it's just hard to think he walked here and now he's gone just that's the hardest part for me well 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 um it just gives me peace I wish he could see this be here yeah that's where you should be you should be [Music] yeah on April 5th 2022 Jordan McKibben of col 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 I couldn't figure out [Music] [Applause] 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 estim estimated to have used katom cam are you familiar with this I'm on it right now oh wow yeah I took six of them see what happens I'm making this video about katom and the ultimate high that you can achieve I got a little priz 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 CR for others a life runer I went from being on top of the world 5 months newly sober alcoholic to spending the next 2 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 A1 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 it my mind is more similar to elicit drug trade the Genies out of the bottle and it's going to be really hard to reain this back in [Music] [Applause] [Music] this is pretty much the standard of what we see coming into the United States now this is just the the leaf flesh material and then we will start to process those powders by extraction this is Christopher mccurty one of the foremost experts on the efficacy and potential risks of katom 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 katum as a new class of of painkillers but they're very weak compared to opioids which are still the gold standard for for painkillers derived from the leaves of the mitogen speciosa tree there are around 50 different alkaloids found in katum but two of them metrine and seven hydroxy metrine stand out as the primary psychoactive compounds that affect the nervous system we are doing research to evaluate the potential that MIT trining may have uh to treat pain and its potential for treating opioid addiction we're in the this opioid crisis we need medications that can help people get off of the hardcore opioids pure Metron 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 Crum so to document whether it has a positive or A negative effect is crucial while katum is relatively new in America and Europe it's been around for centuries in Southeast Asia with relatively few problems [Music] B [Music] [Music] lyric [Music] [Music] ald for [Music] [Music] man [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] IND [Music] [Music] figures from the Indonesian government show 4500 metric tons of Crum around 10 million pounds are exported to America every month [Music] 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 katom now katum has become a main staple of Champs we just got into Edibles and some drink and things like that jelly 70 Botanicals is our newest line of katum gummies I'm with this company hydroxy we're a single alkaloid crom extract company and we're going to 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 20 years ago the only products that were available were Leaf materials if you want to get this euphoric feeling or you want to taste 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 a almost seemingly weekly basis there's a stronger one introduced into the marketplace there's nothing that's Universal across the board from from vendor to vendor like whenever it says chew I go four when you get into the range of 8 to 10 pills it's like oh this this will 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 going to sugarcoat it this one says it contains nine 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 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 uh you can see the weight in my face from from drinking a lot that's how it was I was not 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 I found the feel freeze and I would have one of those I'd be good for like 4 hours I wouldn't think about drinking alcohol I wouldn't think about you know picking up pills or anything like that and uh 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 katum for a couple days as like a step stool 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 cat so some people say that katum is helping them but for a lot of others they feel misled when I first heard about katom 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 supplement which I thought was like you know like an energy drink or something like that and it it turns out it just gets you high those drinks phoo those put you in a nice place it's like a it's a plant plant I feel like I was like on another planet those are not Prof faint part can you just you buy it at this a regular store you would buy it at 7-Eleven at that time of my life h i was I had been sober for 4 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 had basically saved his life spent about 2 years uh experimenting on myself till 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 [Music] alternative there was something very familiar about the way that I felt after I 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 it was too late so I remember taking up to 10 bottles in one day this is how I found that subreddit quitting katum 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 the quitting feel free subreddit and I'm not joking ex exact same story as me exactly the same to a te today I wanted to talk about feel free stay the away from those all right 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 and lawsuits and stuff and I feel like they knew what they were doing [Music] she's talking about a class action lawsuit filed against 7-Eleven in botanic tonics in 2023 where a recovering alcoholic said he was hospitalized after drinking 10 ffree tonics a day the suit alleges that banic tonics failed to disclose in its marketing materials that the drink's main ingredient is