“This research study is the first time the new medication MG001 is being tested in people,” states a National Institute on Drug Abuse summary. “MG001 is a formulation of mitragynine, a compound that comes from a plant called Mitragyna speciosa (sometimes known as kratom), which some people use on their own to help manage symptoms of opioid withdrawal. The purpose of this study is to understand how safe MG001 is, how well it is tolerated, and how the body processes it.”

Researchers from NIDA and the University of Florida developed a “purified formulation” of mitragynine, and anticipate enrolling about 32 volunteers. The study is part of the federal Helping to End Addiction Long-term® (HEAL) Initiative. In a June 1 announcement that the IND had taken effect, NIDA Director Nora Volkow described it as a “major step toward expanding treatment options for the millions of Americans struggling with opioid use disorder.”

Kratom has for years been informally used to manage symptoms of OUD. It’s also prompted various attempts to ban it. But more recently, bolstered by the Drug Enforcement Administration’s demonization of synthetic drugs in contrast to plant-based drugs, these attempts have honed in on 7-OH.

7-hydroxymitragynine, commonly known as 7-OH, is an active byproduct of mitragynine, and so small quantities of it are naturally present in all kratom products. But it’s also been synthetically concentrated to make more products that are much more potent than traditional kratom products, and these are what public officials are referring to when they talk about 7-OH.

The FDA’s decision appears to confirm a somewhat ambiguous statement of support from President Trump a few weeks earlier. 

In July 2025 the FDA recommended placing 7-OH under Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, and formally initiated the review process with the DEA. The agency explained that it was targeting 7-OH specifically, and “not focused on natural kratom leaf products.”

Since then, amid an explosion of interest from media and law enforcement, 7-OH has become the subject of multiple public health alerts including misleading claims about overdose deaths. Media began using the moniker “gas station drugs” to refer to 7-OH and other unregulated synthetic opioids and cannabinoids. Legislators proposed bills to ban all kratom products, or ban all 7-OH products, or regulate kratom while banning 7-OH, and so on. Some of these bills have advanced in the same states at the same time. Kratom products by definition include all 7-OH products, but technically 7-OH is also present in all kratom products, prompting a lot of discussions about thresholds—similar to how hemp-derived CBD products have to contain less than 0.3 percent THC, otherwise they’re legally considered marijuana.

But 10 months later, the DEA has not moved to schedule 7-OH. Meanwhile it seems increasingly likely that the administration plans to eventually approve kratom as a treatment for OUD, which would make it ineligible for Schedule I and thus complicate any attempt to place 7-OH under Schedule I (not that the DEA would be unwilling to proceed with that kind of thing). The FDA clearing NIDA to begin human trials for its mitragynine product appears to confirm a somewhat ambiguous statement of support from President Donald Trump a few weeks earlier. 

“We’re looking very seriously at natural 7-OH and getting that approved—natural 7-OH,” Trump said at an Oval Office event in May. “And we’ll take a look at that very strongly, I think [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet] Oz and everybody were looking to see if we can do something there. A lot of people are asking for it.”

The phrase “natural 7-OH” has done nothing to clear up confusion about synthetic 7-OH versus plant-based kratom, but Trump probably meant the latter.

Image (cropped) via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 4.0

The post FDA Greenlights First Human Trial of Kratom to Treat Opioid Use Disorder appeared first on Filter.

That new law requires kratom products to be kept behind sales counters and not sold to anyone under 21. It does not allow for the sale of 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH) products, which are more potent because they contain a synthetically concentrated form of the main psychoactive compound in kratom. Both kratom and 7-OH have been the subject of increasing attention from media and lawmakers ever since 7-OH was recommended for federal Schedule I by the Food and Drug Administration in July 2025, shortly after Rhode Island passed its reform.

“Rhode Island is facing a deadly opioid crisis, and we must embrace every tool available to reduce harm and to save lives,” Senate President Pro Tempore Hanna M. Gallo (D) stated in July 2025. “Kratom is used by many to manage pain and to ease opioid withdrawal symptoms. Rhode Island remains the only New England state where this substance is prohibited. This legislation replaces prohibition with sensible regulations.”

Seven states and the District of Columbia currently have full kratom bans like the one Rhode Island overturned. (Louisiana, which enacted its full kratom ban in August 2025, is currently considering a bill that would revise that ban so it only applied to 7-OH products.) In Connecticut, where the most recent of these bans went into effect March 25, reports are already emerging that many consumers, some of whom are struggling to find withdrawal support, are driving across state lines to buy it from Massachusetts or New York.

“Some sellers lost a lot of money—threw it away or sold it at a discount,” smoke shop owner Omar Nasser told the Lakeville Journal. “It would be no surprise if others are taking it over the border into New York to sell it or are selling it under the table.”

A growing number of states have introduced consumer protection bills that would regulate kratom alongside other legislation that would ban it.

With the decision to ban 7-OH at the federal level still pending, many states moved to schedule it under their own versions of the Controlled Substance Act, which has been complicated by the fact that many of them are trying to regulate kratom at the same time—kratom naturally contains small amounts of 7-OH. While the proposed bans have tended to focus on 7-OH products rather than on the broader category of kratom products, a growing number of states have introduced consumer protection bills that would regulate kratom alongside other legislation that would ban it. 

South Carolina already enacted a consumer protection act regulating kratom in 2025, and is now considering legislation to reverse course and ban it instead. A Michigan bill to regulate kratom stalled in November 2025, while in late March a bill that would ban kratom crossed over from the House to the Senate. Iowa also recently advanced a House bill that would ban kratom under Schedule I, after narrowly rejecting an amendment proposed by  Rep. Ray Sorenson (R) that would have regulated the plant instead.

“I believe the government has a role in protecting public safety, especially when it comes to minors, but when it comes to adults making decisions about legal products, we should be cautious about expanding criminal prohibitions,” Sorenson said according to Iowa Public Radio. “We need to target the real problem: unsafe products.”

At this point in the legislative session many of the regulation bills and prohibition bills alike have already died in committee or been postponed. But multiple states, including Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Ohio and Tennessee, are still considering both.

Image (cropped) via Tennessee Department of Health

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“7-OH” refers to a synthetically concentrated, potent form of a compound found in kratom, and is considered an opioid by the Food and Drug Administration. In July the FDA recommended that 7-OH be banned under Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, and in the wake of that announcement state attorneys general and local elected officials have become increasingly interested in implying it has a significant role in the overdose crisis and rates of substance use disorder.

