During a combative Senate hearing last week, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, a Democrat from Maryland, leaned forward and asked U.S. Health Secretary Robert Kennedy about his vision for a national system of "wellness farms."
"You said every black kid can be reparented on a wellness farm, can you admit that you said that?" Alsobrooks said, describing the concept as "dangerous" and "irresponsible."
Alsobrooks was referring to one of Kennedy's signature ideas to remake U.S. health and addiction care, by sending people to farm or work camps.
Kennedy appeared startled by Alsobrooks' question and quickly pushed back. "I would have to see, hear the recording because I have no memory of saying anything like that," he testified, later adding, "If I said it, I apologize."
In fact, while running for the White House in 2024, Kennedy did speak at length about "reparenting" American children on wellness farms, which he proposed building in rural communities across the U.S. Kennedy raised the idea during a podcast interview in June of 2024 and again during a separate podcast conversation in July.
At times during the interviews, Kennedy appeared to embrace the scheme as a way to help a wide range of kids harmed by street drug addiction and what he described as over-prescription of anxiety and depression medications.
But Kennedy also spoke specifically about his vision for Black children. After making the false claim that "every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence" Kennedy offered what he described as a solution.
"Those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get reparented and live in a community," he said.
NPR reached out to Kennedy and his team at the Department of Health and Human Services. In a statement emailed to NPR, HHS said that Kennedy did use the term "reparenting," describing it as a psychotherapy term, and said 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 HHS statement said.
During one of the podcast interviews, however, Kennedy pointed to the inspiration for his plan not in psychotherapy, but in a rural addiction program in Italy: "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," Kennedy said.
A "beautiful model" in Italy and Kennedy's vision for the U.S.
This wasn't the first time Kennedy cited the small, often controversial, Italian farm community located a two hour drive east of Florence. He has repeatedly described San Patrignano as a template for the sweeping federal program - he has compared it with the Peace Corps - which he proposed to create.
While running for president in 2024, Kennedy promised to build farm camps in rural areas across the U.S. to help people recovering from alcohol and drug addiction.
"I've seen this beautiful model that they have in Italy called San Patrignano where there are 2,000 kids who work on a large farm and a healing center," Kennedy said during a townhall style presidential campaign appearance in 2024 on the News Nation Network. "That's what we need to build here."
But long before last week's Senate hearing, Kennedy's embrace of San Patrignano, and the community's approach to addiction care, was sparking quiet alarm among many doctors, researchers, and drug policy experts in the U.S.
Critics point to the fact that San Patrignano's program focuses on wellness, abstinence from substance use, and hard work, but rejects use of scientifically-proven medications long considered the gold standard for treating alcohol and opioid dependency by public health officials in the U.S. and in Italy.
"This [opposition to medications] is very hard to answer without getting angry," said Dr. Robert Heimer, who studies the effectiveness of addiction therapies at Yale University's School of Public Health.
"We know that abstinence-based programs fail over and over, often very quickly," he said.
NPR reached out to Kennedy and his team at the Department of Health and Human Services repeatedly over a period of two weeks, asking to interview him about his focus on San Patrignano and about concerns raised by addiction experts and lawmakers.
We also sent detailed questions, but in an email to NPR, HHS said they would have no further comment.
Reporters from NPR and member station WBUR were able to make repeated trips to San Patrignano, where we interviewed numerous residents and employees about their program.
"This place has humanity, it has compassion"
Morning fog hung in the vineyards as Matteo Diotalevi drove his car up the winding lanes of the community, so steep that he struggled with the gear shift.
"From here we see the sea," said Diotalevi, who has worked at San Patrignano for fifteen years.
The view is idyllic, but San Patrignano — which sits apart from neighboring towns, with its own school, workshops, dormitories, vineyard, and a working farm — was established in 1978 because of a deadly crisis. "There was the explosion of the heroin epidemic in Italy," he said.
Like many of the people here, Diotalevi voiced pride in the community, and its grassroots approach to addiction care, sustained through scandals and financial struggles over nearly five decades.
These days, San Patrignano is home to roughly 850 people, all in recovery. "We help people find another chance," he said.
The philosophy of San Patrignano remains simple: People come to live and work in the community while slowly rebuilding their lives, often over a period of years. Residents follow tightly regimented schedules, learning responsibility, while embracing total abstinence from drugs and alcohol.
During a tour of the 700-acre community, Diotalevi brought an NPR reporter to a textile workshop where many of the community's female residents spend their days. Liliana Moretti, 28, sat at a loom surrounded by webs of colored thread. "I'm putting the thread around the wheel, I have a sequence I need to follow," she explained.
Before coming to San Patrignano eight months ago, Moretti divided her time between California and Italy. She was put up for adoption as a child, an experience she says led to trauma and substance use.
