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The Make America Healthy Again movement is in meltdown after their figurehead, Robert F. Kennedy Jr initiated a crackdown on one of their favorite psychoactive drugs: kratom.
Disparagingly known as “gas station heroin,” kratom is an herbal extract known for its opioid-like effects, namely relieving pain and inducing euphoric feelings. For now, it’s sold completely legally in most states, and kratom supplements have become a billion-dollar industry in just a few years, remaining largely unregulated and embraced by the bro-y alternative medicine crowd who get their health advice from podcasts and Reddit. You can find them easily available as gummies, soft drinks, and pills at vape shops and gas stations, despite their long term effects on human health being unknown.
Now, Wired reports, the uncertainty around the drug’s effects is causing a rift in the MAHA crowd, many of whom have championed kratom. Adding to the divisiveness of the debate is that pro-kratom figures often want to ban supplements that contain kratom’s chief active ingredient, 7-hydroxymitragynine, or 7-OH. As their argument goes, many “kratom” products are really just 7-OH products that contain dangerous amounts of the substance, and that true kratom is safer.
“This is a chemically manipulated, full-blown opioid that is now in the marketplace,” Mac Haddow, the senior public policy fellow at the American Kratom Association, a kratom industry lobby group, told Wired. “They masquerade as kratom products.”
The 7-OH industry, by contrast, argues that 7-OH is kratom. And even some kratom purists are against the 7-OH ban, such as Soren Shade, the founder of kratom tea company Top Tree Herbs who argues that banning 7-OH because of sleazy supplement companies “is like banning cars because Volkswagen cheated on emissions tests.”
Advocates of both kratom and 7-OH say that they help safely wean addicts off of real and much deadlier opioids. The federal government, however, has made efforts to ban the active ingredient.
Per Wired, RFK Jr, the US Health and Human Service secretary, has described the 7-OH industry as “sinister” while the Drug Enforcement Agency has called to classify it as Schedule 1 drug, the most restrictive class of banned substances. Yet Trump extolled “natural 7-OH” in a press conference, in a seeming endorsement not just of kratom proper but of its strongest formulations.
Be it kratom or 7-OH, both come with major health risks. Many users report becoming accidentally addicted to these supplements, with grisly withdrawal symptoms. And despite kratom being touted as a natural health aid, many 7-OH products contain little-understood compounds with unknown biological effects in animals or humans, Chris McCurdy, a leading kratom researcher and director at the University of Florida, told Wired.
“So, these products, while represented as ‘clean’ are anything but,” McCurdy added.
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