The Drug Enforcement Administration has not yet scheduled 7-OH under the CSA, meaning possession is not federally banned. Sale and distribution are banned when it’s marketed as a food additive because the FDA hasn’t approved it as such, but in many states 7-OH products are still sold in gas stations, smoke shops and convenience stores.

For example, on December 4, New Jersey introduced a bill that would classify 7-OH as a Schedule I substance under state law. A first-time conviction for sale or distribution could be punishable by up to 18 months in prison. For a second conviction, the maximum prison term would be five years; for subsequent convictions it would be 10 years. All of these would come with accompanying charges for violating the state’s consumer fraud act.

“[Consumers are] easily able to purchase products with concentrated levels of 7-OH online and in gas stations, corner stores and vape shops,” the bill states. “[M]any of these products contain levels of 7-OH that can be as additive [sic] as opioids.”

The consumer alert is technically about 7-OH, but also references kratom, synthetic opioids and “gas station” supplements somewhat interchangeably.

In a December 9 consumer alert, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes stated that products containing 7-OH are “really dangerous and basically act like synthetic opioids,” and warned that she’s “already heard from parents whose kids have become addicted.” The problem, she explained, is that even though these products are being sold to minors, until law enforcement has “stronger tools” there’s little that can be done.

“In its current form, Arizona’s kratom law asks prosecutors to clear a high-bar just to prove a misdemeanor,” Mayes continued. “Most law enforcement agencies simply don’t have the labs, experts or budget to do that on a routine basis.”

Except they do, if the gist of the consumer alert is to be believed. Though Mayes’ doesn’t quite say so explicitly, her solution appears to be to working with lawmakers in the upcoming legislative session to reclassify certain misdemeanors—namely sale to minors—as felonies. Under Arizona’s current law, retailers who sell kratom to anyone under 18 can be charged with a class 2 misdemeanor, which for a first-time conviction carries maximum penalties of four months’ jail time, two years’ probation and a $750 fine. The “stronger tools” are felony charges, not forensic resources.

The consumer alert is technically focused on 7-OH, but also references kratom, synthetic opioids and “gas station” supplements somewhat interchangeably. That’s becoming the norm. As is borrowing a drug-war narrative from campaigns against vapes and fentanyl—as long as something can be linked to youth overdose, even without evidence linking it to youth overdose, then it can be used to add criminal penalties where there weren’t any before, or turn misdemeanors into felonies.

Tens of thousands of products containing or associated with 7-OH were seized in federal raids across Kansas City in early December.

The Arizona consumer alert closely resembles one issued by Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr in November.

“We’re staring down the next wave of the opioid crisis, and we have to take action before it’s too late,” Carr stated. “These harmful and addictive drugs are sold like candy, and they’re putting children at risk. It’s unacceptable and it’s illegal, and there will be consequences for those who break our laws.”

Also in November, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway opened investigations into six alleged kratom distributors, mainly local smoke shops, on the same day that the Department of Justice and the Food and Drug Administration opened a civil forfeiture case against three Kansas City-area warehouses related to sale of 7-OH products. Tens of thousands of products were subsequently seized in federal raids across Kansas City in early December.

“We have seen numerous reports of harmful health consequences in consumers, including children, who have taken 7-OH products,” Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the DOJ’s Civil Division stated December 2. “[W]e will take action against anyone participating in the illegal distribution of these products.”

On December 3, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas proposed Ordinance 251028, a ban on “gas station drugs”—products derived from kratom and 7-OH, but also hemp-derived cannabinoids like Delta-8 and Delta-9, synthetic cannabinoids (K2/spice), synthetic cathinones (bath salts), nitrous oxide, amanita mushrooms, tianeptine (the original “gas station heroin”), and “other chemical analogues designed to produce psychoactive or intoxicating effects.”

“Unregulated gas station drugs are … often just as dangerous as controlled substances and have no place on our shelves when they contribute to addiction, overdoses and neighborhood instability,” Lucas stated, “particularly impacting our children.”

Image (cropped) via Fairfax County, Virginia

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For cases involving 1 ounce of 7-OH or less, Bill S4772 would impose a prison term of three to five years regardless of whether the charge was for possession, manufacturing, distribution or possession with intent to manufacture or distribute. The maximum fine would be $35,000 for possession, and $75,000 for the other charges. In cases involving more than an ounce, the prison term would be five to 10 years and the fine could be up to $150,000. The bill doesn’t specify how weight would be determined, but it’s reasonably likely that it would be the total weight of any kratom product with an alkaloid content that’s more than 2 percent 7-OH.

A naturally occurring alkaloid in the kratom plant, 7-OH is essentially what makes kratom psychoactive. It’s more potent than kratom’s primary alkaloid, but only exists in trace amounts—under 2 percent, which is why that’s the threshold being widely used in similar legislation. Any higher than that indicates that the 7-OH isn’t naturally occurring, but was synthetically engineered, as it isn’t practical to extract concentracted 7-OH from kratom. 

Though the Drug Enforcement Administration’s whole thing is obviously that all drugs are bad, its investment in painting synthetic drugs as even worse has historically been convenient for anyone invested in the narrative that plant-based drugs are better. But now, efforts to legalize and regulate a plant-based drug (kratom) are bumping up against efforts to control and criminalize a synthetic drug (concentrated 7-OH) because the former contains the latter, just not as concentrated, and it’s getting a little hard to keep up.

In Michigan, a proposal to regulate the sale of kratom is on the House Regulatory Reform Committee agenda for October 30. House Bill 4969, which would take effect in 2027, would ban kratom products with an alkaloid content above 2 percent 7-OH.

In Illinois, a proposal to create the Kratom Consumer Protection Act has been with the House Rules Committee since March, but recently picked up a new cosponsor. HB 1303 would also ban kratom products that exceed the 2-percent 7-OH threshold.

Massachusetts is considering a bill that would regulate kratom sales through state licensing similar to cannabis dispensaries, the requirements for which make very clear that concentrated 7-OH products are off-limits. The state is also considering a different bill that would simply ban all kratom (and thus 7-OH) products.

New York has a bill in committee that would ban all kratom products under the state’s Schedule I. It also has another bill that would regulate kratom while banning 7-OH above the 2-percent threshold; another that would permit continued sales of any kratom products, but ban packaging that uses the words “all natural”; another that would ban sales to people under 21; and another that would sale of any food or beverages containing kratom or 7-OH, which the FDA has already declared federally illegal.

