It's just hard to think he walked here and now he's gone. That's the hardest part for me. I'm wearing my brother's hat as a nod to him.
When I come down here, I feel like part of him is within all of this wildness. And it just gives me peace. I wish he could see this. Be here. Yeah, that's where you should be.
You should be. On April 5th, 2022, Jordan McKibben of Kalama, Washington, collapsed in his bathroom. His nephew called Jordan's mother when he found him unconscious on the floor.
We went into the emergency room. The doctor came in and talked to us, and he told us that Jordan had died. And I couldn't figure out why.
The actual cause of his death was kratom. When compared to the opioid epidemic, kratom's death toll is small. But over the last decade, it has exploded in popularity. As early as 2020, 1.7 million people were estimated to have used kratom.
Kratom, are you familiar with this? I'm on it right now. Oh wow.
Yeah, I took six of them. Let's see what happens. I'm making this video about Kratom and the ultimate high that you can achieve. I got a little surprise for you. I'm at that right now.
For some, it's a lifesaver. I am an alcoholic and in the last year and a half, I haven't drank alcohol and it's all due to Kratom. For others, a life-ruiner. I went from being on top of the world Five months, newly sober, alcoholic, to spending the next two years, like, in a complete and utter hell.
And for the most unlucky, it's taken the life of a loved one. I had watched my son grow, and I wanted him to have the life and the dreams that he wanted. And all of a sudden, it just felt like it was all taken away for nothing, because he didn't know.
It's also over a $1 billion industry that's growing. and changing so fast that neither consumers nor regulators can keep up. These extracts and concentrates are totally changing the game and the safety around the market. We're seeing this blow up in an area that's completely unregulated. That, in my mind, is more similar to illicit drug trade.
The genie's out of the bottle, and it's going to be really hard to rein this back in. Music This is pretty much the standard of what we see coming into the United States now. This is just the leaf flesh material. And then we will start to process those powders by extraction.
This is Christopher McCurdy, one of the foremost experts on the efficacy and potential risks of kratom in America. I've always been interested in sort of the intersection of pain treatment and where substance abuse starts to take place. At first, we were interested in looking at kratom as a new class of painkillers, but they're very weak compared to opioids, which are still the gold standard for painkillers.
Derived from the leaves of the Mitragyna speciosa tree, there are around 50 different alkaloids found in kratom. But two of them, metragynine and 7-hydroxymetragynine, stand out as the primary psychoactive compounds that affect the nervous system. We are doing research to evaluate the potential that mitragynine may have to treat pain and its potential for treating opioid addiction.
We're in this opioid crisis. We need medications that can help people get off of the hardcore opioids. Pure Mitraganem by itself has been shown to be helpful in treating opioid addiction, and we turned our focus in that direction. And it is important and urgent because people are already using the Kratom.
So to document whether it has a positive or a negative effect is crucial. While kratom is relatively new in America and Europe, it's been around for centuries in Southeast Asia, with relatively few problems. Kratom is a long-standing plant in Kavah Selu, maybe since the Moen era. Keratom Park is very fertile and fertile in the outskirts.
In our ancestors'time, keratom was used for light medicines, such as body heat. Then there are pots and pans. Then it can be made to drink. The leaves are plucked, 3 to 4 leaves are plucked, then boiled, the water is drunk. When we drink, the morning is fresh.
In 2014, our friends from abroad started to come to West Kalimantan to look for this. The Keratom plant was then cultivated. Alhamdulillah, the Kratom plant can be a family treasure. In my opinion, half of this capacity depends on the life in Kratom.
This morning we are in a farm owned by Mrs. Ati. This has a fairly large keratom farm, which God willing, they will harvest soon. Since 2014, we have been purchasing keratom leaves. We are very motivated with keratom leaves. Before this, we were rubber farmers.
But rubber farmers are not meeting our needs. So, I am very happy with the keratom leaves. I plant them. Keratom leaves are the hope of our community of Kapuasulu.
