#IAMKratom
I Never Planned to Become a Kratom Advocate. I Was Just Trying to Get My Life Back.
I did not discover kratom because I was looking for a movement to join. I was not looking for a cause. I certainly was not planning to spend the next decade arguing with federal agencies, walking the halls of Congress, speaking to reporters, reading scientific papers, talking with researchers, questioning people in the kratom industry, and occasionally arguing with other kratom advocates.
I was sick.
That is where my kratom story actually begins.
And to understand why an obscure leaf from Southeast Asia eventually became important enough for me to stand outside the White House in 2016 and fight for it, you first have to understand what my life looked like before I ever tried it.
I Lost Several Years of My Life
I medically retired from the Navy after a career that included years overseas and deployments connected to the wars following September 11.
Iraq. Guantánamo Bay. Years away from home. Physical injuries. Experiences that followed me home long after the deployments ended.
There was chronic pain. There were multiple herniated discs and degenerative problems in my back. There were headaches tied to a traumatic brain injury. There was PTSD. There was depression. There was anxiety.
Then, in late 2013, I developed Meige syndrome the doctors think was tied to burn pit exposure.
Meige syndrome is a form of dystonia. In my case, it causes involuntary muscle contractions and spasms involving my face, eyes, jaw and other muscles. At its worst, the spasms can interfere with speaking and simply functioning normally.
None of these conditions existed independently of the others. Pain could aggravate the spasms. Stress could aggravate them. Anxiety could aggravate them. Poor sleep could aggravate everything. The spasms themselves could create more pain and more anxiety.
It became a miserable feedback loop.
And the conventional answer was medication. Then another medication. Then another.
At one point I was taking around 20 different medications a day.
There were medications for pain. Medications for muscle spasms. Medications for depression. Medications for PTSD. There were medications intended to manage symptoms and side effects that seemed to pile on top of everything else.
I do not say that to criticize the doctors treating me. They were trying to help a patient with a complicated collection of physical and psychological injuries using the tools available to them.
But somewhere along the way, I stopped having much of a life.
I fell into a horrible loop.
I would sleep through days. Sometimes it felt like I slept through entire weeks. I would wake up feeling horrible. I would take medications trying to feel better. I would spend much of the day exhausted, medicated, hurting or simply disconnected from everything around me. Then I would go to bed feeling horrible.
Wake up. Repeat.
Days disappeared. Then weeks. Then months.
Looking back, it feels like I lost several years of my life after getting out of the service.
That may be one of the hardest parts of that period for me to think about now. I had spent so many years of my adult life in the military, including years overseas, that retirement was supposed to be the point where I finally came home and started the next part of my life.
Instead, I came home and largely disappeared into illness, pain, PTSD and medication.
My wife sometimes had to help me get out of bed. There were days when making it from the bedroom to the couch was an accomplishment. Then I might spend most of the day there before eventually going back to bed.
The PTSD could make even ordinary things difficult. A telephone ringing could set me off. Checking the mail could become an ordeal. Leaving the house could become something I avoided.
The physical problems fed the psychological ones. Pain increased stress. Stress aggravated the muscle spasms. The spasms increased the pain. Poor sleep made everything worse. Then some of the medications intended to help manage all of it could leave me too sedated or disconnected to participate in my own life.
It became a loop I did not know how to escape.
That is the person who eventually found kratom.
My Doctor and I Started Talking About Kratom
About a year after developing Meige syndrome, sometime in 2014, kratom came onto my radar.
This part of my story matters because there is sometimes an assumption that people who use kratom simply discover it on the internet, buy some mystery product and start experimenting on themselves.
That was not what happened with me.
I started discussing kratom with my doctor at the VA. We talked about what was known. More importantly, we talked about how much was not known.
With his blessing and oversight, I started reading everything I could find.
The scientific literature was considerably thinner then than it is today. I read what research existed. I read about Mitragyna speciosa and its history of traditional use in Southeast Asia. I read about mitragynine and other alkaloids researchers had identified.
I read reports from people using kratom for pain. I read claims about energy, mood, anxiety and opioid withdrawal.
And, frankly, a lot of it sounded like snake oil.
Here was a plant people on the internet seemed to claim could help with pain, energy, anxiety, mood and seemingly a dozen other things.
My skepticism meter was pegged pretty high.
But I kept reading. So did my doctor.
Eventually, toward the end of 2014, I decided to try it.