Similar to how fentanyl is incessantly described as being 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine, 7-OH comes with a tagline, too.

Similar to how fentanyl is incessantly described as being 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine, 7-OH comes with the tagline of being 13 times more potent than morphine. (For what it’s worth, this statistic comes from a 2002 experiment on guinea pig intestines; not humans.) And now that more and more legislators find themselves talking about 7-OH, they’re plugging in the same fentanyl rhetoric they know by heart; if it works for one synthetic drug, it must work for all of them.

In an October 28 letter about 7-OH products “and their analogues,” Kansas Senator Roger Marshall called for DEA Administrator Terrance Cole to “eliminate these dangerous synthetics”—via temporary scheduling. He went on to describe manufacturers “exploiting regulatory gaps and flooding communities with synthetic compounds” by advertising concentrated 7-OH products as kratom extracts.

“This regulatory gap blurs the distinction between a natural botanical product and a dangerous synthetic drug,” he wrote. “These products are adulterated chemical analogues engineered to deliver intense opioid-like effects that no natural Kratom product could produce.”

The recently proposed New Jersey bill does much the same thing.

“The FDA has issued a number of warnings and conducted seizures of illegally sold, unapproved or misbranded drug products,” the bill states, “containing potentially lethal doses of synthetic 7-OH.”

The phrase “potentially lethal dose” is borrowed from the DEA, which uses it in reference to fentanyl. The FDA’s 7-OH guidance does not describe the substance this way; it’s actually pretty explicit that while anecdotal reports and preclinical (non-human) trials suggest there could be risk of respiratory depression with 7-OH, the fact that it was in someone’s system at the time that they died does not mean it killed them.

Image (cropped) via County of Los Angeles Public Health

The post Some States Try to Ban 7-OH, Others to Regulate Kratom. Some Try Both. appeared first on Filter.

Various media outlets are reporting that 7-OH was directly responsible for the deaths, which is also the conclusion most people would probably draw from the LACDPH press release, where 7-OH was the only substance singled out in the headline.

“The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health is making residents and health care providers aware of the risks of the synthetic kratom compound known as 7-Hydroxymitragynine (7-OH) after the County of Los Angeles Medical Examiner recently identified three fatal overdoses in LA County residents between the ages of 18 to 40 years old,” LACDPH stated. “Alcohol was present in all cases. The decedents were otherwise healthy, with no other substances identified as substantively contributing to their deaths.”

In medical examiner case records that LACDPH confirmed to Filter correspond to the three deaths in question, none determined 7-OH to be the primary cause of death. One that lists cause of death as acute alcohol toxicity cites 7-OH as an underlying cause alongside kratom and two antidepressants, and notes that other significant conditions included “pulmonary congestion and edema, psychiatric history with prescribed antidepressant therapy.”

LACDPH told Filter that reconciling this with description in the press release would be best addressed by the medical examiner, who had not responded as of publication time.

FDA slide warning of 7-OH as an emerging public health threat

In August, just after the FDA recommended banning 7-OH under Schedule I of the CSA, Louisiana passed a bill that banned both 7-OH and kratom explicitly. Florida became the first state to ban 7-OH on its own. America’s Poison Centers—the organization that oversees the National Poison Data System—reported that so far in 2025 there had been 165 reports of 7-OH exposure. Of the unspecified number of patients who reported exposure to 7-OH and no other substances, more than one-third had “serious health problems” and more than two-thirds “were treated at a health care facility.”

7-OH isn’t readily detectable on standard urinalysis tests. So the data that US poison centers are going off of is primarily self-reported, and isn’t confirmed at a lab. The same is true of calls about kratom exposure.

“At low doses, 7-OH can have stimulant-like effects and at higher doses it has opioid-like effects,” LACDPH continued in its press release. “High doses of 7-OH and/or co-used with alcohol or other sedatives can cause severe respiratory depression and death. Again, they are unregulated and may contain unknown concentrations of 7-OH, increasing the risk of unintentional overdose.”

We tend to think of stimulants as uppers and opioids as downers, and there is obviously a lot of truth to that. But a more complete description would explain that all kinds of drugs have a stimulating effect at lower doses, and a sedating effect at higher doses. Alcohol is a good example of this, because it’s so commonly used; most of us are probably familiar with the concept of someone getting chatty after the first couple of drinks, and passing out by the end of the night. But it’s not clear what basis there is for saying that “high doses” are linked to respiratory depression and death. 7-OH is unregulated. What constitutes a high dose, and how does someone know that’s what they’re taking?

Prohibition and regulation are legal constructs that have very little to do with a drug’s actual benefits or harms.

Advocates for 7-OH say the sudden attention to 7-OH is being manufactured by, essentially, Big Kratom.

“Unfortunately, there are current efforts in a number of state legislatures to ban 7-OH, which are largely driven by a kratom organization that views 7-OH as a threat to its market share,” states Holistic Alternative Recovery Trust, a nonprofit supportive of 7-OH and other opioid alternatives. “7-OH can be an invaluable harm reduction tool that should remain an option for the hundreds of thousands of consumers that rely on it. This was a key factor in HHS’ decision to reject efforts to ban kratom and 7-OH.”

Groups like the American Kratom Association, meanwhile, are quick to draw a distinction.

“The AKA is committed to protect consumers from deliberately deceptive marketing by 7-OH product manufacturers who are materially misleading and confusing consumers seeking traditional kratom products,” AKA Senior Fellow on Public Policy Mac Haddow stated in January. “Any product containing a level of 7-OH that exceeds the 2 percent of the overall alkaloid content are not kratom products, and consumers looking to purchase traditional kratom products should avoid these mislabeled products.”

Beginning with Indiana and Wisconsin in 2014, seven states have now banned kratom. This includes Rhode Island, which in July passed legislation to reverse its ban and plans to flip to a legal regulation model in 2026. The FDA’s recent call to ban 7-OH didn’t extend to kratom. (The agency attempted to ban kratom nearly a decade ago, but was overwhelmed by public pushback.)

This gets confusing because many kratom stakeholders are also pushing for legal regulation of the plant, which contains the chemical compound they’re are hoping to ban (in its concentrated form). 7-OH stakeholders, meanwhile, are also arguing for regulation, and suggesting that the compound has untapped medical benefits while posing no more risk than kratom.

The important thing to remember in all this is that prohibition and regulation are legal constructs that have very little to do with a drug’s actual benefits or harms. That’s why the CSA tells us that marijuana has no medical benefits and alcohol has no potential for addiction, and the designation reserved for the most dangerous drugs of all—Schedule I—is a list of 300 synthetic cannabinoids and unpronounceable research chemicals.

