Despite the seemingly uncontroversial goal of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “Make America Healthy Again,” many of his health care stances are deeply divisive: In the last two years alone, he has suggested that Covid-19 was genetically engineered to spare specific ethnicities, stated that radiation from cell phones causes cancer, and doubled down on the long-disproven claim that HIV does not cause AIDS.
But at least one health care cause that has occupied much of his attention in 2024, in contrast, has major unifying potential: the addiction and opioid crisis. As a presidential candidate, Kennedy cast the issue as a symbol of the nation’s broader ills. He traveled the country with a film crew to make a documentary focused on addiction, sharing his own struggles with heroin and alcohol. He surrounded himself with doctors, recovery advocates, judges, and public health officials, seeking an answer to a question that has evaded three successive presidents: how can the U.S. bring its decades-long drug crisis to an end?
According to a STAT examination of Kennedy’s past statements on drug use and his own recovery, his documentary, and interviews with multiple advocates he spent time with during filming, his philosophy toward addiction policy is ideologically flexible. Kennedy has pitched a nationwide system of “healing farms,” espoused the virtues of 12-step recovery like Alcoholics Anonymous, and advocated “tough love” for people battling addiction. He also repeatedly expressed his admiration for Amsterdam’s response to its own drug epidemic decades ago, which included providing prescription heroin to drug users not ready to stop, and suggested at one point he was open to the controversial practice of supervised consumption. His biggest apparent takeaway was simple: What America is doing hasn’t worked.
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