My first experience with kratom was spectacularly unimpressive.
Yep. Snake Oil.
The first kratom product I ever tried was a tincture.
Looking back now, knowing considerably more about kratom products than I did then, it was probably not a particularly good tincture. Who knows what was actually in it or how well it had been made.
I tried it. I waited.
Nothing.
Not some subtle change I almost missed. Nothing I could identify at all.
I remember essentially thinking, “Yep. Snake oil.”
That could very easily have been the end of my kratom story.
Fortunately, my doctor was a little more curious than I was.
Rather than concluding that an entire plant was nonsense because one tincture did nothing, he recognized that there might still be something worth investigating. He encouraged me to look for something closer to the traditional product.
Raw kratom leaf.
So I went back to researching. I found a raw product. I tried it.
And this time something happened.
Not a miracle. Not some overwhelming sensation.
I simply started noticing that I felt better.
The pain was more manageable. I felt calmer. I could function better.
And fairly quickly, something else became noticeable. The things that tended to aggravate my Meige syndrome were not hitting me quite as hard.
That got my attention. It got my doctor’s attention too.
Kratom Did Not Cure My Meige Syndrome
This distinction is important.
Over the years my story has occasionally been shortened into something much simpler than reality: veteran has Meige syndrome, veteran takes kratom, kratom treats Meige syndrome.
That is not how I understand what happened.
Kratom did not cure my Meige syndrome. I have never claimed that it did.
Even my doctors were not completely certain why my symptoms seemed to improve as much as they did.
What we suspected was more complicated.
Pain made my symptoms worse. Anxiety made them worse. Stress made them worse. My overall physical and psychological condition made them worse.
Kratom seemed to have a calming effect for me. It helped with pain. It seemed to give me a greater sense of wellbeing. When those other problems became more manageable, my Meige symptoms often became more manageable too.
Could kratom have been affecting the movement disorder more directly? Maybe. Maybe not.
We did not know. I still would not pretend to know today.
That distinction has become even more important to me after spending more than a decade reading kratom research and having the good fortune through advocacy to speak with scientists who understand this pharmacology far better than I ever will.
Personal experience can tell us that something happened. It does not necessarily tell us why.
What I knew in late 2014 was much simpler.
Something was finally moving in the right direction.
I was in less pain. I had more energy. The spasms seemed more manageable. I could participate in my own life again.
And perhaps most importantly, this was not something I had stumbled into alone.
My doctor knew what I was doing. We watched what happened. We asked questions.
We treated my experience as exactly what it was: an experiment involving one patient for whom the existing options had not been working particularly well.
I Wanted My Life Back, Not a High
My objective was never intoxication.
I wanted enough relief from pain to move. I wanted enough control over anxiety to function. I wanted enough energy to participate in life again.
I wanted to wake up and actually be awake. I wanted to participate in my marriage and my family. I wanted to leave the house. I wanted to work.
I wanted to have days I could actually remember living instead of looking back and realizing another month had disappeared.
More than anything, I wanted some part of my life back.
I had already experienced what it was like to spend my days heavily medicated. I was trying to move away from that existence, not recreate it with something else.
Kratom eventually became part of a fairly boring routine.
Originally I consumed powdered leaf. That created gastrointestinal problems for me, so eventually I changed how I consumed it.
I started making tea and straining out the plant material.
Over time, that became my normal way of using kratom.
Leaf tea. Usually once or twice a day. Nothing particularly exciting.
That is still largely how I use it more than a decade later.
I Was Willing to Test My Own Beliefs
Something else happened during those early years that shaped how I think about kratom today.
I was willing to stop using it.
My doctors and I wanted to know what happened without it. At one point I stopped for an extended period under medical oversight. I also periodically took shorter breaks.
I wanted to understand what I was putting into my body.
I was not interested in proving that kratom was harmless. I was interested in finding out what it was actually doing to me.
There is a difference.
During one of those periods, I recorded myself. People could see the difference. The facial spasms became much more pronounced. Speaking became more difficult.
Those videos eventually circulated far beyond my little corner of the internet.
For me, the video never proved that kratom was an effective treatment for Meige syndrome. It could not. It was one person. Me.
But it did show what my life could look like when something that had become useful to me was removed.
And soon the federal government was proposing to take it away permanently.
August 2016 Changed Everything
Until 2016, kratom was mostly a personal health matter for me.
Then the Drug Enforcement Administration announced its intention to temporarily place mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine into Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act.