Images (cropped) via United Stated Food and Drug Administration

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7-OH is an active byproduct of mitragynine, which is the main psychoactive compound in the Mitragyna speciosa plant—similar to how delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the primary psychoactive compound in Cannabis sativa. The Mitragyna speciosa plant is better known as kratom. Essentially, 7-OH is a more potent version of kratom.

“The FDA is specifically targeting 7-OH … it is not focused on natural kratom leaf products,” the agency stated. “7-OH is increasingly recognized as having potential for abuse because of its ability to bind to opioid receptors.”

Both mitragynine and 7-OH are considered partial opioid agonists, like buprenorphine. In its accompanying report on 7-OH, however, the FDA stated that “observations suggest 7-OH has pharmacological properties representative of a full mu opioid agonist and an associated high potential for abuse.” It also stated that “[c]linical presentations include euphoria, sedation, respiratory depression and opioid-like withdrawal syndromes, with users acknowledging its significant addiction potential.”

It should be noted that all of these observations and clinical presentations refer to either lab testing involving petri dishes or mice, or posts on Reddit and other online forums like Erowid.

The FDA’s analysis did include human post-mortem toxicology data, but the agency cautioned that it “generally cannot be discerned” whether 7-OH specifically contributed to any deaths, so there are “significant limitations in making inferences from these data.”

What we do know is that both supply and demand for 7-OH, or similar higher-potency kratom products, have been growing at a faster rate since 2023 compared to previous years.

7-OH is not regulated, and so various products like chewable tablets or gummies can be legally sold at vape shops, gas stations, convenience stores and so forth.

The Centers for Forensic Science Research & Education has described mitragynine, AKA plant-based kratom products, in a manner that recalls synthetic cannabinoids: “a pharmacologically complex drug, exhibiting stimulant-like effects at low doses and sedative effects at higher doses.”

At a July 29 press conference, United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stated that CSA scheduling was necessary to prevent 7-OH from becoming the fourth wave of the opioid-involved overdose crisis. It’s widely established among drug-policy researchers that after prescription analgesics, then heroin, then fentanyl, the fourth wave already began around 2018 with opioid-stimulant polysubstance use. But the FDA has been using this “fourth wave” framing for 7-OH, too.

Also on July 29, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary published an op-ed in the New York Post warning that 7-OH could be the next wave to follow “prescription opioids, heroin and fentanyl.” He also leaned on tropes borrowed from the FDA’s anti-vaping agenda, which the agency has been featuring heavily throughout its new 7-OH public awareness materials as well.

“Vape shops are popping up in every neighborhood in America, but few people—even doctors—know that many of these shops are selling a dangerous new opioid,” Makary wrote in the Post. “Perhaps most alarming is that 7-OH products are often disguised as attractive candies, gummies and even ice cream cones that parents might never see as a risk … this synthetic opioid [is not] a safer alternative—and store owners, too, should be aware.”

Images (cropped) via Food and Drug Administration

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The flurry of state-level scrutiny follows efforts in recent years by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to ban the drug, which remains unregulated at the federal level.

A majority of states either have no current regulations or very limited rules, such as an age limit. Six states, however—Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Tennessee, Vermont and Wisconsin—already have kratom bans, as do a handful of local jurisdictions.

Some states have now proposed further bans on kratom products. Mississippi is one, although lawmakers there have seen multiple such bills fail in recent years. Louisiana lawmakers have also prefiled prohibition legislation.

For Mac Haddow, a lobbyist and senior fellow on public policy at the American Kratom Association, what could be a crisis is an opportunity. He’s confident that advocates can defeat the Louisiana bill, for one thing, and he can rattle off a laundry list of other bills in play around the country. He spoke to Filter from Vienna, Austria, where he was presenting at the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs.

“It really comes down to your evaluation of a harm reduction tool. “Other than that, it’s a freedom issue.”

In recent years, nearly 30 US states have introduced or adopted kratom legislation, whether to ban kratom products outright or to more proactively regulate existing markets.

Haddow said he’s currently keeping a close eye on legislation either introduced or expected in states including Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Florida and Tennessee. “I’m just trying to remember them as best I can,” he quipped.

His broader message is a familiar one in the drug policy reform world: He argues that state and federal kratom policies should be guided by available science and common sense, rather than backlash and misunderstanding.

“It really comes down to your evaluation of a harm reduction tool,” Haddow said. “Other than that, it’s a freedom issue.”

The past decade has seen a rush of US political activity around a substance that once flew under the radar. In 2014, the FDA banned the import and export of kratom as a dietary substance. Two years later, the DEA attempted to add kratom to Schedule I of the federal Controlled Substances Act, effectively outlawing it completely. While DEA officials reversed that position after public opposition, the FDA has continued to urge against the use of kratom and insist it has no therapeutic value.

Law enforcement groups have backed many of the state-level bans. In Alabama, for example, which outlawed the substance in 2016, authorities reportedly claimed that kratom products were 13 times stronger than morphine.

“We’ve investigated every single autopsy report we can get our hands on. We’ve found not one that was kratom only.”

Haddow says popular fears around kratom are overblown—and misplaced. He attributes the recent turbulence to a 2010 report out of Sweden that linked kratom products to nine deaths over a 12-month period.

The problem, Haddow said, is that kratom didn’t cause those deaths. “We’ve investigated every single autopsy report we can get our hands on. We’ve found not one that was kratom only.”

The deaths in Sweden were all associated with a single kratom product, a herbal blend called Krypton, which was sold online in Europe. While the FDA cites those deaths as linked to kratom, Haddow noted that researchers behind the original report have since said the deaths were likely caused by an adulterant, O-desmethyltramadol.

It’s reminiscent of the so-called “EVALI” scare of 2019, when US health authorities raised the alarm about serious and fatal lung injuries associated with vaping. Initially the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and some state and local officials sought to blame vaping products in general, feeding into an existing panic over youth nicotine vaping. The injuries were eventually linked instead to unregulated THC vape cartridges adulterated with vitamin E acetate.

Every death or serious injury Haddow has seen linked to kratom, he said, has been the result of either contamination or combining kratom with other drugs, such as opioids or benzodiazepines.

“I think it’s true that if you have an adulterated kratom product that you are going to have adverse health events,” he said. Likewise, if people are using kratom in an attempt to replace opioids, it would follow that some people who die of opioid-involved overdose might have kratom in their systems.

