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RFK. Jr. Says Addicts Need Tough Love. Is He Right?
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RFK. Jr. Says Addicts Need Tough Love. Is He Right?
When I visited my family in rural East Texas this Christmas, I found myself asking the same question about various cousins, uncles, and other relatives: “He’s doing good?”
“Doing good,” is a euphemism for “sober”—ideally, sober and religious. Practically everyone in my family is either an addict or a Protestant fundamentalist. Occasionally, someone is both at the same time, which means he is “doing his best.”
A shrug or an “I wouldn’t know” in response to my question means they’re on a bender and nobody’s heard from them in a while. My biological father is “doing good,” I was told, as is my cousin who once went to prison for wrecking his truck while on PCP, and who was living in my grandfather’s lumber shed for some time.
All of this is to say that I’ve seen the addiction crisis up close. So has RFK Jr., a former heroin addict who has lost two family members to overdoses. But unlike me, the incoming HHS secretary has ideas on how to fix it. Kennedy thinks “tough love” and community—in the form of commune-style farms—are the solutions. Is he right?
Sally Satel, a psychiatrist who specializes in treating addiction, says he is both right and wrong. Writing for The Free Press, she applauds RFK Jr. for insisting that addicts have to get clean, rather than have the people around them indulge their addiction. But she worries that he will cut the availability of pharmaceuticals such as methadone that have proven useful in addicts’ recovery. “People who have recovered from addiction often have a fierce commitment to helping fellow addicts. But they can be too attached to the methods by which they themselves achieved sobriety,” she writes.
Read Sally’s piece, “RFK Jr. Says Drug Addicts Need Tough Love. Is He Right?”
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