Suddenly the plant I had quietly incorporated into managing my health could effectively be placed into the same federal legal category as heroin.
People like me were barely part of the conversation.
Government was talking about kratom. It was not doing much talking to the people actually using it.
So I started making noise.
A lot of us did.
A White House petition opposing the DEA action drew more than 100,000 signatures as advocates converged on Washington.
That response mattered because it demonstrated something policymakers had not fully appreciated.
There were a lot of us.
We were veterans. We were people living with chronic pain. We were people with disabilities. We were people who said kratom had helped them reduce or stop using prescription opioids.
We were husbands, wives, parents, workers and business owners.
We were not the caricature beginning to form around the plant.
September 13, 2016
On September 13, 2016, I stood outside the White House with other kratom consumers and advocates.
I spoke publicly about my life.
I talked about being a veteran. I talked about my disabilities. I talked about chronic pain. I talked about PTSD. I talked about the medications.
I talked about what my life had looked like before kratom and what had happened afterward.
That was the part policymakers needed to understand.
They were not considering banning some abstract chemical in a laboratory. They were making a decision that would affect real human beings who had incorporated this plant into their lives.
I was one of them.
And I was not going quietly.
The rally was never about pretending kratom had no risks, at least not for me. It was about asking government to slow down, listen to consumers, look at the evidence and understand what prohibition would actually mean.
Then Something Almost Unheard Of Happened
Members of Congress started paying attention. Researchers raised questions. Consumers flooded the government with comments. Journalists began talking to actual kratom consumers.
The story became considerably more complicated than “dangerous new drug.”
Then something remarkable happened.
The DEA backed away from its immediate scheduling plan. In October 2016, it formally withdrew the notice of intent and opened a public comment process while awaiting a scientific and medical evaluation.
People often describe that as a victory for kratom.
It certainly felt like one.
But I think it represented something bigger.
People who were about to be directly affected by a drug policy decision forced the federal government to stop long enough to listen before criminalizing them.
We had won time.
What I did not realize then was how badly Washington would waste it.
Stopping the Ban Should Have Been the Beginning
The events of 2016 should have started the next conversation.
If millions of Americans were using kratom, how should we regulate it?
How should products be manufactured? What should labels say? Should there be an age requirement? What contaminants should manufacturers test for? How should alkaloid content be disclosed? What claims should companies be allowed to make? What research did we desperately need?
Those were not anti kratom questions.
They were consumer protection questions.
Many of us wanted those conversations.
Instead, Washington remained stuck.
Congress never created a comprehensive federal regulatory framework. The FDA continued warning about kratom. The industry continued growing anyway. States began developing their own rules.
And commerce moved considerably faster than regulation.
We Warned About Contamination Before Salmonella
By 2017, one of the things worrying me was contamination.
I made a video discussing it.
My message to vendors was simple: test your products.
My message to consumers was just as simple: demand testing.
Kratom is an agricultural product. Agricultural products can become contaminated during growing, harvesting, processing, shipping, handling and packaging.
If millions of Americans are consuming something, there should be reasonable standards ensuring that they are not also consuming Salmonella, dangerous levels of heavy metals or other contaminants.
Then came the 2018 multistate Salmonella outbreak associated with kratom products.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ultimately reported 199 illnesses in 41 states. Fifty people were hospitalized. No deaths were reported in that outbreak.
Nobody who had warned about contamination enjoyed being right.
But it demonstrated something I still believe.
A lack of regulation does not necessarily create freedom for consumers. Sometimes it simply leaves consumers dependent upon companies voluntarily doing the right thing.
Eventually laboratory testing became much more common throughout the kratom industry.
That was progress.
But it should not have required a public health crisis to make basic safety practices normal.
A Leaf of Faith
My story eventually became part of Chris Bell’s 2018 documentary A Leaf of Faith.
By then my private medical story had become very public.
People saw the spasms. They heard me talk about PTSD. They heard about my military service. They heard about the medications. They heard me describe kratom as giving me a new lease on life.
I meant it.
But documentaries necessarily compress complicated lives into minutes.
My relationship with kratom was never as simple as “this plant fixed me.”
It did not.
Kratom became one tool in a much larger toolbox.
That toolbox included doctors. It included conventional medicine. It included mental health treatment. It included lifestyle changes. It included learning my physical limitations. It included my family.
And it included kratom.
Then life threw something considerably bigger at me.