Similar points were being made by health experts even as states moved to ban kratom years ago. “Direct kratom overdoses from the life-threatening respiratory depression that usually occurs with opioid overdoses have not been reported,” Oliver Grundmann, a clinical professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Florida, told VICE at the time of the Alabama ban.

Kratom itself poses fairly benign health risks, Haddow said, most commonly nausea. Serious side effects are rare and typically occur at high doses. When consumed in its plant form (often in teas, powders or capsules), kratom has lower concentrations of its two main active ingredients, mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine, than some refined products that have recently become available. Think coffee beans versus processed caffeine, or cannabis flower versus distilled THC.

For some people, discontinuing regular kratom use may result in relatively mild withdrawal symptoms. Certain studies, some of which Haddow would dispute, have additionally associated kratom with side effects such as agitation, cardiac problems, hallucinations, weight loss, insomnia and seizures—yet even those found that such harms most frequently occur at high doses or when used alongside other drugs.

The model legislation backed by the American Kratom Association is called the Kratom Consumer Protection Act.

The American Kratom Association is hoping to get ahead of the controversy as public awareness of kratom grows and lawmakers feel pressure to act. In addition to trying to combat what it sees as misinformation, the organization has spent the past few years working to pass state-level legislation that would set basic guardrails around kratom while ensuring it remains available to adult consumers.

The model legislation backed by the group is called the Kratom Consumer Protection Act (KCPA). Broadly speaking, it sets a minimum age of 18 to buy kratom products (though some states have made it 21), prohibits the addition of adulterants or “any synthetic or artificially elevated alkaloid content,” requires that manufacturers register with the proper regulatory authority, and creates standards around packaging and labeling.

“Labeling is critically important,” Haddow said. That means not only what’s in the product but also who processed and packaged it.

“One of the most important things on the label is who manufactured it and what their address is, because too many kratom products today have no identifiers,” he explained. “If you have an adverse event, you don’t know who to report it to—or report on—because there’s no information that’s available.”

So far, seven states have already enacted some form of KCPA: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon and Utah. Lawmakers in Virginia and West Virginia, meanwhile, just passed their own versions of KCPA bills earlier this year. Similar legislation is also making its way through the Texas legislature.

In Missouri, a bill to regulate kratom passed the legislature last year but was vetoed by Gov. Mike Parson (R). Haddow said he has a meeting scheduled with the governor and his staff, “and we’re going to work through whatever their objections were.”

“We’ve been able to answer most of that,” he continued, “and we’re going to clarify that they’re going to sign the bill that passed last time, so that’ll be run again.”

Georgia already has a form of KCPA in place, but lawmakers introduced a ban this session. Haddow and the American Kratom Association pushed back, and the bill has since been amended. Haddow hopes the final version might even strengthen the KCPA.

Haddow said his group is also on the cusp of helping overturn a kratom ban on the books in Vermont. “We petitioned the state of Vermont, the Department of Health, and they approved our petition to reform the drug rule in Vermont on March 1,” he said. The state must next go through rulemaking, although officials are holding off until the end of the session to see whether lawmakers pass a regulation bill that‘s pending in the legislature.

Similar efforts are underway in Wisconsin, Rhode Island and Arkansas. In Indiana, lawmakers are currently considering legislation to repeal a ban and pass a version of the KCPA.

Like other drug policy reform advocates, Haddow has his complaints about stubborn, evidence-blind law enforcement associations and reactive politicians, quick to attack what they don’t understand.

When it comes to Alabama? “That’s just a tough state,” he said. “The district attorneys association was responsible for getting kratom banned in the first place, and they’re just locked and loaded against kratom. They don’t care about facts. They don’t care about any data. I think if the Savior Himself came down and said, ‘Kratom is good,’ they wouldn’t care.”

“I tell my wife it’s because I’m a great lobbyist, but the truth is, it’s because kratom’s less well known.”

Despite the holdouts, the American Kratom Association and other advocates have had some remarkable successes in winning over politicians. Reform efforts around more mainstream drugs, such as cannabis or psychedelics, have in some cases spent decades struggling to overcome entrenched stigma and stereotypes.

“I tell my wife it’s because I’m a great lobbyist, but the truth is, it’s because [kratom]’s less well known,” Haddow said. “The only thing I have to fight, and the AKA advocates have to fight, is googling kratom. State lawmakers don’t know what it is, and so they google it.”

Haddow noted that kratom only entered the US in significant amounts in the 1970s, after soldiers encountered the plant during the Vietnam War. Compared with many other drugs, there has been far less time for stigma against kratom to embed itself in US culture and politics.

And unlike other drugs, despite that 2016 DEA effort, kratom still isn’t covered under the federal Controlled Substances Act. Haddow wants it to stay that way. While kratom should be regulated for safety and quality and kept out of the hands of children, he said, adults should be trusted to make the decision to use it.

“I spoke with an FDA official today, and he was telling me that one of the biggest concerns the FDA has about kratom is that people are sitting at home and self-medicating with it, and they’re trying to get off opioids,” he said from Vienna. “I think that strips people not only of their freedom but of their dignity.”

If people are self-medicating at home for this purpose, he continued, with a substance that has a low risk profile, “I want people to have access to that.”

Photograph by drogen.bz via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 3.0

The post “Lawmakers Have to Google It”: Inside the Struggle to Regulate Kratom appeared first on Filter.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which funds something like 80 percent of the world’s drug research, has sometimes been criticized for its overwhelming focus on “drug abuse and addiction” at the expense of pleasure and benefits. However, new research out of the US federal institute suggests that people’s reasons for using kratom have changed and expanded.

To look into this, the research team re-contacted respondents from a previous study (which ran between September 2020 and March 2021 and surveyed people who used alcohol, opioids, or stimulants in the prior six months) who had reported past kratom use. The respondents in the past study had been recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing platform.

The kratom research team reached out to 289 people, of whom 129 took the survey about their kratom use. All were located in the United States, and aged 18 or over. It was “essentially a convenience sample, but it had greater diversity in terms of use experiences compared to a lot of the other online kratom surveys,” Dr. Kirsten Smith, a NIDA researcher and one of the paper’s authors, told Filter.

Interestingly, the mean age at which respondents first tried kratom was 29.9—older than is the case for most other drugs.

