The boomerang effect from legacy kratom manufacturers

There’s a unique twist in the story about kratom in the United States that should make veterans of 2016’s scheduling attempt rather uneasy.

A decade ago, the kratom community watched the machinery of the federal government attempt to prohibit kratom in a loose and fast way. The substance was slandered as an Internet fad and public health menace.

Proper discussion and debate were discounted while users were treated as an afterthought. The proposed solution placed a natural product used by global cultures for centuries on the highest tier ban list in the United States, alongside the most demonized drugs available.

That fight then hinged on a principle still relevant today: panic policy is not consumer protection. It’s a costly shortcut that often makes harms worse.

Now, the kratom alkaloid known as 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH) faces a similar battle, the new target of the enforcement momentum. And in a strange twist of fate, the legacy kratom manufacturing industry is reaching for the same tactics that almost banned their products and had their consumers criminalized a decade ago.

The incentive is obvious. Concentrated 7-OH products have exploded in popularity and appear on the same store shelves as the legacy kratom brands. It is derived from the same ingredients but available as a pill or concentrate rather than a green powder. When people ingest kratom, the body breaks it down and produces 7-OH as a metabolite.

For the now-mature kratom industry, this new competitive alternative product represents a threat both on the messaging and economic front. In order to compete, though, the kratom industry has decided it will use the political process rather than directly appeal to consumers.

Now this leads us to the current moral panic on 7-OH, buoyed by a kratom industry that was a central player in its own moral panic.

These efforts have been led by two trade associations that have crafted the entire narrative against the burgeoning 7-OH product category, the American Kratom Association (AKA) and Global Kratom Coalition (GKC).

AKA has spent years polishing its armor as a defender of kratom consumers against encroachments of federal and state governments. And while that may have been true, they have abandoned these principles on similar 7-OH products, claiming they “masquerade” as kratom, and they “unambiguously violate” federal law when 7-OH is isolated or concentrated above natural levels.

When the FDA recommended scheduling for 7-OH products last year, both the AKA and the GKC applauded the move and ramped up their own campaigns.

The GKC, for its part, proudly hosts an entire website and public advocacy kit calling for outlawing 7-OH, wilfully deploying the meme about “gas station heroin” that has now become shorthand used by public officials and the media.

Overall, the pattern is hard to miss: simplify, isolate, stigmatize, and escalate. The neoprohibitionists who first tried to ban kratom are now bedfellows with the kratom industry, using the same tactics to sow confusion and doubt about a fledgling product category. Rather than win with better science and products, the incumbents are attempting to win by regulating their competitors out of business, locking consumers out of a product they may rely on.

And while kratom advocates have been forceful, the boomerang has swung back on them. The nuance between concentrated kratom products versus plant-based kratom products is not enough for most lawmakers and concerned parents, and it has led to full bans on 7-OH and kratom in both localities and states.

The infighting itself underscores the risk. The AKA has publicly sparred with the GKC over its stance on 7-OH isolates, proof that even “the legacy side” can’t agree on where the category begins and ends. Even the entities engaging in regulatory capture, disguised as consumer protection, are at odds.

The central point isn’t that concentrated 7-OH products are harmless. It’s that 2016 should have taught everyone, industry included, how quickly fear can erase nuance, and how easily a “targeted” crackdown can become a category-wide stigma that swallows the very people and products it claims to spare.

And, as always, the first victims are the consumers who depend on a product to manage their conditions.

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Yaël Ossowski is deputy director at the Consumer Choice Center.