The Kratom Civil War Is Heating Up, and MAHA Has Picked a Side
A decade ago, kratom advocates fought a surprisingly successful campaign against a proposedDrug Enforcement Administration ban that claimed the obscure Southeast Asian plant posed “an imminent hazard to public safety.”
They won bipartisan allies from Bernie Sanders to Rand Paul, and helped create a billion-dollar industry out of kratom, which has pain-relieving effects they said could help fight the opioid epidemic as a far safer, natural alternative to pills.
Now, many of those same pro-kratom activists are calling for a ban on products containing concentrates of one of kratom’s active components: 7-hydroxymitragynine, or 7-OH, an ultra-potent extract with opioid-like effects. And it’s causing major friction amongst consumers, sellers, and advocates of both substances.
“This is a chemically manipulated, full-blown opioid that is now in the marketplace,” claims Mac Haddow, the senior public policy fellow at the American Kratom Association, a kratom industry lobby group. “They masquerade as kratom products.”
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