Case in point, he's often positioned himself as a foe of processed fast food — but who could forget the photo of RFK Jr. with Trump and his posse that emerged this week, all posing on a private jet with fresh slop from McDonald's? (Let's not forget that Trump's White House was "awash" in Adderall, the benzo-like Xanax, and other dubiously-prescribed substances.)

At the end of the day, the fact that RFJ Jr. has offered almost nothing in terms of specifics about his radical rhetoric means that a threat is now looming over everyone in America who relies on these medications. If nothing else, leaving them in limbo is a profound failure.

More on RFK Jr.: RFK Jr. Grimaces While Eating McDonald's With Donald Trump, Elon Musk

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