WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended his proposal to build a national network of "wellness farms" modeled on an Italian addiction recovery community during a Senate hearing last week. Kennedy praised the San Patrignano model, a farm community in Italy for people with alcohol and drug addiction, and said he wants to build similar farm and work camps in the United States.

"The model for this is a community that I had direct contact with because a family-member of mine went there — and it's called San Patrignano's," he said.

San Patrignano, established in 1978, spreads across roughly 700 acres in the Italian countryside about a two-hour drive east of Florence. The community is home to roughly 850 people working to recover and includes its own school, workshops, dormitories, vineyard, and a working farm. Residents follow tightly regimented schedules and embrace total abstinence from drugs and alcohol while rebuilding their lives over a period of years. Kennedy has compared the San Patrignano model with the Peace Corps.

While running for the White House in 2024, Kennedy spoke at length about reparenting American children on wellness farms, which he proposed building in rural communities across the U.S. He raised the idea in a podcast interview in June 2024 and again in July 2024. In those earlier remarks, he said, "Every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence," and said, "Those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get reparented and live in a community."

At the hearing, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks pressed Kennedy on his earlier remarks. "You said every black kid can be reparented on a wellness farm, can you admit that you said that?" Alsobrooks asked.

"I would have to see, hear the recording because I have no memory of saying anything like that," he said. "If I said it, I apologize."

In a statement, HHS said Kennedy used the term "reparenting" as a psychotherapy term and that his comments were taken out of context. "Prior to his time as Secretary, he described these communities as spaces where individuals, particularly young people facing alienation, mental health challenges, and rising rates of despair could undergo a form of 'reparenting,'" the agency stated.

San Patrignano's program rejects the use of scientifically proven medications for treating alcohol and opioid dependency, according to critics of the model. Dr. Robert Heimer, a researcher at Yale University School of Public Health, addressed that approach. "This [opposition to medications] is very hard to answer without getting angry," he said. "We know that abstinence-based programs fail over and over, often very quickly."