Especially in the coast of Kapuas. Since the COVID-19 pandemic started in Indonesia, the number of cases has increased by 300 times. In 2021, we will have 50 tons of 4,500 metric tons of kratom, around 10 million pounds, are exported to America every month.
The growth is incredible. It's like a dream come true. Pratam is a product of the past. They have turned soda drinks into gummies.
And they have turned it into a shirt. Just leave it to good old American capitalism to go from an ancient Southeast Asian tea used by farmers to this. This show is huge for Kratom now.
Kratom has become a main staple of Champs. We just got into edibles and some drinks and things like that. Jelly 70H Botanicals is our newest line of Kratom gummies. I'm with this company Hydroxy. We're a single alphaloid Kratom extract company and we're gonna be the strongest, most purest on the market right now.
We're the first extract enhanced powder and capsule on the market. We wanted to be a soccer mom brand that you know just to get your energy in the morning instead of something else you know what I mean. Twenty years ago the only products that were available were leaf materials. If you want to get this euphoric feeling or you want to chase this High, that's very difficult to attain with leaf material.
The only way to do that is take more and more and more of the material, which makes it more and more and more dangerous every time. The poison is in the dose. We're seeing liquid energy type shots, we're seeing concentrated products. On an almost seemingly weekly basis, there's a stronger one introduced into the marketplace.
There's nothing that's universal across the board from vendor to vendor. Like whenever it says two, I go for it. When you get into the range of eight to ten pills, it's like, oh, this will f*** you up.
But, you know, we're all learning together, I guess. There's lots of new shots coming out. And the reality of it is that we make these concentrations and we make these extracts because it's the demand for the industry. So it is what it is.
I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. This one says it contains nine doses. It's just unreasonable to think that someone would open this up and take only nine equal sips. Wow. These extracts and concentrates are totally changing the game and the safety around the market.
MIT 45. I've been taking it for so long now my tolerance is built up like I have to take the whole bottle for me to feel anything. which is also not a good thing. That's what we've linked to saying is more like legal morphine, and it truly is.
I was the type of drinker that morning, noon, night, I was drinking. My problem was I never stopped. And then there would be pills on top of that.
That's how I used to look. This is on a good day. But you can see the weight in my face from drinking a lot. That's how it was.
I was not the happiest, you can see. I knew I needed to clean things up. It wasn't until I was 40, that's when I found the Feel Freeze, and I would have one of those.
I'd be good for like four hours. I wouldn't think about drinking alcohol. I wouldn't think about, you know, picking up pills or anything like that. And yeah, it was just a godsend for me.
Chris isn't alone. I just came up with an idea to essentially stop taking painkillers, use Kratom for a couple days as like a stepstool. In my head, I needed that one drug that I would use when I got overwhelmed and I couldn't deal with my emotions and so it just happened to be Kratom. So some people say that Kratom is helping them, but for a lot of others, they feel misled. When I first heard about Kratom, I was listening to a podcast.
If you have not heard of this breakthrough product from Botanic Tonics called the Feel Free Shot, then this one's going to blow your mind. And this isn't an isolated incident on podcasts. You introduced me to something called Feel Free, which is just an over-the-counter supplement, which I thought was like, you know, like an energy drink or something like that. And it turns out it just gets you high.
Those drinks, those put you in a nice place. It's like a... It's a plant.
I feel like I was on another planet. Those are not for a faint of heart. Can you just buy it at a regular store?
You can buy it at 7-Eleven. At that time in my life, I had been sober for four months. I was on top of the flippin'world. I think this is before I got sober, but that's the amount of weight that I had on my body. I was listening to that podcast, and they had mentioned Feel Free, and I found out that the owner of the company was an alcoholic.
and said it basically saved his life. Spent about two years experimenting on myself until I found the feeling that I was looking for. Feel Free is the main product sold by the company Botanic Tonics, which markets Feel Free on its website as a wellness tonic and health alcohol alternative. There was something very familiar about the way that I felt after I drank it. I felt like I was on drugs.
