While Kennedy’s adoption of salvage farms may be new, the concept dates back nearly a century. In 1935, the government opened the United States Narcotic Farm in Lexington, Ky., to research and treat addiction. Over the years, residents included Chet Baker and William S. Burroughs (who described the institution in his novel “Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict”). The program had high relapse rates and was contaminated by pharmacological experiments on human subjects. In 1975, as local treatment centers began to proliferate across the country, the program was shut down.
In America, therapeutic communities for addiction treatment became popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Some, like Synanon, have become notorious for abusive and cult-like environments. There are now perhaps 3,000 around the world, researchers estimate, including one that even Kennedy praised: San Patrignano, an Italian program whose centerpiece is a highly regarded, resident-run bakery.
“If we go the route of large, government-funded therapeutic communities, I would like to see some oversight to ensure they are up to modern standards,” said Dr. Sabet, who is now president of the Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions. “We should also eliminate the false dichotomy between these approaches and medications, as we know they can work together for some people.”
If Mr. Kennedy were confirmed, his authority to establish healing farms would be uncertain. Building federal treatment plants in “deprived rural areas,” as he put it in his documentary, presumably on public land, would face political and legal obstacles. Fully legalizing and taxing cannabis to fund agricultural businesses would require congressional action.
In the documentary’s closing moments, Kennedy invoked Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist whose views on spirituality influenced Alcoholics Anonymous. Dr. Jung, he said, felt that “people who believed in God got better faster and that their recovery was more long-lasting and long-lasting than people who didn’t believe in it.”