Of the respondents, 48.5 percent ranked kratom as a “preferred substance.” And while previous NIDA research points to men using illicit drugs at higher rates than women, a slight majority of the kratom sample were women. The sample was mostly white, which speaks to the need for more targeted research into other demographics.

The paper notes that in the US, kratom use increased from around 2007, but remained rare until 2015. Many of the respondents reported trying kratom for the first time after 2015. And interestingly, the mean age at which respondents first tried kratom was 29.9—older than is the case for most other drugs studied (buprenorphine, a drug prescribed for opioid use disorder, is one exception).

Smith said that this warrants more research. However, she believes that as kratom grows in popularity, the age at which people try it for the first time may decrease. “People who are younger will now know about it,” she said.

While some believe kratom could act as a “gateway drug” to opioids, Smith said that this seems unlikely based on what she’s heard anecdotally and the fact that kratom, in the US, is relatively new.

On the other hand, there are many reported cases of people using kratom to wean themselves off opioid use, to replace opioids, or to stave off opioid withdrawal symptoms while opioids are unavailable to them, as Smith acknowledged. Many of the study respondents reported using kratom as an opioid substitute, but also as a substitute for alcohol or stimulants.

Fascinatingly, in this context, the study found that the other drug with the “strongest association with past-year kratom use” was vaped nicotine, which is typically used as a harm reduction substitute for tobacco. Past-month kratom use, meanwhile, was most strongly associated with past-month use of cannabis, which is itself sometimes described as an “exit drug” for opioids.

In the research, 48.1 percent of respondents said kratom boosts energy. And some people take it before working out, Smith said.

However, people also use kratom for various completely different reasons—and the number of reasons for kratom use appears to be growing. “The motivations are so important to understand the kratom story,” Smith said.

In the research, 48.1 percent of respondents said kratom boosts energy. And some people take it before working out, Smith said. Others may look at it as a herbal supplement, considering 29.5 percent of respondents reported purchasing kratom at herbal/vitamin stores. People also simply use kratom to relax enjoyably, vaguely similar to how people might drink wine after work—48.8 percent of respondents said they used it this way. Other people might want to use kratom to address pain, or to take it before work just to feel a little better.

Others still may use it to self-treat things like ADD, anxiety symptoms or chronic fatigue—as such, some people are using it to address gaps in health care, Smith said. She doesn’t believe that these groups represent the majority of kratom users at the moment, but the nature of how most people use the drug may change going forward.

“You have people who are the early adopters getting it online … The first cohort of users in the United States were very much in that self-treatment kind of group,” Smith said. “And then you start to see a shift as products become commercially available in all these different forms, and marketed in different ways.”

Kratom grows in various Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia and Thailand. It is regularly sold as a powder made from leaves of the plant, as capsules filled with the powder, or as tinctures, among other formulations.

If the motivations Smith emphasized are to be fully understood, a lot more research will be needed.

The most abundant chemical in kratom is mitragynine, which is largely considered the compound that produces the relatively mild high. However, one study suggests that there are around 40 different alkaloids present in kratom leaves, and they can vary wildly from strain to strain—or even plant to plant, depending on numerous factors like where the plant is grown, when it is harvested, etc. This makes gauging the subjective and chemical effects of kratom difficult.

Kratom exists in a kind of legal gray zone in the United States, as it has not been approved for consumption by humans by the FDA, but is not federally illegal to sell. However, some states, such as Alabama, have made it illegal. There are myriad websites that sell kratom online, but in some parts of the US, it can also be purchased in brick-and-mortar shops.

The NIDA paper provides a glimpse into people’s rapidly diversifying reasons for kratom use, but if the motivations Smith emphasized are to be fully understood, a lot more research will be needed. Further, considering the sheer breadth of potentially psychoactive compounds in the plant, the dearth of research on withdrawal and other knowledge gaps, there’s a great deal more to learn.

Photograph by Morgan Godvin

The post People’s Reasons for Using Kratom Are Rapidly Diversifying appeared first on Filter.

I didn’t need the Steps to quit heroin. And my recent experience of quitting kratom after nine months of daily use has only cemented my suspicion: We are not powerless over the drugs we use.

Type “kratom withdrawal” into Google and you will see a series of addiction treatment centers and SAMHSA warnings. Where there is money to be made, there is pristine search engine optimization. Surprise, you can go to an expensive inpatient detox and rehab for this plant.

Spend any time on the r/quittingkratom subreddit, and you’ll be left with an even more dire impression of the drug. People lament the green sludge that has robbed them of their lives, turned them into recluses only focused on their next dose, driven them into poverty, all the while beleaguered by withdrawals comparable to heroin.

When I made the conscious decision to take kratom daily, deciding that the benefits outweighed the cost, I knew the day would come that I would need to taper off of it entirely. Thanks to my raging PTSD from being force-detoxed into withdrawal at the county jail, I always held a healthy skepticism of any substance that required daily dosing. For this reason, and the fact that there is scant research about long-term or heavy kratom use, I always kept my dose low. When tolerance left it creeping upward, I would dramatically reduce for a week to “reset.” But I never completely stopped.

Thanks, once again, to criminal-justice system traumas, however, I’m now massively wary of breaking laws. I regret that that sentence could be read by some as a justification of punitive policies; it should not be. Nonetheless, it’s true for me. So when my best friend suggested that we visit the UK this summer, I knew what it meant. Kratom is a banned substance there. I would have to taper all the way off.

Because of my felonies, I had to apply for a tourist visa even though most Americans don’t need one. While I waited, I read up what the tapering journey would be like. It filled me with fear. Dozens of people reported horrific opioid-like withdrawals, mental cravings and an inability to cease using. People described 100 gram per day habits—meaning you’d consume an entire kilo in a 10-day span. (That’s still only $200 a month—an expense, certainly, but I feel like the “kratom impoverished me” complaint should be taken in the context of the overpriced, adulterated illicit opioids that some of us kratom users were previously paying for.) It all felt unbelievable to me, as I’d hovered between 4 and 12 grams a day and preferred the low end of that range.

Such absolutist portrayals on both ends of the spectrum frustrate me.

I became increasingly trepidatious about the task. In r/quittingkratom, most people go cold turkey, or “CT” in the lingo. Despite the fact that slow tapers, in my experience, almost entirely mitigate withdrawal symptoms, the people in the subreddit described finding it too challenging to resist temptation and stick to a taper schedule. Others said they found dose-reduction withdrawals to be so similar to CT that it didn’t matter.

