Last night, Jason, Brandi, and I streamed the first installment of a series we’re working on that digs a bit more into San Patrignano, an Italian, social impact, “sustainable” treatment center for addiction in Rimini, Italy. RFK Jr. wants to scale this program across the United States, setting up centers in rural communities using proceeds from legalized sales of marijuana and psychedelics. In this video, we discuss the primary backer of the program, oil refining heiress and Milanese politician Letizia Moratti. Moratti is associated with the “third pole” centrist political party along with former technocrat Prime Minister Mario Draghi, an MIT educated economist and central banker. I believe Italy’s “third pole” to be similar to the Transpartisan Party in the United States and has synergy with RFK Jr.’s campaign in its centrist framing. Moratti was involved in education reform and supported Draghi’s push for Green Pass adoption during the lockdowns as health minister in Lombardy. We’ll be doing a follow up analysis of clips from the 2020 Netflix series SanPa: Sins of the Savior and an examination of the origins of Bill Wilson’s Alcoholics Anonymous 12-Step program in Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley’s psychedelic spirituality for world peace. Stay tuned.
As an ex “alcoholic” who went through two bouts of treatment and participated in AA for several years, I am highly concerned about this sort of program that is being suggested by RFK, jr… For me personally …the alcoholism and addiction was related to unintegrated trauma that I needed to slow down long enough to deal with. There were certain times in my “treatment” that I had to be away from my children and they have profound medical issues and this was profoundly destabilizing as I have been the primary caregiver managing their care for their entire lives. I found myself ashamed, alone and in a different location, retraumatized, and it was not helpful to my recovery in any way. Separating people from those they live with might be okay for some but not for many. The whole family gets sick and usually the one that shows up with the addiction is the identified patient for very unhealthy patterns in families, etc. Also AA is close to being a cult. Its got some merit early on but is a chum bucket for any and all struggling with addiction and vulnerable and like i said, ok at first when it’s really important just to stop drinking/using, to have a support network, and stop… but as time goes on this framework and the all or nothing approach to recovery and healing what in most cases is unprocessed unintegrated trauma, becomes more of a church, a religion and not necessarily able to meet the variety of people that come through the doors at the level they need to really heal. I appreciate your work, and coverage of this important aspect of what is happening with RFK Jr ‘s potential program.
Really eye-opening, thank you all for your efforts! I like the idea of a whole segment on AA as well.
What struck me as really relevant in the RKJ clips was him saying, “Addiction is all about abusing power.” So, that would mean those who abuse power are addicts, right? Of course, we know that, but he’s demonstrating he knows that. So it makes perfect sense to get into the rehab biz if you want to find good henchmen, no? Get a few good ones young enough, whose addictive personality type will transform through re-education to do your dirty work later. It’s a trauma-bond relationship so it’s very ‘bi-polar’ and they internalize the master-slave dynamic.
The series Yellowstone with Kevin Costner which was so popular draws on this very prominently. The cowboys come from the prisons, some as kids, some get branded and they are the really loyal ones who do whatever it takes for the ranch owner, just like gangs operate. The successful ones have heroic rags to riches stories the main one getting the owner’s daughter and inheriting into all that wealth. Early in the series there was a quote that plays on the ‘kill the Indian, save the man’ and it was ‘kill the man, save the legacy’ which seems to evoke mythic symbolism, maybe the ouroborus.
I should add, I do not think addiction is always about abusing power, all the more interesting that he believes that.
Also, about the psychedelics aspect I agree they want to create the group consciousness and then harness that energy/power and that the drug concoctions are a means to enter the altered states of emergence. But I think a dual-use of that tech will be to train groups to work in surreal situations by using the ‘peak experience’ of select drug use to adapt the groups to the environments in advance—a kind of carrot and stick—like cults use. I do not think it is a stretch to call these programs cultish. If that does feel like a stretch, there’s a good series by David Whitehead called ‘Cult of the Medics’ that might interest readers here.
http://www.allreligionsareone.org/Robert%20F%20Kennedy%20Jr.html
Hi Alison, I’m not sure this is relevant or not but i thought it’s coincident that I was trying to find out about what 12 steps works. Because my son has been going through mental health matters last 7 years and I recently found Every BRAIN MATTERS organization (https://everybrainmatters.org) in America. I am reading about so many youth and young adults are going though terrible situations after they started using marijuana after it got legalised. It’s been legalised for medicinal use in Australia as well a few years ago where I live. This organisation has lots of information about how badly marijuana is affecting youth and that’s is increasing rapidly!!! They are working hard to fight back. Anyway I always appreciate your posts.