That's how I felt. I was addicted from the first bottle because I knew that there was something wrong with this. But by that time I was too late.
So I remember taking up to 10 bottles in one day. This is how I found that subreddit Quitting Kratom. When I got in there and I just saw, I mean it was so many people. And now they're sick, sick and they can't get off of it. And you know every single day a new person comes in the Quitting Feel Free subreddit.
And I'm not joking exact same story as me. Exactly the same to a T. Today I wanted to talk about feel free.
Stay the f*** away from those, alright? They can be very addictive. Me trying to get off it for the first time cold turkey was like one of the scariest days of my life.
I'm angry, you know, I'm angry because I feel like I've been tricked, I feel like I've been duped. And there's been stuff going on and lawsuits and stuff and I feel like they need to be dealt with. They knew what they were doing.
She's talking about a class action lawsuit filed against 7-Eleven and Botanic Tonics in 2023, where a recovering alcoholic said he was hospitalized after drinking 10 feel-free tonics a day. The suit alleges that Botanic Tonics failed to disclose in its marketing materials that the drink's main ingredient is not kava, but kratom. But Botanic Tonics is not the only defendant in lawsuits.
Large Kratom companies like OPMS have been sued by people who have claimed that they overdosed on Kratom products. In July, the FDA warned consumers not to ingest OPMS black liquid, saying it's been linked to serious adverse health effects, including death. OPMS didn't respond to a request for comment. The company has sought to dismiss lawsuits filed against it and has said it will challenge the FDA warning. CDC data indicates that kratom-involved overdoses in the U.S. have jumped from 152 in a one-and-a-half-year period ending in 2017 to at least 4,100 deaths between 2020 and 2022. Kratom has escaped being labeled a controlled substance because overdoses tend to involve other drugs.
Still, the DEA has listed it as a drug and chemical of concern. This is Matt Lowe, the executive director of the Global Kratom Coalition, an industry trade group supported by these companies. J.W.
Ross of Botanic Tonics serves as chairman of the board. So I think the rub doesn't sit in prohibition again. It sits in appropriately regulating it. Kratom industry lobbyists have successfully fought attempts to tighten restrictions on the drug a number of times in the last few years.
Every Kratom product, including 708 products, should have a warning to consumers that these products can be habit-forming. You can pick up a bottle of cough syrup and you can kill yourself with it. So responsible use with good labeling on all products is a key part of the safety factor. There is a bit of an arms race that's happening in the industry at the moment. Everyone's just going, well how do I make the strongest product, the strongest product, the strongest product?
What that means sometimes to make a product more appealing, it creates a greater sense of well-being. And the greater it makes you feel good, the more you're going to want it. And that's the essence of how drugs can start to produce addiction. And one of the most addictive alkaloids in kratom, 7-hydroxymetragynine, or 7-OH, is flooding the market.
We've learned that metragynine has this unique pharmacology. It doesn't activate opioid receptors fully. Its metabolite, 7-hydroxy, does.
Chemically, metragynine is the most abundant alkaloid in kratom. 7-hydroxymetragynine, while sharing a similar structure, has crucial differences. 7-OH features an additional oxygen atom binded to a hydrogen atom at the seventh position of the molecule, which has a profound impact on its pharmacological profile. It enhances 7-hydroxymetragynene's binding affinity to opioid receptors in the brain, making it significantly more potent and addictive than metragynine alone.
We've called it a legal morphine because it is actually only interacting with opioid receptors and it's activating them very strongly. We got rats addicted to morphine and we simply took away their morphine and replaced it with mitragynin. They actually didn't have any interest in administering mitragynin to themselves.
However, we did the same thing with cevahydroxy and it, boom, absolutely substituted for morphine. So it's a much more potent compound than morphine, probably not as potent as fentanyl, but really showed the abuse potential of 7-hydroxy. And it's incredibly frightening. But of course, people have said, well, this is interesting.
You've got this very strong compound that's in Kratom. How do we find a way to synthesize it, to isolate it and turn it into a product? My name is Greg Daly.