Cancer
In 2017, I was diagnosed with paranasal squamous cell carcinoma.
Then came chemotherapy.
Two long cycles between 2017 and 2019.
Cancer has a way of rearranging your priorities very quickly.
There were periods when eating became difficult. My appetite disappeared. My weight dropped dramatically. There was pain. There was nausea. There was exhaustion. There were nights when sleep became its own challenge.
At different times I used different tools, including cannabis products, to deal with some of those symptoms.
Kratom remained part of that toolbox.
Cancer also reinforced something I believe is enormously important when discussing complementary or alternative products.
I survived cancer because of modern medicine.
Kratom did not cure my cancer. Cannabis did not cure my cancer. Tea did not cure my cancer.
Medical treatment addressed the disease.
Other things helped me endure what came with it.
Those are different claims.
We should be capable of holding both ideas in our heads at the same time.
Quality of life matters.
So does evidence.
The Longer I Advocated, the More Complicated This Became
When I entered the kratom debate in 2016, the central issue seemed fairly straightforward.
Do not ban this plant and criminalize the people using it.
I still believe that.
But ten years inside this debate have taught me that the rest of it is anything but simple.
I have criticized the DEA. I have criticized the FDA. I have criticized Congress.
Eventually I became equally willing to criticize the kratom industry and kratom advocates.
That has occasionally made me unpopular.
So be it.
I did not become involved in 2016 to protect somebody’s business model.
I became involved because people like me were about to lose access to something that mattered to our lives.
Those are not necessarily the same mission.
As more money poured into the kratom marketplace, incentives changed.
I saw marketing I did not like. I saw exaggerated claims. I saw companies pushing boundaries. I saw products becoming increasingly concentrated. I saw advocates sometimes become unwilling to acknowledge inconvenient information.
I eventually stepped away from an advocacy organization when I believed transparency and consumer interests were taking a back seat to other considerations, including controversy around products being marketed under the kratom umbrella.
That did not make me anti-kratom.
It made me what I had always claimed to be.
A consumer advocate.
If I am willing to question the FDA when its claims exceed the evidence, intellectual honesty requires me to question a kratom company or advocacy organization when its claims exceed the evidence too.
The standard has to work both ways.
The Market I Entered Does Not Exist Anymore
The kratom marketplace of late 2014 was relatively simple compared with what exists today.
I was looking for raw leaf.
Today consumers can encounter powders, capsules, extracts, shots, gummies, isolated alkaloids, high potency tablets and increasingly novel products.
Some may originate with kratom.
That does not make them pharmacologically interchangeable.
Traditional leaf matters.
Traditional use in Thailand, Malaysia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia matters.
It gives researchers valuable information about human use over long periods.
But traditional use is not a safety study of every modern American product that can trace some ingredient back to a kratom leaf.
A raw leaf powder is not automatically equivalent to a concentrated extract.
A concentrated extract is not automatically equivalent to a product built around isolated 7-hydroxymitragynine.
And those products are not automatically equivalent to compounds that are chemically altered, synthesized or manufactured from kratom derived precursors.
Calling all of them “kratom” may be convenient for marketing.
It is increasingly unhelpful for science and public policy.
I Tried 7-OH Products Also
I think honesty requires me to acknowledge something else.
I have tried a 7-hydroxymitragynine product.
It was not my thing.
That statement is not a safety study either.
My experience with it tells us almost nothing about how another person will respond.
But it reinforced my belief that we need to stop pretending every product in this marketplace is the same thing.
We need to know what is in a product.
We need to know how much is in it.
We need to know whether what the label says matches what laboratory testing finds.
We need research on dependence, interactions, metabolism and toxicity.
We need to understand the differences among raw leaf, extracts, isolated alkaloids and manufactured derivatives.
And we need to stop allowing marketing departments, activists, regulators or social media personalities to substitute certainty for evidence.
“Safe” Is Too Simple a Word
I have used kratom for more than a decade.
That does not mean I think kratom is harmless.
Everything with pharmacological activity has risk.
Prescription medications have risks. Over the counter medications have risks. Alcohol has risks. Cannabis has risks. Kratom has risks.
Get Andrew Turner’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The useful questions are more specific.
What are those risks?
How large are they?
How do they change with dose?
How do they change with product type?
Who may be more vulnerable?
What happens when kratom or its alkaloids are combined with other substances?
What happens when manufacturers dramatically increase concentrations that occur only at much lower levels in the natural leaf?
