By the time Courtney True found the Reddit thread about kratom in December 2016, she hadn’t touched an opioid for 48 hours. She was in bad shape — stomach cramps, diarrhea, jitters, hot sweats, cold sweats, and body aches that made even her teeth hurt. Sitting at her kitchen table hunched over a laptop, she recalled, “I felt like I wanted to rip my skin off and step out of it.”
True had been dependent on opioids since she was a 14-year-old growing up in Mississippi, when a doctor prescribed her Percocet to treat chronic migraines. By the age of 24, she was shooting OxyContin. A decade after that — after moving to Maine, becoming a nurse, and having two kids — the Drug Enforcement Administration cracked down on sketchy online pharmacies that sold pills, and True started on heroin.
She’d tried to quit many times over the years, using every conceivable remedy for the misery of withdrawal — Imodium A-D, quinine, valerian root. Nothing worked. So here she was, reading earnest online testimonials about an obscure leaf from Southeast Asia.
“It seemed kinda seedy, it seemed kinda underground, and kinda maybe like something I shouldn’t be doing,” True, now 41, told BuzzFeed News. “But at that point I was desperate enough to give it a try.”
Her husband drove her a half hour to a smoke shop in downtown Portland. She bought a little of everything: a small bag of crushed kratom leaves, some capsules, and two tiny bottles of extracts, all for about $100.
Back in the car, heater blasting, she swallowed some of the capsules and downed a bottle, then sat waiting, skeptically, to feel something like a high. She never did, but within 20 minutes her withdrawal symptoms had faded away. "It was like a fog had cleared," True said. "They were just gone."
Now 18 months have passed, and True has been heroin-free for 17. She drinks a murky kratom-grapefruit juice mix several times a day, and credits the plant for saving not only her own life, but also her family’s. Her husband, John Wolstenhulme, had a 20-plus-year opioid addiction, and her 27-year-old stepson, Jeff Wolstenhulme, used fentanyl. Both are now off of opioids — John for 16 months, Jeff for almost four — thanks to kratom, they say. True convinced her mother in Mississippi to use it to treat her irritable bowel syndrome. She even gives it to her dogs for their joint pain and anxiety. “Sometimes I just sprinkle it in their food,” she said, laughing.
True is part of a growing grassroots movement of former drug users who see kratom as the cheap, safe, “all-natural” way to curb the opioid epidemic killing more than 40,000 people in the US every year. The once-obscure botanical has become big enough to warrant its own lobbyists in Washington, DC — the American Kratom Association, which claims that kratom is a billion-dollar business, with thousands of vendors selling it to an estimated 3 million to 5 million people.
Its proponents range from Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch to bro podcaster Joe Rogan to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. In Facebook groups and Reddit threads, tens of thousands of people obsess over the best suppliers, dosages, recipes, and strains for every possible ailment, but mostly for kicking their opioid addictions. In March, the country’s first rehab facility to use kratom opened a few miles from True’s house.
There's just one problem. The government is in secret talks to possibly ban the plant, suspecting that kratom is not the answer to the opioid crisis, but the start of a new one.
At issue is its chemistry: Kratom latches on to some of the same brain receptors that heroin, morphine, and fentanyl do. From the government’s perspective, that makes kratom an opioid like any other, and too dangerous to leave unregulated.
“Claiming that kratom is benign because it’s ‘just a plant’ is shortsighted and dangerous,” FDA chief Scott Gottlieb said in a statement released earlier this year. The agency has circulated notices about kratom strains contaminated with salmonella and has linked the plant to the deaths of 44 people. Last month, the FDA sent warning letters to three distributors for making unproven claims about kratom’s ability to treat pain, opioid addiction, and cancer.
“We’re firing warning shots,” an FDA spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “You’re going to see us crack down.”
People struggling with addiction, Gottlieb said, should instead rely on FDA-approved medications like methadone and Suboxone. But kratom advocates point out that these drugs are too often inaccessible to the uninsured, don’t work for some people, and can be abused. When feeling conspiratorial, they go so far as to say that the FDA is in cahoots with Big Pharma to purge kratom from the market so they can hook addicts on more prescription opioids.
But beyond a few medical case reports and animal studies on kratom dependence, there isn’t much science to support the idea that the plant is safe — or that it’s dangerous. No one knows yet whether kratom really works long-term. Or whether the people who love it, like True’s family, have just swapped one opioid addiction for another.