I recently completed the book ‘Alcoholics Anonymous’ aka ‘The Big Book’ written in 1939 and now I and am starting the ’12 Steps 12 Traditions’.
Reading The Big Book with a WrenchInTheGears perspective was most insightful and many of the highlighted and underlined passages that captured my attention may be helpful as we continue to work through this mess. There are several names dropped in The Big Book and a smattering of capitalized words, functioning a bit like code or trigger words to further capture and steer the audience. Overall, the book is written in a very simplistic manner and completely avoids the conversation about what might cause severe alcoholism in some peoples and families (underlying trauma? epigenetic inheritance? etc.). Instead the narrative and personal stories are keen on pushing the reader to accept and understand only the 12 steps as a path forward. Below are just a few of the important names and highlighted passages that caught my attention:
In the forward to the 2nd Edition (1955)
“With the appearance of the new book a great deal began to happen. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick (brother of Raymond Fosdick who ran Rockefeller Foundation for three decades), noted clergyman, reviewed it with approval. In the fall of 1939 Fulton Oursler, then editor of Liberty, printed a piece in his magazine, called ‘Alcoholics and God’.”
“In the Spring of 1940, John D. Rockefeller Jr. gave a dinner for many of his friends to which he invited A.A. members to tell their stories….the mushrooming process was in full swing. A.A. had become a national institution.”
1st AA group — Akron. 2nd: New York. 3rd: Cleveland. 1st international conference held at Cleveland, Ohio. 1950.
From ‘The Doctor’s Opinion’ written by AA co-founder William D. Silkworth:
“We doctors have realized for a long time that some form of moral psychology was of urgent importance to alcholics, but its application presented difficulties beyond our conception. What with our ultra-modern standards, our scientific approach to everything, we are perhaps not well equiped to apply the powers of good that lie outside our synthetic knowledge.”
“Although he gives all that is in him, it often is not enough. One feels that something more than human power is needed to produce the essential psychic change”
Silkworth on the phenomenon of craving: “This phenomenon, as we have suggested, may be the manifestation of an allergy which differentiates these people, and sets them apart as a distinct entity. It has never been, by any treatment with which we are familiar, permanently eradicated. The only relief we have to suggest is entire abstinence.”
“His alcoholic problem was so complex, and his depression so great, that we felt his only hope would be through what we then called “moral psychology,” and we doubted if even that would have any effect…”
From Bill’s Story (Chapter 1):
Bill credits his loneliness, (not his military service as a veteran of foreign wars), as a reason he turned to alcohol. In 1929 (the year of the great crash) Bill “contracted golf fever” and claims he started to overtake Walter Hagen (still the 3rd greatest golfer of all time) on the exclusive courses when the crash hit in 1929. Important to note but not directly addressed was that prohibition was also in full effect at the time. The interconnected nature of prohibition ending (what Truman called ‘a moral experiment’ and AA beginning should give pause for consideration, but neither are mentioned in the Big Book.
In this passage, Power, Spirit and Universe are all intentionally capitalized:
“I had always believed in a Power greater than myself. I had often pondered these things. I was not an atheist. Few people really are, for that means blind faith in the strange proposition that this universe originated in a cipher and aimlessly rushes nowhere. MY intellectual heroes, the chemists, the astronomers, even the evolutionists, suggested vast laws and forces at work. Despite contrary indications, I had little doubt that a mighty purpose and rhythm underlay all. How could there be so much precise and immutable law and no intelligence? I simply had to believe in a Spirit of the Universe, who knew neither time nor limitation. But that was as far as I had gone.”
“I could go for such conceptions as Creative Intelligence, Universal Mind or Spirit of Nature but i resisted the thought of a Czar of the Heavens, however loving His sway might be….my freind suggested what then seemed a novel idea. He said, ‘Why don’t you choose your own conception of God?”
Ty for this Allison, but I just saw RFK speak at a townhall, and he said that when he was an addict, the program that helped him was the Italian program, that’s why he wants to offer it. You didn’t mention that at all, did you see that interview?