Those are questions science can help answer.
“Safe” and “dangerous” are often slogans.
Risk is more complicated.
Regulation Is Not Prohibition
My position today is not difficult to explain.
I support keeping traditional kratom legal for adults.
I support a minimum purchase age of 21.
I support independent laboratory testing.
I support standards for microbial contamination and heavy metals.
I support accurate labeling.
I support meaningful disclosure of alkaloid content.
I support manufacturing standards.
I support truthful marketing.
I support keeping these products away from children.
I support enforcement when companies knowingly sell adulterated, mislabeled or illegal products.
I support separating traditional leaf from highly concentrated or manufactured alkaloid products when the pharmacology and evidence justify doing so.
What I do not support is pretending prohibition is the same thing as regulation.
It is not.
Banning a product does not cause demand to evaporate.
Sometimes it pushes the product into a marketplace where labels become less reliable, quality control becomes worse and consumers know even less about what they are buying.
The goal should be reducing harm.
That requires more work than writing the word “banned” into a statute.
2025 and 2026 Forced a New Conversation
The distinction I had been arguing for became increasingly difficult to ignore as 7-OH products and newer synthetic or semisynthetic compounds spread through the market.
In 2025, the FDA began explicitly distinguishing concentrated 7-OH products from natural kratom leaf in its public actions. Whatever disagreements I may have with the agency about kratom more broadly, that distinction matters.
By July 2026, the federal government had moved further. The DEA announced the start of a temporary scheduling process aimed at 7-OH above a proposed threshold and several synthetic kratom related compounds, while HHS sought public input on the threshold.
That is a very different policy question from banning the natural leaf.
It also demonstrates why Congress should have built a rational framework years ago.
Chemistry did not wait for lawmakers.
The market did not wait for lawmakers.
Consumers did not stop buying products while Washington debated what words to use.
We lost years in which we could have established clear categories, testing requirements, age restrictions, labeling rules and manufacturing standards before the marketplace became this complicated.
Then Came Ole Miss
In September 2026, two University of Mississippi students died in separate incidents.
Kratom labeled or kratom related products were reportedly found during the investigations, including a product marketed as Smax Pseudo DHM.
Almost immediately, the familiar battle lines appeared.
Some people pointed at kratom.
Some kratom advocates insisted kratom could not possibly have played a role.
I refused to do either.
As I write this, the toxicology questions surrounding those deaths have not been publicly resolved.
That matters.
Finding a package at a scene is not a toxicology report.
Finding other substances at a scene is not a toxicology report either.
A product being labeled “kratom” does not tell us everything that was actually inside it.
And the fact that a product may contain novel or manufactured compounds does not give advocates permission to declare traditional kratom completely irrelevant before the evidence is available.
The families of two young people deserve better than having their losses turned into ammunition for somebody else’s argument.
Wait for the evidence.
Then follow it.
If toxicology eventually shows that a kratom derived compound contributed to a death, we should say so.
If it shows another substance caused the death, we should say that.
If several substances interacted, we should say that.
If the evidence remains uncertain, we should have the integrity to say that too.
Consumer advocacy is not defending a product no matter what the evidence shows.
It is demanding enough evidence to know what actually happened.
Prohibition Was Already Failing in Oxford
There is another uncomfortable fact in the Ole Miss story.
Oxford, Mississippi, had already prohibited kratom sales locally years before these deaths.
Yet products were still reportedly being sold.
That does not prove what caused either student’s death.
It does demonstrate something about prohibition.
Writing a ban does not make a market disappear.
If products are being sold despite a ban, the policy question cannot end with “ban it.”
We have to ask what was being sold, where it came from, what was actually in it, whether the label was accurate, whether existing laws were enforced, and whether a regulated legal market would have provided consumers and authorities with better information.
Those questions are harder than prohibition.
They are also more useful.
The Science Matters More Than My Story
This may sound strange in an article built around my own experience, but my story should never be the final word on kratom.
Neither should anybody else’s.
My experience matters because it helps explain why people use kratom.
It can help researchers formulate questions.
It can help physicians understand why a patient might choose to use it.
It can help policymakers understand what they are affecting when they regulate it.
But my experience cannot establish population level safety.
I am one person.
The same rule applies in the opposite direction.
A tragic death deserves investigation and may identify a real danger, but a single case cannot automatically answer every question about millions of consumers, every dose and every product.
That is why toxicology matters.
