| No Images? Click here   Authorities claim the popular herbal drug Kratom poses potentially deadly risks, but there are big problems with their evidence. HuffPost's reporter Nick Wing looked into the death of John Grove, whose death was blamed on the herbal supplement.Talk to us about the seed of the story.I've been covering kratom for a while now, actually since before the DEA announced plans last summer to take emergency action to place the herbal supplement in Schedule I (alongside heroin, LSD and of course marijuana). Even though the DEA eventually backed off those plans, state and federal authorities have made it pretty clear that they're intent on making kratom a new target in the war on drugs. That became clear again last month, when the FDA released a statement claiming kratom poses deadly risks to users.I'm always skeptical of this sort of alarmist tone when it comes to drugs. In my mind, the kratom story has always been an example of our worst drug policy tendencies playing out in real time. I often think about how the push to schedule marijuana would have been covered if it were happening now -- or if we simply knew then what we know now.What was most challenging about the reporting?Well, the FDA is being very sketchy about their data, and nobody seems to have any idea where they're getting their numbers about these supposed "kratom-related deaths." It would be easier to fact check them if they'd be more transparent about that, but shadiness from government agencies on the issue of drugs is pretty much par for the course.Beyond all of that, kratom is admittedly complicated. As an herbal supplement, it's subject to very few concrete regulations to control what's in products or how products are being marketed or sold. That rightfully raises concerns about adulteration or kids getting their hands on it. Furthermore, there hasn't been enough large scale scientific research to say exactly what kratom does and doesn't do. We have enough to say that claims of "deadly risks" are inconsistent with what scientists have found, but that's not the same as saying with certainty that kratom is harmless in every scenario, regardless of who is taking it and how much they are taking. As with any substance, users should be smart, and shouldn't take this reporting as a license to be a moron.As I wrote in the story, we need more research to see if there are potential health conditions or genetic predispositions that could cause complications for kratom users, whether or not they're likely to be fatal ones.What was most surprising?I was genuinely surprised by my subject John Grove's toxicology test. When I got it back and saw how much he appeared to have taken, I honestly thought it could be real case of "acute mitragynine intoxication." That would have been a pretty big deal, but the more I tried to figure out what that actually would mean, the more I realized that nobody really knows. It really seems like sort of a scapegoat term, which allows a medical examiner to explain an unusual death that is otherwise hard -- or even inconvenient -- to explain. If you're interested in a loose parallel, look up the controversy over deaths attributed to "excited delirium."But the real shock came when I spoke with Grove's father, and he pretty quickly suggested that there was a much more obvious and likely potential cause of death -- or at least a significant contributor -- at play here. Despite the presence of HGH in his son's car and his son's open history of steroid use, none of this seemed to factor into the medical examiner's finding at all. All of this raises broader concerns about how anti-drug hysteria can feed into itself, effectively encouraging medical examiners to make haphazard determinations that inaccurately blame drugs for deaths.Anything you'd like to add?Just wanna talk briefly about what's at stake when it comes to the push to ban or crack down on kratom. Reasonable people might say that it makes sense to pull this off the shelves out of an abundance of caution, because it's clear that more research does still need to be done to fully understand the potential harms and benefits of kratom. This is the standard that the FDA traditionally operates on, so perhaps it's not surprising that that's what they're arguing here.But I think that argument sort of misses the serious implications that this aggressive actions would have on current kratom users. Surveys show that people aren't using kratom for fun, so it's not like this would be taking a pointless recreational drug away just to be safe. I've heard from literally hundreds of people who use kratom as a treatment for serious ailments. Among the top anecdotes I hear are that it works effectively to treat pain for people who have had bad experiences with traditional opioid painkillers. Often, pills have either led to a serious loss in quality of life or problems with addiction. Other people are recovering addicts who use kratom as a replacement for opioids themselves. If you take away this drug -- their preferred method of treating those conditions -- the underlying problems aren't going to just go away. They'll still need to seek out some form of treatment. This means they're either going to be forced to turn to black market kratom, which will undoubtedly crop up and will almost certainly be more dangerous than the products that are out there now. Perhaps worse, it might force a bunch of people with a history of opioid addiction issues to turn back to more dangerous opioids.If you truly care about public health, you've gotta measure the net harms of kratom in its current state against what is likely to happen if it were banned. Pretty much everyone agrees that the latter option would look much, much worse.Love, |
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