When the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) recently announced plans (Mitragyna speciosa), people across the country became interested in a leaf used medicinally for centuries in South-East Asia.
What the DEA did not seem to know is that hundreds of thousands of Americans were already using it for pain relief and as a substitute for opiates and other pharmaceuticals they want to stop using.
Kratom is related to the coffee plant and provides a caffeine-like energy boost at low doses. It is not an opiate, but has opiate-like effects at higher doses.
Advertisement
Last year, my colleagues and I published a qualitative . Findings were largely positive; users reported a sense of well-being and relaxation, enhanced empathy and sociability, pain relief, and success in weaning themselves off opiates and other pharmaceuticals. However, a minority reported negative effects, including nausea, vomiting, dizziness and alternating chills and sweats. Approximately 10 percent of our sample experienced withdrawal symptoms, although these were generally mild relative to published descriptions of individuals coming off opiates.
In our literature review, we found anecdotal reports of serious adverse effects coincident with kratom use, including . The nascent scientific literature on kratom is insufficient to make definitive links between its use and serious harm.
The DEA鈥檚 plan, announced in August, was to put kratom on the fast track to criminalisation. Public comment was not necessary, it said.
Crippling for research
Necessary or not, comment was forthcoming. Thousands wrote to their representatives and senators (who in turn wrote to the DEA), petitioned the White House and talked to the media about what they perceived as an infringement on their right to use a plant that helps them. Researchers expressed their dismay that criminalisation would cripple scientific investigation of kratom鈥檚 medical uses.
My colleagues and I could only shake our heads at the insanity of the move. In a country that , with consequences that include ruined lives and generations of children growing up without parents, we choose to criminalise this.
In a country with an opiate-dependence epidemic, we take away a tool that people successfully use to quit opiates, a plant that people are taking instead of hard drugs for their pain. In a country that has suffered from a costly and ineffective 鈥�war on drugs鈥�, we extend that war to a new substance and a whole new group of people.
And without solid data to implicate kratom as an urgent health concern, we move to ban it and potentially worsen several urgent public health crises. It seemed a cruel and irresponsible decision.
Then something amazing happened. The DEA listened. It withdrew, for now, its plan to criminalise kratom, citing public opposition and seeking comment from doctors and scientists.
For an agency that has insisted for decades, in the face of mountains of evidence, that cannabis has no medical use, could this uncharacteristic reversal signal that the DEA is giving a higher priority to facts? Let us all hope that this is a meaningfully positive development in the long, sad story of US drug policy.