I am the CFO of 7-Ohms, which is a 7-hydroxy product in the Kratom industry. We have launched a war against fentanyl and other harmful things that are killing people we love. Today, our product is one of the only pure 7-hydroxy products on the market, and pretty quickly took off.
If you look at most of the drink shots on the market today, most of them taste really bad. Because since they're not using 7-Hydroxy, they have to put a lot more material in there. But as soon as customers started using this, they all immediately were switching. Others in the Kratom industry are not thrilled with the rise of 7-Hydroxy products. So I feel like it's a kind of a punch in the gut.
I feel like it's a really bad look on the industry. And let's be honest, it's the heroin feel and that's what people go for. This will do you just as good as any kind of prescription. This sh** may become a problem.
We have an epidemic happening in the United States of America with opiates right now and we finally found something that can help people and we're now flaunting these hardcore drugs in their faces and I just think that it's it's a disgusting look personally. When other Kratom brands talk to me and communicate this idea that 7-OH in general is not good for the industry, my thinking is if they had the scientific ability to to safely and at scale create 7-OH, they would be doing it. Kratom is legal to buy in every state except for six and Washington DC, meaning that 7-Hydroxymetragynine is also fully legal to be sold alongside those Kratom products. We see these beautiful pictures of these leaves, these green leaves, right?
That is what's been used in Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Thailand for a very long time. That is not what is used in the United States. You see this rainbow of different products with varying concentrations and without any regulation. How do we maximize benefits and minimize the risk? We need to address the issue of regulation of these products.
You don't get to go into America and sell stuff throughout the country. For human consumption, until you have established it is scientifically safe to do so. After I saw the pictures on the internet that families had lost their children or their spouse, I wanted it changed.
I wanted the laws changed. We're not yet ready to even adequately inform consumers about those dangers. So Buyer Beware assumes that there's enough information so that the buyer knows what they need to be aware of. And the longer Kratom goes without regulation, the more stories can end up like this.
Jordan was not a drug user. He was really health conscious. It's just people lied to him and deceived him, and he took things that he would have never taken had he known. This Kratom takes people's lives.
Regulators have been apprehensive to limit the use of Kratom, though the first FDA-sponsored study on doses and dangers of Kratom won't come out until 2027. The agency warns against using it. I felt like, let's see what we can do to help others so this doesn't impact other people's lives. So I reached out to several lawyers and started the process to see if they would take the case. It's sort of like the genie's out of the bottle and it's hard to put it back in.
Our firm, MCT Law, has now established two judgments. the only judgments in the country so far against Kratom companies for selling these products. Two wrongful death cases that MCT Law is taking on both happened in Cowlitz County, Washington. They won one of the cases involving the death of Patrick Coyne with an award of $2.5 million and are currently in litigation over the death of Jordan McKibben. Now we've got 10 cases across the country active right now, wrongful death cases.
And, you know, while our clients in these cases were not addicts, it is true that this industry is preying upon those who are already suffering from addiction. Without clear laws regulating kratom, both sides of the debate continue to point fingers. To hear one voice out there saying that it's impossible to overdose.
We don't want any more lies, like there's deaths from kratom. Then to say that it's only harmful and it will kill you, the reality is obviously in the middle. What we want to do as scientists in this space, the ones who are studying it, is we take the lead in developing what we feel are the appropriate packaging, labeling, based on the science that we know right now, and that's ever-changing.
This is a product that deserves additional study and research and maybe even a fast track if it looks like it's superior to other treatment methods for those struggling with opiates. By all means the research should continue to flood into the study of this product so that can be dealt with under medical supervision. If we're gonna have extracts they should be very clearly defined in what the constituents are that are in them and they should be capped. that a percentage of alkaloids or a milligram level of alkaloids that we feel safe about. It's a strong drug.
It should not just be sold over the counter with no warnings on it. Jordan was a huge part of our family. Then he was just gone.
I don't want another mom to go through that.