In r/kratom, on the other hand, it’s almost entirely rainbows and sunshine. Miracle drug! Lifesaving! Despite the benefits I found in kratom, such absolutist portrayals on both ends of the spectrum frustrate me—which is why I made sure to acknowledge my physical dependency when I outed myself as a kratom user some months ago.

I ended up buying the supplements random strangers on the internet recommended, some of which have an evidence base and some of which don’t. I liked the black seed oil, which I’d previously used to potentiate my dose. I megadosed vitamin C, and took more things that I won’t go into because of the haywire nature of the unregulated US supplement market. I threw everything at the wall to see what stuck. (Something was working, because I would feel worse when I forget to take my meal-sized handful of “supplements.”)

I was enthralled by all the r/quittingkratom accounts of true addiction, in which people’s desire to live their life, have sex, have fun or do anything else was completely supplanted by their kratom use. Were we using the same substance?

I started by cutting out my occasional midday doses, then began lowering my morning and evening doses. I got down to 2 grams per day within a couple of weeks. I had little trace of opioid withdrawal, with which I am intimately familiar. Sleep became more challenging, and the mental health symptoms that made me take kratom in the first place felt more intense, but quickly everything regulated. (Not that my baseline is all that great.)

But I did have an unexpected symptom: brain zaps, which sometimes radiated throughout my body, resulting in panicked consultations with friends of mine who “get it”—read: a medical student and a generous psychiatry resident. I had felt “shocks” once before, after tapering off of prescription Xanax more quickly than my psychiatrist advised. (My need to prove I have power over drugs seems ingrained.) Concerned that it was GABA withdrawal like from the benzos, which does pose a seizure risk, I took a low dose of a leftover prescription benzodiazepine. It didn’t abate the shocks; this was my very ad hoc diagnostic tool to confirm that the shocks were instead related to the neurotransmitter serotonin. A flurry of Reddit searches confirmed it’s a semi-common symptom. I wish there were more peer-reviewed literature; I researched heroin exhaustively back in the days of Bluelight, but find kratom to be mostly a black hole.

To my best guess, kratom functions as an SSRI. This is suggested by research on its hypothetical mechanism of action. My taper was slow enough to avoid opioid-like withdrawal symptoms but too fast to avoid SSRI-style withdrawal. I sat at 2 grams daily for two more weeks, but struggled to get below that amount. Less than that felt exactly the same as none at all. It was time to jump off.

Drugs are not good or bad. It is our relationships to them, influenced by many outside variables, that form the crux of our subjective experiences.

I took my last dose Saturday morning. I didn’t experience so much as any discomfort. On Sunday, I went hiking. On Monday, I went to a Pride Gay Skate event at the roller rink. And it struck me anew how little drug addiction has to do with the drug itself.

There are some important caveats to my personal experience. I may be formerly incarcerated with mental health challenges, but I am not subjected to extreme poverty, racism or any number of other stressors that heavily impact people’s management of their relationships with drugs. Yet none of these very real societal factors are inherent to any drug—and that’s the point.

Drugs are inanimate substances. They are not good or bad. It is our relationships to them, influenced by many outside variables, that form the crux of our subjective experiences. Human beings are so desperate to externalize our internal emotions, to find something else to obsess over beyond our existential dread. I realized this once, fresh out of inpatient treatment, pulled over on the side of the road with the Domino’s Pizza sign alit on top of my car midway through my shift, gasping for air as I descended into a panic attack.

It’s because I need heroin, I told myself. That’s not true but it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy if you believe it, some wiser part of myself responded. We want a way to make the incomprehensible digestible. Identifying an external, concrete source of our troubles—rather than the complex interplay of psychological and societal circumstances—is relatively reassuring.

This anxiety is because I need heroin. Believe in your inherent need, and you have a clear remedy. And heroin will help, at least initially. But if instead you tell yourself a different story—like, this is anxiety that reflects aspects of my life, but experience tells me it will subside—that might become true, too. There’s a venerable study, led by William R. Miller, co-creator of motivational interviewing, that reflects these ideas. For people with alcohol addiction, it found, two factors were “optimally predictive of resumed drinking.” Those were: “lack of coping skills and belief in the disease model of alcoholism.”

It is never really about the drug. The vast majority of people who try any drug never become addicted, contrary to popular lore. It’s about the relationship, and as with other relationships, we sometimes adopt toxic dynamics.

I do not doubt that people struggling with kratom addiction are, in fact, struggling. To those who went to inpatient only to resume addictive use, my heart goes out to you. I know that pain. But I also know that addictive relationships with non-drug behaviors can be just as painful. And I know that kratom is a relatively mild substance that can be successfully tapered with few ill effects—if other variables allow it.

Funnily enough, the UK ended up denying my visa. But I wanted to prove to myself that I could endure the withdrawals, taper and quit anyway. And I did.

Telling people they’re powerless over a drug carries the severe risk of making them believe it.

Though I’d rather not test it, I do believe that my life is purposeful enough today that even taking heroin wouldn’t lure me back into compulsive, uncontrolled use. My relationship to that substance has changed because my relationship to myself has changed.

Most critically, my social context has changed. I am not, as I once was, an impoverished adolescent with no hope for my future, living an unequivocally miserable life. While I still struggle with suicidal ideation, unlike before I went to prison, it no longer feels like the most rational choice. (Its profound irrationality bothers me most, in fact.) After military benefits supported me through a bachelor’s degree, I have found work that supports me financially and that I find meaningful.

Many people do not share these privileges, and the unequal toll of addiction damningly reflects the injustices of our society. At the same time, knowing what addiction is not can be empowering to anyone. It isn’t the drug. And telling people they’re powerless over a drug carries the severe risk of making them believe it.

Photograph by Morgan Godvin

The post Quitting Kratom Reminded Me How Little Drugs Have to Do With Addiction appeared first on Filter.

A cousin of the coffee plant, kratom is a tree native to Southeast Asia. Its leaves are shredded into a bitter green powder and sold across the world. I order mine online, avoiding the low-grade product sold at gas stations and headshops.

Over the six months since I began using kratom, I haven’t been mentioning my use to many people, and certainly not in addiction-recovery circles. Decades of drug-war rhetoric baked irrational fears into the American psyche. If the drug isn’t alcohol or caffeine, it is insidious. Except anyone who has taken kratom realizes how bogus this is.

Kratom makes my days livable, manageable.

I take the herbal supplement two or three times daily, which ends up costing me about $1 per day. It would be cheaper (and faster-acting) if I only used the powdered form, which I sometimes do by making a sealed “taco” of Japanese potato starch disks called oblate papers. With a preference for speed and convenience, I usually take pre-filled capsules.