One thing is clear: The battle over kratom is swiftly coming to a head. “We are at the foot of a revolution,” True said. “This is about to blow up.” (...)
The kratom obsessives discuss how to make the bitter plant palatable by stirring the green powder into juice, brewing it into a sweet tea, pouring it into capsules, or just chasing it with whatever liquid is on hand — water, Gatorade, warm Fanta, and even pickle juice. Armchair chemists discuss trial-and-error attempts at making kratom stronger with citric acid (“acidify when extracting, then basify before consumption”) or turmeric or black seed oil. Others suggest combinations of white, red, and green strains that will prompt wildly different effects (white is energizing, red calming, and green somewhere in the middle).
Real chemists have shown that at low doses, kratom — a tall, skinny tree in the coffee family — acts as a mild stimulant and mood booster, making it a popular herb for centuries among manual laborers on rubber plantations in Indonesia, Thailand, and other parts of Southeast Asia. At higher doses, kratom has a much more prized effect: It kills pain. The nerdier Reddit threads cite pharmacology studies to chronicle the plant’s 25 major chemicals, called alkaloids, some of which have been shown to bind to opioid receptors even more tightly than potent opioids like morphine.
These communities see kratom as a panacea for a bewilderingly broad set of problems. Some described how it got them through 12-hour shifts at Panera and Popeyes. One person said it helped them ace a math test. Others said kratom fixed their stutter, lifted the fog of a decadelong depression, cured insomnia, cured alcoholism, cured PMS, eased chronic pain caused by rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease, and was “a miracle drug” for erectile dysfunction.
Most of the threads, though, describe how the plant offers “freedom from opiates.” Users claim that it’s impossible to die from kratom — that it would force your body to vomit before you could overdose, and that it doesn’t slow breathing like heroin and prescription opioids do. (These claims have not been backed up by any clinical studies in people, since none exist.)
These threads often veer into rants about the pharmaceutical industry, which sparked the opioid crisis.
“The FDA is scared that kratom will take away from the profits of Big Pharma,” Mike Gill, an administrator of one of the bigger kratom Facebook groups, once posted. “Big Pharma funds the FDA...Big Pharma Lobbies the FDA = Big Pharma OWNS the FDA!”
by Azeen Ghorayshi, Buzzfeed | Read more:
Image: Yoon S. Byun
True had been dependent on opioids since she was a 14-year-old growing up in Mississippi, when a doctor prescribed her Percocet to treat chronic migraines. By the age of 24, she was shooting OxyContin. A decade after that — after moving to Maine, becoming a nurse, and having two kids — the Drug Enforcement Administration cracked down on sketchy online pharmacies that sold pills, and True started on heroin.
She’d tried to quit many times over the years, using every conceivable remedy for the misery of withdrawal — Imodium A-D, quinine, valerian root. Nothing worked. So here she was, reading earnest online testimonials about an obscure leaf from Southeast Asia.“It seemed kinda seedy, it seemed kinda underground, and kinda maybe like something I shouldn’t be doing,” True, now 41, told BuzzFeed News. “But at that point I was desperate enough to give it a try.”
Her husband drove her a half hour to a smoke shop in downtown Portland. She bought a little of everything: a small bag of crushed kratom leaves, some capsules, and two tiny bottles of extracts, all for about $100.
Back in the car, heater blasting, she swallowed some of the capsules and downed a bottle, then sat waiting, skeptically, to feel something like a high. She never did, but within 20 minutes her withdrawal symptoms had faded away. "It was like a fog had cleared," True said. "They were just gone."
Now 18 months have passed, and True has been heroin-free for 17. She drinks a murky kratom-grapefruit juice mix several times a day, and credits the plant for saving not only her own life, but also her family’s. Her husband, John Wolstenhulme, had a 20-plus-year opioid addiction, and her 27-year-old stepson, Jeff Wolstenhulme, used fentanyl. Both are now off of opioids — John for 16 months, Jeff for almost four — thanks to kratom, they say. True convinced her mother in Mississippi to use it to treat her irritable bowel syndrome. She even gives it to her dogs for their joint pain and anxiety. “Sometimes I just sprinkle it in their food,” she said, laughing.