"I had scars that had never healed or healed not well, not enough," she said. "I had things that were unresolved that I patched up with alcohol, with cocaine and with food mostly."
Like most of the people who live here, Moretti doesn't undergo traditional therapy and receives no medications. Instead, she said, her program involves hard work, service, and peer-to-peer counseling.
"This place has humanity, it has compassion. It has things that help you see hope in yourself and in others," Moretti said.
Kennedy, who used heroin for more than a decade beginning in his teens, has said that similar ideas about wellness, faith, work and community service helped him recover.
San Patrignano leaders skeptical of Kennedy's vision
But even many of San Patrignano's most ardent advocates expressed confusion and frustration over Kennedy's interest in their program.
When talking about the community, Kennedy often describes it inaccurately. San Patrignano is much smaller and serves far fewer people than Kennedy has suggested. While Kennedy has described it as a place that serves children, the overwhelming majority of residents are adults.
Dr. Antonio Boschini, San Patrignano's medical director, also told NPR it would be "impossible" for his community's model to be safely scaled up into the kind of national program Kennedy has described.
"You cannot have another San Patrignano," Boschini said, noting that when his community tried to expand in the 1990s the effort led to a series of scandals that nearly destroyed the program. "There were too much people, out of control."
NPR could find no record of Kennedy speaking publicly about widely publicized scandals at San Patrignano, portrayed in a Netflix documentary series in 2020, which have drawn national attention across Italy.
According to Boschini, five residents were held against their will when they tried to leave the program. "Like jail, that's against the law," he told NPR. "It was a crisis."
The Italian businessman who founded the community, Vincenzo Muccioli, was eventually convicted of helping to to cover up the murder of one resident who had fled San Patrignano. Muccioli died in 1995 while his case was on appeal.
San Patrignano's current leaders acknowledge that past practices left residents vulnerable. They say they have implemented sweeping reforms designed to improve transparency and safety.
"There were two people who committed suicide and this is something that continued to shade, to give the shade, on our program," said San Patrignano spokesperson Monica Barzanti. "Nowadays we have recognized our mistake."
NPR was also unable to confirm whether Kennedy had ever visited San Patrignano or spoken with any of their staff about its program before suggesting it as a model for the U.S.
According to Barzanti, she has no record of communicating with Kennedy, or with U.S. Health Department officials, and only learned about his enthusiasm through the media.
"I read the interview [with Kennedy] because someone forwarded it to me, it is the only thing I know about this project," she said.
"The treatment is worse than the disease"
While San Patrignano has changed many aspects of its program, one controversial aspect of the community's approach has not been reformed. The program still rejects all use of medications — including methadone and buprenorphine.
"No drugs can cure drugs," Barzanti told NPR. She described her community's focus on work and personal responsibility as the only path to full recovery from addiction. "It is the only way that it works. Nobody can cure you. You have to rebuild your own biography."
That view is widely rejected by medical researchers and public health officials. Addiction experts interviewed by NPR said the impact of San Patrignan's approach is less problematic in Italy, where the most common forms of substance use involve alcohol and cocaine. Overdose rates are much lower.
But in the U.S., the deadliest street drugs are opioids. Fentanyl, heroin and prescription pain pills already kill tens of thousand of people every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Heimer, the researcher at Yale, said it would be dangerous to adopt San Patrignano's abstinence-centered approach more widely in the U.S. and could lead to more fatalities.
Heimer's research shows that when people addicted to opioids attempt to stop using street drugs without the aid of medications, they typically relapse within a short time.
"Once their tolerance [to opioids] goes down, and they relapse, they are at enormous risk [of overdose and death]" Heimer said. "The treatment is worse than the disease."
Again, Kennedy and HHS officials didn't respond to NPR's request for an interview or to a list of questions about concerns with the San Patrignano model.
In past interviews, Kennedy has sent mixed messages about his view of science-based medications that treat addiction.
At times he has described them as "practical and pragmatic" when used alongside faith-based approaches.
Other times, Kennedy has voiced deep skepticism about prescription treatments for addiction, as he did during his appearance on News Nation in 2024.
"I've been in recovery for forty years. I'm a person who would never tell you the answer is a drug," Kennedy said. "I'm a person who says you never can fix what's wrong inside of you with something outside of you, with a substance, a powder, a potion or a pill."
The CDC and other health agencies have concluded that the best way to save lives is to expand use of opioid-addiction medications. But in February of this year, when rolling out the White House's new addiction program, called the Great American Recovery Initiative, Kennedy spoke frequently about his faith and made it clear he believes abstinence-centered programs should the focus for the U.S. response.
"That's how you precipitate a spiritual revitalization, a spiritual renaissance, by reaching out to addicts on the street, giving them stable lives," Kennedy said.
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