That is why controlled research matters.
That is why pharmacology matters.
That is why surveillance data matter.
That is why we have to distinguish correlation from causation and traditional products from new formulations.
Over the years I have been fortunate to have access to some extremely smart researchers and academics.
I have asked them a lot of questions.
Sometimes their answers confirmed what I thought.
Sometimes they did not.
Sometimes the answer was simply, “We don’t know yet.”
I have developed a lot of respect for those four words.
We don’t know yet.
Science is allowed to say that.
Advocates should be able to say it too.
I Am Not the Same Advocate I Was in 2016
In 2016, I was fighting to keep the government from banning something that had become important to my quality of life.
I am still that person.
But I also have ten more years of experience.
I have watched the science develop.
I have watched the industry develop.
I have watched products appear that would have been almost unrecognizable in the marketplace I entered.
I have watched good companies invest in testing and responsible manufacturing.
I have watched other companies make claims they should never have made.
I have watched advocacy organizations do valuable work.
I have also watched money complicate advocacy.
I have watched government agencies make statements I thought went beyond the evidence.
I have watched consumers sometimes respond by going too far in the opposite direction and pretending risk does not exist.
None of those things changed my basic belief in adult access.
They changed my understanding of what responsible advocacy requires.
If I want regulators to acknowledge evidence that supports kratom consumers, then I have to acknowledge evidence that raises legitimate concerns.
If I demand accurate information from FDA, I have to demand accurate information from vendors.
If I criticize sensational headlines about kratom deaths without toxicology, I also have to criticize advocates who declare a death impossible before seeing that same toxicology.
That is not abandoning the cause.
That is taking consumer advocacy seriously.
What I Want After More Than a Decade
I do not want a free for all.
I do not want prohibition.
I want something more difficult than either of those options.
I want a regulated adult marketplace.
I want consumers to know what they are buying.
I want a bag of raw leaf to be treated as a bag of raw leaf and not automatically equated with a tablet containing a highly concentrated alkaloid or a novel manufactured compound.
I want companies to prove that their products meet reasonable contamination standards.
I want labels that mean something.
I want testing that means something.
I want claims grounded in evidence.
I want researchers to be able to study these compounds without the politics surrounding kratom determining the answer before the study begins.
I want doctors to be able to have honest conversations with patients who use kratom.
I want consumers to tell their doctors what they use without fearing that they will immediately be treated like addicts or idiots.
I want people who develop dependence to be able to acknowledge it and seek help without advocates treating their experience as an attack on kratom.
I want people who genuinely benefit from traditional kratom to be able to say so without being dismissed as drug seekers.
Both people can exist.
In fact, they already do.
Good policy has to be capable of dealing with both.
Why I Still Speak Up
Sometimes I wonder why I am still involved in this conversation.
My life today looks very different from the life I was living when I first found kratom.
I work with veterans.
As a Veteran Service Officer, I help veterans and their families navigate benefits and claims.
As an emergency relief coordinator, I work with veterans facing much more immediate problems: rent, utilities, food, transportation and the thousand ways a financial crisis can push somebody over the edge.
I went back to school.
I wrote and published a novel.
I have a family.
I survived cancer.
I have already spent a considerable portion of my life fighting battles.
It would be easy to simply make my tea and stop arguing about kratom.
Then I remember the person I was in 2013 and 2014.
I remember waking up feeling horrible and going to bed feeling horrible.
I remember losing days.
I remember losing weeks.
I remember looking back and realizing that several years of my life had largely disappeared into pain, PTSD, spasms and medication.
I remember the first tincture doing absolutely nothing and thinking the whole thing was snake oil.
I remember my doctor encouraging me not to stop asking questions.
I remember trying the leaf.
I remember realizing that something had changed.
I remember standing outside the White House two years later because the federal government was preparing to take that option away.
And I know that somewhere today there is another person sitting on a couch wondering whether this is simply what the rest of life is going to look like.
That person deserves accurate information.
They deserve products that are what the label says they are.
They deserve doctors willing to listen.
They deserve regulators willing to distinguish among products.
They deserve researchers willing to ask difficult questions.
They deserve advocates willing to acknowledge uncomfortable evidence.
They deserve companies that care about consumers after the sale is complete.
And they deserve the ability, as an informed adult, to make decisions about their own body.
#IAMKratom
I have never particularly liked the way public debates reduce human beings to categories.
“Drug user.”
“Patient.”
