09/02/2025
Hiding in plain sight. Beware Kratom in drinks and you can get it at the gas station. Beware.
Kratom—which comes from a tree in the same family as the coffee tree—first began cropping up in the United States in the early to mid-2000s. Up to that point, for decades, Thai and Malaysian laborers and farmers chewed raw kratom leaves or boiled them into teas or inhaled them as v***r or smoke, using the substance to “provide energy and relief from muscle strains,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Some would even use kratom to avoid going into o***m or he**in withdrawal, says Christopher R. McCurdy, PhD, a professor at the University of Florida’s College of Pharmacology, who researches kratom’s effects, including its potential medical benefits and possible harms.
Thanks to the Internet, a global audience became familiar with a previously regional plant. In the U.S., where the opioid crisis has raged since the turn of the century, new restrictions on access to prescription opioids in the past 10 years may have further increased demand for kratom, studies show. The product is especially prevalent in Appalachian states such as Tennessee, West Virginia, and Kentucky, where the opioid epidemic has hit hard: Over 40 percent of respondents in a 2020 Johns Hopkins survey said they took kratom (primarily via dried kratom leaves, either in powdered form or prepared as tea) to treat opioid dependence. And of those using it to treat opioid dependency, 87 percent reported relief from opioid withdrawal symptoms.
Kratom produces opioid-like effects, but it’s technically not an opioid; it interacts with the brain’s opioid receptors. And though there’s been research into its potential benefit to the opioid addiction community, experts aren’t yet sure if it’s just another antagonist—or possibly an asset—in the ongoing public health problem. Once the prescription pain pill OxyContin—widely recognized as the main villain in the epidemic—was reformulated to be “abuse-deterrent” in 2010 (making it more difficult to crush or inject it), many people turned to other substances, like he**in and fentanyl…and now kratom.