not Cava but katum [Music] [Music] but botanic tonics is not the only defendant in lawsuits large katom companies like opms have been sued by people who have claimed that they overdosed on katom 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 Crum involved overdoses in the US have jumped from 152 in a 1 and 1/2 year period under in 2017 to at least 4,100 deaths between 2020 and [Music] 2022 katum 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 low the executive director of the global catom Coalition an industry trade trade group supported by these companies JW Ross of botanic tonics serves as chairman of the board so I think the RAB doesn't sit in prohibition again it sits in appropriately regulating it industry lobbyists have successfully fought attempts to tighten restrictions on the drug a number of times in the last few years every katum product including 70 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 that's at the essence of how drugs can start to produce addiction and one of the most addictive alkaloids in katum 7 hydroxy metrine or 7oh is flooding the market we've learned that metran has this unique pharmacology it doesn't activate opioid receptors fully its metabolite 7 hydroxy does chemically metrine is the most abundant alkaloid in katum seven hydroxy metrin while sharing a similar structure has crucial differences 7oh 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 seven hydroxy metrin binding Affinity to opioid receptors in the brain making it significantly more potent and addictive than metrine alone we've called it a legal morphine because it is actually only interacting with opioid receptors and it's activating them very [Music] strongly we got rats addicted to morphine and we simply took away their morphine and replaced it with mitanin they actually didn't have any interest in administering mitanin to themelves however we did the same thing with seven hydroxy and it boom absolutely substituted for morphine so it's a much more potent compound than morphine probably not as potent as fenil but really showed the abuse potential of seven hydroxy and and it's it's incredibly frightening but of course people have said well this is interesting you've got this very strong compound that's in how do we find a way to synthesize it to isolate it and turn it into a product [Music] my name is Greg DOL I am the CFO of s MMS which is a seven hydroxy product in the Crum 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 um 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 subon 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 creatum industry are not thrilled with the rise of 7 hydroxy products so I 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 may become a problem we have a 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 katum brands talk to me and communicate this idea that 7oh in general is not good for the industry my thinking is if they had the scientific ability to safely and at scale create 7oh they would be doing it katum is legal to buy in every state except for six and Washington DC meaning that 7even hydroxy metrine is also fully legal to be sold alongside those katum [Music] 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 [Music] regulation how do we maximize benefits and minimize the risk is 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 a establish it it's scientifically safe to do so after I saw the pictures on the on the internet that families had lost their children and or their spouse I wanted it changed I wanted the LW 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 katom goes without regulation the more stories can end up like this Jordan was not a drug user he was really health conscious just people lied to him and and deceived him and he took things that he would have never taken had he known this katum takes people's lives Regulators have been apprehensive to limit the use of katom though the first FDA sponsored study on Doses and dangers of katum won't come out until 2027 the agency warns against using it I felt like um let's see what we can do to 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 out of the bottle and it's hard to put it back in our firm MCT law has now now established two judgments the the only judgments in the country so far against katum companies for selling these products two wrongful death cases that MCT laws taking on both happened in ked's County Washington they won one of the cases involving the death of Patrick coin with an award of $2.5 million and are currently in litigation over the death of Jordan McKibbon now we've got 10 cases across the country active right now wrongful death case cases and you know while our clients in these cases were not addicts it is true that this industry is praying upon those who are already suffering from addiction without clear laws regulating katom 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 Li like there's deaths fromom then to say that it's only harmful and it will kill you and the reality is 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 and developing what we feel are the appropriate packaging labeling you know based on the science that we know right now and that's ever [Music] changing this is a product that deserves additional study and research and maybe even a FasTrack if it looks like it's Superior to other treatment methods for those struggling with opiates by all means um the research should continue to to flood into the the the study of this product so that it can be um dealt with under medical supervision if we're going to have extracts they should be very clearly defined in what the constituents are that are in them and they should be capped at a percentage of of alkaloids or a milligram level of alkaloids that we didn't 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 [Music] [Music] [Music] oh