“Addict.”
“Veteran.”
“Chronic pain sufferer.”
“Advocate.”
“Cancer survivor.”
I suppose I have been several of those things, depending on who is doing the labeling.
But none tells the whole story.
Neither does “kratom consumer.”
I am a retired sailor.
I am a husband.
I am a father.
I am a veteran who came home carrying injuries that did not disappear when I took off the uniform.
I am someone who lost years of life to pain, PTSD, neurological illness and a mountain of medications.
I am someone whose VA doctor was willing to listen when I brought him something neither of us knew much about.
I am the guy who tried a tincture, felt absolutely nothing and thought, “Yep. Snake oil.”
I am also the guy who tried the traditional leaf afterward and discovered that, for reasons we did not fully understand, life became a little more manageable.
I am the guy who eventually stood outside the White House and told strangers about some of the worst years of my life because I thought the government needed to understand who its decision would affect.
I am a cancer survivor who learned again that medicine does not have to be an either or proposition.
I am a consumer advocate who has spent years telling government not to exaggerate risks while also telling industry not to minimize them.
I am somebody who has used traditional kratom for more than a decade and can still say, without contradiction, that kratom has risks.
I can say it helped me without claiming it will help everyone.
I can say prohibition is a bad answer without pretending regulation is unnecessary.
I can defend access to leaf while asking much harder questions about concentrated and manufactured products.
I can acknowledge uncertainty without surrendering my experience.
That is where I am in 2026.
More than a decade after my first cup of kratom, I still live with Meige syndrome.
I still live with chronic pain.
I still live with PTSD.
I still live with the physical consequences of a life that has occasionally been harder on my body than I would have preferred.
Kratom did not erase any of that.
It did not cure me.
It did not make my past disappear.
It did not make me invincible.
What it did, for me, was much less dramatic and much more important.
It helped make life manageable enough that I could start living it again.
The years since have included cancer, chemotherapy, work, advocacy, arguments, research, mistakes, lessons, family, veterans I have had the privilege to help, going back to school, writing a book and building a life that the man sleeping through entire weeks after leaving the Navy might have had trouble imagining.
Kratom does not get credit for all of that.
I do.
My wife does.
My doctors do.
Modern medicine does.
The people who stood beside me do.
But kratom was one of the tools that helped me get moving again.
That is why I refuse to let an industry turn my story into an advertisement.
It is also why I refuse to let government turn my story into a warning label.
My experience belongs to me.
It is neither proof of universal safety nor evidence of universal danger.
It is a piece of a much larger story that science is still trying to understand.
After ten years of advocacy, that may be the thing I believe most strongly.
We do not need more absolutes.
We need better evidence.
We need honest labels.
We need responsible companies.
We need serious regulation.
We need physicians willing to listen.
We need consumers willing to talk honestly about both benefits and problems.
We need advocates willing to follow evidence even when it makes our arguments harder.
And we need policymakers willing to do the difficult work of regulating a complicated marketplace instead of reaching for prohibition and calling the job finished.
In 2016, I stood outside the White House because I did not want the government to make me a criminal for using a leaf that had become one useful part of my life.
Ten years later, I am asking for something more.
Do not criminalize us.
Do not exploit us.
Do not lie to us.
Give us the science.
Give us standards.
Give us truthful information.
Then trust adults to make informed decisions.
I still make my tea.
I still ask questions.
I still read the research.
I still criticize bullshit when I see it, including when it comes from my own side.
And I am still here.
That is my kratom story.
#IAMKratom
Author’s Note
This essay describes my personal experience. It is not medical advice, and my experience cannot establish whether kratom or any kratom related product is safe or effective for another person. People should discuss medical conditions, medications, substance use and potential interactions with qualified health care professionals.
Source Notes
Federal and public health facts referenced in this essay were checked against the Drug Enforcement Administration’s August 30, 2016 announcement of its intent to schedule mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine; the October 2016 Federal Register withdrawal of that notice; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s final report on the 2018 multistate Salmonella outbreak linked to kratom products; FDA materials distinguishing concentrated 7 OH products from natural kratom leaf; and FDA and DEA materials describing federal actions involving 7 OH and synthetic kratom related compounds in 2025 and 2026.
The discussion of the September 2026 University of Mississippi deaths intentionally does not state a cause of death. Public reporting available as of October 2, 2026 said toxicology findings had not yet established the role, if any, of kratom related products or other substances.