Its effects are mild, don’t impair me in any way, and have a natural ceiling—a consequence of kratom having both agonist and antagonist opioid-like properties. When I found a dose that worked for me, I stayed there, raising only incrementally to combat inevitable tolerance before going on “tolerance breaks.” Kratom makes my days livable, manageable.

The herb is not on our banned drugs list more by chance—including its former obscurity in the United States—than design. But there are periodic threats to this status. When there was talk of an international ban, which for now has not materialized, I felt the vice grip of the drug war once again.

I was addicted to heroin for years and, as a direct result, was in prison for years after that. Then came the random urinalyses and the perpetual fear. Once, the day after a doctor’s visit where my physician told me to drink more water because my blood pressure was low, my urinalysis sample came up “dilute” at the federal probation office, a punishable offense. I had long since quit opioids, but trace amounts of THC (whether from CBD or unwittingly consuming even the residue of edibles) could have sent me back to prison. I avoided all supplements, however natural, for fear of contamination.

My mental health suffered. If suicidality is a scale, I never get below a four out of 10. Some days are worse than others, with shocking amounts of my mental energy consumed by batting back thoughts of suicide. On the outside, this can look like laziness or paralysis. But merely existing in that moment, without taking a gun to my head, is the best I can do. The pandemic first triggered my jail-learned fear of infectious disease, thanks to being confined in overcrowded spaces with lice and tuberculosis for four years. Later, the pandemic restrictions caused another trigger for my PTSD as I felt trapped and confined.

The solution? Xanax. I was mostly living abroad during that time, where Big Pharma panic never took hold because opioid prescribing never took off. A psychiatrist prescribed me Xanax and encouraged me to try SSRIs, which I wouldn’t do (I have since softened). I had once binged benzos and feared that if I took one pill, I would end up with a needle in my arm the next day. But it didn’t happen. I used the medication when I needed it, never escalated my dose or frequency, and tapered off easily once my panic subsided. I learned then that addiction is not a fixed mental state, but rather a consequence of circumstance.

Back in the United States, my distant addiction history disqualified me for prescription benzodiazepines.

Back in the United States, my distant addiction history disqualified me for prescription benzodiazepines, despite my having used them without problems for an entire year. Left without pharmaceutical support, I began looking into alternatives for my anxiety, depression and chronic suicidal ideation.

Mostly, I fantasized about doing heroin. Being appointed to the Measure 110 Oversight and Accountability Council to oversee Oregon’s drug decriminalization has been one of the most challenging experiences of my professional career. However rewarding it may be, we find ourselves under constant, public pressure. I had never gotten so close to returning to heroin.

That’s when I found kratom. I’m a researcher, so naturally, I researched it exhaustively. Various subreddits provided ample material. With a sample size of thousands upon thousands of posts, I could glean clear patterns.

People use kratom for opioid replacement theory, opioid withdrawal management, chronic pain, anxiety, depression and other mental health woes. Others use it as a pre-workout supplement, for mild euphoria, or to make shift work more bearable. (Traditionally, it was used by Southeast Asian laborers working long hours in the sun.)

Few of these thousands of accounts of benefits are reflected in academic research. With few exceptions, kratom studies are retrospective, which introduces inherent negative bias. No one walks into the emergency department to tell you that kratom cut their pain in half; people walk in because something negative has occurred.

Of the few documented cases of kratom-involved death, virtually all had other substances present. It does not cause respiratory depression, unlike opioids. As buprenorphine induction for people using fentanyl becomes increasingly difficult, could kratom be used as withdrawal relief? I think so, but without legal standing I cannot do a randomized control trial and have it be ethical. It’s a catch-22.

Kratom does cause physical dependency, and that can be downplayed by its advocates. It has effects on the kappa opioid receptors, among other mechanisms. It has both mildly sedating and stimulant effects, a unique mix for a molecule. Now, when I go more than 14 hours without kratom, I have mild temperature dysregulation. I feel hot or cold, sweat. Anyone who has experienced opioid withdrawal is familiar with this symptom.

But critically, it stops there. My nose might run, my eyes water, but I feel fine. I’ll have trouble falling asleep, the most annoying symptom. But the very mild withdrawals can be averted by even rapid tapers, which I sometimes do for my tolerance breaks. When I stopped taking Xanax, I wrote out a schedule and stuck to it, and the same can be done with kratom.

Upon stopping, I do feel depressed and suicidal. But is that from withdrawal, or simply a return to baseline? Kratom is not a magic bullet. I still struggle with mental health most days. But at least I have something reliable to lean on that is unlikely to harm me.

For me, as for many others, kratom is the epitome of harm reduction when used as a replacement for far riskier alternatives.

Problems might arise only when use is stopped suddenly, as often happens with unregulated drugs whose supply is unreliable. There have certainly been issues with the kratom supply chain. Like all things billed “supplements” in the United States, it has almost no government regulations. It has been found adulterated with everything from bacteria to actual drugs. (I highly recommend Amanda Mull’s feature Everything is a Multivitamin about the deregulated chaos of the industry.)

These incidents have been used in calls to ban the substance but they’re evidence that more consumer protections are needed, not prohibitions. Kratom regulation bills, to enhance such protections, have passed in several states, Oregon included.

If kratom were banned tomorrow, or the supply failed completely, I would probably end up on Blues. Without something, however mild, to tickle my opioid receptors, I am a hulking mass of raw nerves, existential dread and anxiety. For me, as for many others, kratom is the epitome of harm reduction when used as a replacement for far riskier alternatives.

Why are a few non-prescribed drugs legal, and the rest banned? A mix of chance, racism, oppression and evidence-averse legislators. And yet for six months, I hesitated to share publicly that I use the substance. It doesn’t cause me intoxication and it helps, rather than hinders, me in getting through daily life. But in most recovery circles, it jeopardizes my status as a person in long-term recovery. It can also jeopardize my access to high-quality healthcare, as providers are wont to blame any symptom on this herb they do not understand. The internalized shame and stigma persist.

The days of demonizing drugs can and must be over. Kratom provides myriad benefits to people who use it, and could have substantial applications in addiction medicine and chronic pain treatment. But no form of drug use is cause for shame. I refuse to hide in the shadows any longer. 

Photograph by drogen.bz via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 3.0

The post Kratom Helps Me Cope With Life, So What’s the Problem?  appeared first on Filter.