Kratom Addiction & the Hippie Heroin Crackdown
Kratom has both saved and ruined lives. Clearer labeling could help.
After weaning off Suboxone, Nicole Sanchez was opioid free for 11 years—that is, until she walked into a Sunoco gas station and purchased what she thought was an energy drink.
It wasn’t too long before Sanchez was spending $60 per day on three little bottles of OPMS’ Black Liquid Kratom Extract. Eager to find a more affordable alternative, she picked up some Opia tablets for the gentler price tag of $30 for four doses.
Those Opia tablets contained 7-Hydroxymitragynine (7-OH), a naturally occurring alkaloid found in the kratom plant (Mitragyna speciosa in Latin). Seven-OH makes up less than two percent of natural kratom, but synthesized 7-OH products have significantly cranked the dial on the dose.
“I had no idea it was way more potent than the kratom extract,” says Sanchez. “You would think my brain would be on my side, but addiction has turned it against me.”
The supermarket where Sanchez works shares a parking lot with the gas station that sells an impressive variety of 7-OH products, and every day she has to fight the urge to walk over there on her break and buy a fix. “The mental obsession is indescribable,” she says, “It’s relentless.”
“I hate to call it a relapse,” says Sanchez’s doctor, James Kurt Grovenburg, MD. “It’s more like a new lapse.” He explains that Sanchez is one of many patients to “get blindsided by these products, not realizing that they can be addictive.”