True is part of a growing grassroots movement of former drug users who see kratom as the cheap, safe, “all-natural” way to curb the opioid epidemic killing more than 40,000 people in the US every year. The once-obscure botanical has become big enough to warrant its own lobbyists in Washington, DC — the American Kratom Association, which claims that kratom is a billion-dollar business, with thousands of vendors selling it to an estimated 3 million to 5 million people.
Its proponents range from Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch to bro podcaster Joe Rogan to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. In Facebook groups and Reddit threads, tens of thousands of people obsess over the best suppliers, dosages, recipes, and strains for every possible ailment, but mostly for kicking their opioid addictions. In March, the country’s first rehab facility to use kratom opened a few miles from True’s house.
There's just one problem. The government is in secret talks to possibly ban the plant, suspecting that kratom is not the answer to the opioid crisis, but the start of a new one.
At issue is its chemistry: Kratom latches on to some of the same brain receptors that heroin, morphine, and fentanyl do. From the government’s perspective, that makes kratom an opioid like any other, and too dangerous to leave unregulated.
“Claiming that kratom is benign because it’s ‘just a plant’ is shortsighted and dangerous,” FDA chief Scott Gottlieb said in a statement released earlier this year. The agency has circulated notices about kratom strains contaminated with salmonella and has linked the plant to the deaths of 44 people. Last month, the FDA sent warning letters to three distributors for making unproven claims about kratom’s ability to treat pain, opioid addiction, and cancer.
“We’re firing warning shots,” an FDA spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “You’re going to see us crack down.”
People struggling with addiction, Gottlieb said, should instead rely on FDA-approved medications like methadone and Suboxone. But kratom advocates point out that these drugs are too often inaccessible to the uninsured, don’t work for some people, and can be abused. When feeling conspiratorial, they go so far as to say that the FDA is in cahoots with Big Pharma to purge kratom from the market so they can hook addicts on more prescription opioids.
But beyond a few medical case reports and animal studies on kratom dependence, there isn’t much science to support the idea that the plant is safe — or that it’s dangerous. No one knows yet whether kratom really works long-term. Or whether the people who love it, like True’s family, have just swapped one opioid addiction for another.
One thing is clear: The battle over kratom is swiftly coming to a head. “We are at the foot of a revolution,” True said. “This is about to blow up.” (...)
The kratom obsessives discuss how to make the bitter plant palatable by stirring the green powder into juice, brewing it into a sweet tea, pouring it into capsules, or just chasing it with whatever liquid is on hand — water, Gatorade, warm Fanta, and even pickle juice. Armchair chemists discuss trial-and-error attempts at making kratom stronger with citric acid (“acidify when extracting, then basify before consumption”) or turmeric or black seed oil. Others suggest combinations of white, red, and green strains that will prompt wildly different effects (white is energizing, red calming, and green somewhere in the middle).
Real chemists have shown that at low doses, kratom — a tall, skinny tree in the coffee family — acts as a mild stimulant and mood booster, making it a popular herb for centuries among manual laborers on rubber plantations in Indonesia, Thailand, and other parts of Southeast Asia. At higher doses, kratom has a much more prized effect: It kills pain. The nerdier Reddit threads cite pharmacology studies to chronicle the plant’s 25 major chemicals, called alkaloids, some of which have been shown to bind to opioid receptors even more tightly than potent opioids like morphine.
These communities see kratom as a panacea for a bewilderingly broad set of problems. Some described how it got them through 12-hour shifts at Panera and Popeyes. One person said it helped them ace a math test. Others said kratom fixed their stutter, lifted the fog of a decadelong depression, cured insomnia, cured alcoholism, cured PMS, eased chronic pain caused by rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease, and was “a miracle drug” for erectile dysfunction.
Most of the threads, though, describe how the plant offers “freedom from opiates.” Users claim that it’s impossible to die from kratom — that it would force your body to vomit before you could overdose, and that it doesn’t slow breathing like heroin and prescription opioids do. (These claims have not been backed up by any clinical studies in people, since none exist.)
These threads often veer into rants about the pharmaceutical industry, which sparked the opioid crisis.
“The FDA is scared that kratom will take away from the profits of Big Pharma,” Mike Gill, an administrator of one of the bigger kratom Facebook groups, once posted. “Big Pharma funds the FDA...Big Pharma Lobbies the FDA = Big Pharma OWNS the FDA!”
by Azeen Ghorayshi, Buzzfeed | Read more:
Image: Yoon S. Byun
